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12.14.11

SUSE in Clouds, OpenSUSE in Marketing Mode

Posted in GNU/Linux, Marketing, Microsoft, Novell, OpenSUSE at 10:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Clouds

Summary: A critical assessment of where SUSE stands at the end of 2011 and how this interacts with the release of OpenSUSE

THE past year has been good for GNU/Linux. On the server, for instance, it carried on gaining.

According to some figures, Red Hat keeps beating Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Linux (SUSE), and Solaris. This is not especially surprising given the recent results and upgrade of Red Hat (c/f our daily links). SUSE can see the growth of GNU/Linux, but it cannot quite steal Red Hat’s thunder, not even with Microsoft’s assistance. From the news: “Even as the Linux Foundation reports on Linux jobs in the U.S., the global picture seems to be even more encouraging.”

Over in New Zealand, SUSE is looking to “re-open Linux conversation” — whatever that actually means. They cannot even get the name right. The news site says: “Suse has informed us the official pronunciation is written soo-sah – check out this YouTube video if you’re still not sure.”

At SUSE there used to be a lot of buzz over “IP peace of mind” (Microsoft FUD) and right now there is more and more of the Fog Computing (“cloud”) hype. We gave many examples over the past couple of years. Consider this new Q&A from Australia:

There are two types of Cloud — public and private, and there is also the hybrid Cloud that’s a combination of both. We’re already in the Cloud business. You can use SUSE through a number of public Cloud providers, and we use Telstra locally. We also work with IBM and Intel, Rackspace and we’ve got some more global announcements coming up shortly about this.

Joe Brockmeier, formerly of Novell/SUSE, also pumps in that type of hype:

SUSE announced its commitment to OpenStack in October, along with a development preview available via SUSE Studio. This includes the three major components in the Diablo release (Nova, Glance, and Keystone). Brauckmann wasn’t sure about specific contributions that SUSE would be making to OpenStack, but did say that the company plans to follow up with a second technology preview in Q2 of 2012. (The “Essex” release of OpenStack will come out in late Q1 if it sticks to schedule.)

At SUSE, it is no longer important to encourage software freedom; patents and decoupling one from his/her data is now a priority. On the purely proprietary side there is also IDM which Novell spreads to keep track of people. Novell’s account in YouTube promotes the proprietary Vibe [1, 2] (based on open source but proprietary) and some other proprietary software stuff that can be found in other new files like this one. The only thing which remained somewhat open is OpenSUSE, but this is a promotional move/tool for SLE*. The so-called ‘community’ is being approached for free artwork [1, 2] while others provide documentation and reviews. OpenSUSE is not unique, but this one review says: “when I read about some of the features in OpenSuse 12.1, I couldn’t resist giving it a try.”

All those features are available elsewhere. What YaST has should have equivalents elsewhere too. There is of course also the volunteer composition of weekly reports [1, 2], putting aside the OpenSUSE project site itself [1, 2] or those who took it for a spin for comparative purposes.

The bottom line is, SUSE lost to Red Hat and it is not promoting Open Source at all. OpenSUSE is being used to add the “open” angle to SUSE marketing. Nobody really needs either of those. Smart folks simply see what else is out there and let SUSE dry up inside Microsoft’s wallet. The boycott was not in vain, and it has been very effective. █

Software Patents in the EU Become a Central Concern Again

Posted in Europe, Patents at 10:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Software patents. From the back door/stage.

Showtime

Summary: A quick catchup with patent news, emphasis persisting on the situation in Europe

PATENT rants have become abundant and over the coming weeks we shall cover several that we missed over the past week or two (yours truly was absent).

Granting of software patents can be influenced by the proposed patent harmonisation in Europe and the “EPO can influence patent harmo[nisation] through translation, classification, PPH,” notes one person. This matter is especially sensitive because software patents in Europe are the bridge for US monopolists (including Apple and Microsoft) to take their abusive behaviour global, i.e. their embargo war becomes indisputable. In some cases even access to life-saving drugs is at stake.

Glyn Moody, a Brit, wrote about the danger earlier this month and pointed out that:

Aside from the general issue of transparency and accountability, there is also a more particular concern for readers of this blog. Despite the fact that in Europe patents may not be given for software “as such”, patents are being issued for software using a variety of legal tricks (mostly involving extremely dubious redefinition of key terms to avoid the ban on software patents.)

Just watch what happened in Germany where Apple tried to embargo Linux-powered tablets:

A German court has ruled in Motorola Mobility’s favour in a patents dispute with Apple.

The Android smartphone maker had complained that Apple failed to license one of its wireless intellectual properties.

As the FSFE’s Karsten Gerloff (in Germany) put it, there is a “Good summary of #Apple ban in Europe ur1.ca/6jiri (DE) Can we all agree now that #swpat are silly?”

In the United States, Apple cannot get its way all the time. Based on leaked documents, Apple is more vicious than its followers realise. To quote: “A person within Apple has leaked the company’s ‘Retail Blogging and Online Social Media Guidelines’ which explain that employees cannot use blogs, wikis, social networks, and similar online tools to communicate about their employer internally.” This means no complaining about Apple’s patent aggression presumably. What a lovely company, eh? In separate posts we are going to tackle what Microsoft is doing as well. Antitrust regulators get increasingly involved in what constitutes racketeering, proxy wars, and anti-competitive collusion. There are even those who say that “Patents violate the constitution in discouraging innovation”.

A more comprehensive coverage of the situation in Europe will be posted soon. Now is the time to fight back for elimination — not proliferation — of software patents all around the world. █

Botnets Versus Comes Versus Microsoft

Posted in Microsoft at 10:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Precision in targeting

Wonderful

Summary: Out-of-control machines (or otherwise vandals) from Microsoft Corporations target a Web site critical of Microsoft

A LOT of visitors come to this site having searched for or browsed for Comes vs Microsoft material. But there are other sites that host this type of material.

Slated.org, which famously hosts all the Comes vs Microsoft stash, has been hit by what seems like zombies from Microsoft. To use its own explanation:

Now, as regular readers will already know, Slated is a site dedicated to GNU/Linux, Free Software, Free Standards, civil and human rights, business ethics, altruism and, generally, the cause of social liberalism. This upsets certain types of people and companies, no doubt including Microsoft. So it doesn’t really surprise me when they attack Slated, although I find it rather disturbing that a global corporation like Microsoft should do it so openly.

Perhaps this “hack” is nothing more than yet another compromised Windows PC inside Microsoft’s Redmond HQ, or maybe it’s something more sinister, but either way someone or something on Microsoft’s network just attacked Slated.

Good to know I have their full attention.

There were also DDOS attacks on other Microsoft-hostile sites. The botnets sometimes come from Microsoft. Claiming and also proving that there was malicious intent bringing those attacks from Microsoft is nearly impossible because of the structural nature of botnets, but it does need to be highlighted. We have already caught some pro-Microsoft trolls in blog comments who later turned out to be Microsoft employees. Novell did the same thing and so did SCO. It is not unusual. █

Divergence From Microsoft Front Groups

Posted in Deception, Microsoft at 10:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Globe

Summary: Kaspersky is one of the latest members of the BSA to leave and IDC dares not to shower Windows with the usual paid-for compliments

LAST year we saw the BSA losing some key members after it had gotten worse than terrible. Techrights made it into some mainstream news sites for breaking this story at the time.

The BSA recently fronted and promoted SOPA, which led to yet more of an exodus. Can the BSA become defunct like other Microsoft front groups, let’s say within a decade? We shall wait and see. What we already find in the news is that FUD spreader Al Gillen and his colleagues lose blind faith in Windows as IDC expresses concerns about Vista 8. How times have changed… █

Links 14/12/2011: KahelOS, Fujitsu Linux Phones

Posted in News Roundup at 3:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source Trust Abused

    The matter has been a unhealed wound for more than six months, but this week the problem that C|Net’s Download.Com website has been perpetrating leapt into high profile with a complaint from the developers of NMap and others. The download.com site is one of the oldest software download sites, running since the nineties to offer downloads of free-of-charge software of all kinds – shareware, trialware and other proprietary software with loss-leader business models as well as true open source software.

  • 60 Open Source Replacements for Communications Software

    By 2013, experts estimate that e-mail users will send 507 billion messages every day. Currently, the average person receives about 419 e-mails per day, with a little less than half of them related to work.

    When you add up the time it takes to read and manage all that e-mail, plus time spent instant messaging, reading and writing blogs, and viewing and creating Web content, it’s clear that digital communication is one of the primary uses for technology.

  • Introducing LibrePlan: Project Planning, Monitoring and Control

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Grammar checking in LibreOffice

      Competitive grammar checking would be a nice improvement for LibreOffice. Supported by FSF.hu Foundation, Hungary, I have made two sentence checking patches to the English and Hungarian dictionary extensions of LibreOffice, based on the Lightproof Python UNO environment: see the related issue, the description and the standalone extensions.

    • A look at IBM Lotus Symphony

      BM Lotus Symphony is a free Office Suite available on Windows, Mac and Linux. The project began in 2007 and is basically a modified version of Openoffice.org. Though active, it still uses Openoffice 3.0 as its base. The developers seem to be focusing on stability and have released 3 “fix-packs” for Symphony 3.0 last year instead of newer versions. After the Libreoffice/Openoffice split, Symphony will continue to be based on the “official” version of Openoffice maintained by Apache.

  • CMS

    • Louvre using Drupal

      Big news! The world’s most visited art museum in the world is now using Drupal for its website: http://louvre.fr. Très cool!

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU Fdisk 2.0.0a1 released!

      We are happy to announce the new release of GNU Fdisk.

      As reported in the previous release, the software has been rewritten from scratch with a new design. With this release we include a first backend.

    • GIMP 2.7.4 now available for testing

      The maybe last development release in the 2.7 series of GIMP has just been made available for testing purpose.

  • Project Releases

  • Licensing

    • The GPL and distributing binaries

      Of late I’ve become the “build guy” in GNOME it seems. One thing I want to clear up is I do not actually care about building just because I think it’s fun or interesting in and of itself. No, the reason I care about building is because if software doesn’t build, then clearly it’s not being run. And if it’s not being run, then it’s not being tested. And if it’s not tested, then it will be crap. In other words, a competent build system is necessary for not producing crap (but not sufficient, obviously).

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Charter of Open Source Org is Classified, CIA Says

      Open Source Works, which is the CIA’s in-house open source analysis component, is devoted to intelligence analysis of unclassified, open source information. Oddly, however, the directive that established Open Source Works is classified, as is the charter of the organization. In fact, CIA says the very existence of any such records is a classified fact.

    • Open Data

      • White House to open source Data.gov as open government data platform

        As 2011 comes to an end, there are 28 international open data platforms in the open government community. By the end of 2012, code from new “Data.gov-in-a-box” may help many more countries to stand up their own platforms. A partnership between the United States and India on open government has borne fruit: progress on making the open data platform Data.gov open source.

  • Programming

Leftovers

Open Washing the Tivoization of Windows

Posted in Antitrust, Microsoft, Vista 8 at 2:11 am by Guest Editorial Team

A Doomed Microsoft Again Spins Legal Compliance into Something it’s Not.

Tivoized PC with a lovely Ballmer tongue

A Tivoized PC will look like an ugly TV.

The Windows press is doing damage control to quell a rising realization that the Microsoft demands and will have complete practical control of the next generation of Windows devices. Microsoft cleverly divulged key details over the past months to prevent people from understanding the implications. Free software advocates immediately understood the implications of signed code and some adopted a wait and see attitude believing OEMs would not be foolish enough to make all of their hardware Windows 8 logo compliant. Microsoft’s App Store rules made the intentions clear for Windows users, so Microsoft boosters are Open Washing the program to keep users from bolting. Boosters celebrate a Microsoft limited choice of free software and Microsoft’s cynical license compliance as a “Big win for Open Source.” Microsoft’s demands should trigger anti-trust investigation. Free software developers who still concern themselves with Windows should think carefully about the implications for their code. Windows users should migrate immediately because the PC ecosystem they grew up with is long gone.

A spokesman for Microsoft lead Business Insider to believe the revocation feature may only be for “Metro”

The Windows Store will be the exclusive distribution channel for apps that use the Windows 8 “Metro” interface, which is designed for tablets and smartphones, but will also contain some traditional desktop apps. Microsoft wouldn’t confirm if the kill switch applies only to Metro-style apps or if it covers any app in the store. “It’s really the early days yet,” said a spokesperson. “The terms of use applies to apps that people are creating now. More info will be shared as we get closer to release.”

Microsoft’s claim, of course, is ridiculous hair splitting. If Microsoft succeeds in Tivoizing all x86 and ARM hardware, only Microsoft signed code will run on Windows 8. Stopping any program from running will be as easy as revoking the keys no matter how they are installed.

Extreme Tech claims compliance terms in the App Store documentation are a “big win for Open Source.” The article is titled, “Windows 8 Store will allow open source apps, unlike iOS and Mac App Stores” and says:

There may be another win for the open source movement today, as there has been some interesting legalese found in the recent publication of the Windows Store Application Developer Agreement. … The section in question states that apps released under a license from the Open Source Initiative (GPL, Apache, etc.) can be distributed in the Windows Store. Further, it says that the OSI license will trump the Microsoft Standard Application License Terms, namely the the restriction on sharing applications.

The article offers some explanations that glorify Microsoft and belittle competitors but fail to make the common sense observation that Microsoft is forced to comply with the licenses used. They sink as low as to compare Microsoft’s long running patent extortion[2] to a friendly game of chess. Here’s another article that makes some of the same silly claims.

“Choice” and “Open” code are poor substitutes for software freedom and Tivoizing hardware defeats meaningful software freedom. Microsoft will be able to comfort their users with free software like browsers, image and audio editors. They will dutifully provide users with source code if the license requires as much but it is of no real value to the user because they can never run a modified version. The user gains none of the security, privacy or control of real software freedom from a single free program on top of a malicious OS. Users of Windows 8 will never have the tools to guard themselves.

Both articles are filled with Microsoft’s language about “security” and “legal” reasons for revocation of code. This is a smoke screen. The only security signed code provides is financial security for Microsoft from a lock out of competition.

In the past, I’ve often warned free software developers that porting to Windows is a waste of time and energy better spent making gnu/linux and other really free software better. It was easy enough to point to all of the companies Microsoft ruined by technical sabotage and ask people why they would bother with such an anti-social company. People who ignored that warning should be asking themselves some serious questions about what extra efforts they will now be forced to go through. What process will Microsoft demand for approval? Will a partial distribution be worthwhile? Can they trust Microsoft to distribute code free of modification beyond selection?

Microsoft’s attempt to Tivoize the computing world is far from assured. Vista and Windows 7 were both dismal failures [2] mostly because of Microsoft’s insane anti-competitive and digital restrictions plans. Windows 8 is more of the same with even less to offer the user. Plans to lock out competition by signed code is a sign of desperation born of complete failure to compete on merit. The only real question is how many of their partners they will ruin before they fail. Apple, IBM and Google each have more to offer those partners.

12.13.11

Links 13/12/2011: Ubuntu at HMV Stores, Ultimate Edition 3.0 Swaps Ubuntu

Posted in News Roundup at 1:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • eBay Open Sources New Query Language

    eBay’s Ql.io could make e-commerce web applications faster to develop – and use

  • The Ada Initiative: Looking Back and Looking Forward

    The Ada Initiative isn’t quite one year old, but with the project embarking on a new fundraiser and as 2011 draws to a close, it seems like a good time to check in on the project. Much of the focus in 2011 has been on bootstrapping, but 2012 is looking like a very good year for the Ada Initiative.

  • The 10 Most Important Open Source Projects of 2011

    Well, here we are, another year almost done for. Time to look back and take stock of the year that was. You know what? It turns out that 2011 was a banner year for open source projects. So much so, that picking the 10 most important was pretty difficult.

    So what do I mean by “important,” anyway? Clearly, it’s not just projects that are widely used. That list would be just too long to even contemplate. You’d have to include Apache, GCC, X.org, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Linux Mint, not to mention a bazillion and one libraries and utilities that we depend on every day.

    So to judge importance, I looked at projects that are influential, gaining in popularity, and/or technical standouts in new areas. In other words, projects that are even more noteworthy than the other noteworthy projects. This means that many projects that are crucial didn’t make the list. And now, in no particular order, the 10 most important projects of 2011.

  • What a stint with an open source project can add to your life
  • Open source awareness growing, but misconceptions persist

    Its core business products such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system and JBoss middleware remain key components of Red Hat’s growth strategy, as the open source vendor looks to strengthen its presence in Asia-Pacific, particularly Southeast Asia, even as it makes “exploratory moves into cloud”.

  • DARPA’s factory of the future looks like open source development

    DARPA is looking to solve the problem of runaway defense systems projects by reinventing how complex systems are developed and manufactured. They aim to do this by borrowing from the playbooks of integrated circuit developers and open-source software projects. And in the process, the agency’s Adaptive Vehicle Make project may reinvent manufacturing itself, and seed the workforce with a new generation of engineers who can “compile” innovations into new inventions without having to be tied to a manufacturing plant.

  • Perspective from an open source newbie
  • Adoption of Open Source Software: The Challenges and Opportunities

    Open source has opened minds and provided a great amount of freedom of choice not just to organisations but to our government as well. In my view, open source has brought about a change in the way we view and adapt to technology. We are seeing a paradigm shift from packaged software to open source standards not just within organisations, but also at the government level. A significant amount of government administration processes have been simplified by employing various open source tools. In the last five years, there has been a sudden rise in open source developers being hired. There is a huge untapped potential for developers in the open source domain. However, it remains to be seen what measures the government is taking at the central and the state levels to implement this technology and how it is addressing the challenges associated with migrating to open source.

  • New Open-Source Technology Locks Down User’s DNS Connection

    The connection between a user and his or her DNS service can now be locked down with an encrypted session to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks, spoofing, or sniffing: OpenDNS has written an open-source tool to secure that traditionally exposed link.

  • Artwork for articles is lacking for FOSS organisations

    I’ve noticed recently how badly disorganised some organisations seem to be when it comes to making their artwork easy accessible to people who wish to promote their work. Organisations, projects and groups all want their newest release covered, or what they’ve just announced is going to happen, unfortunately it’s hard to write about something when you’re missing their logo.

  • In Defense of Free Riders

    Free riders, people who contribute nothing to the software they use, are to free and open source software (FOSS) what illegal downloaders are to the Recording Industry Association of America. They’re people who are perceived as getting away with something, and are the subject of periodic rants. Really, though, I don’t see what the fuss is about.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Facing Trouble, Mozilla Argues Importance of Firefox

        Mozilla is making an emotional appeal to Firefox users amid declining market share and potential lost revenue thanks to Google.

        Mozilla has released a video, called “The Mozilla Story,” which explains the organization’s roots as a community project and the importance of Firefox as an open-source Web browser backed by a non-profit organization. The video avoids technical nitty-gritty in favor of general statements about putting users’ interests first.

      • Mozilla introduces gamepad support to Firefox
      • Google Deal or No, Firefox Can Still Survive

        Mozilla’s Firefox browser has had something of a rough year in 2011, but the past week or so has been particularly unkind.

      • Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) Renews Firefox Search Deal
      • Mozilla Chairwoman Sheds Light on Firefox Priorities

        As pundits ponder the future of Mozilla’s Firefox browser, the non-profit group’s chairwoman is banking on some pretty abstract gambles to help regain the platform’s edge over its rivals.

        By one researcher’s count, Firefox last month lost its position as the second most-used browser to Google’s Chrome offering while Microsoft Internet Explorer held it’s lion’s share, although this continues to shrink.

      • Firefox May Not Recover In 2012

        As I stumbled over a note from Mozilla’s developer staff today, I wondered how much impact feature delays in a rapid release process really have and whether delays in a 6-week release cycle matter or not? Firefox could use some good news, but there is not much that could cause some optimism in the near future. Nearly every major feature the browser could use today is delayed and the browser that Mozilla would need today won’t be available until the end of April.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU Stow gets first update since 2002

      GNU Stow, the GNU utility for managing the installation of software packages, gets its first official release since 2002 after a complete refresh of the code. Stow allows users to manage multiple software packages, keeping their files in separate directories while at the same time presenting the user with a single run-time directory, created using symlinks into those separate directories. Stow is a simpler, database-less version of its inspiration, the Carnegie Mellon Depot application.

  • Public Services/Government

    • DOD to debate appropriate use of open source software

      The Department of Defense is taking a closer look at open source software, hinting at the potential for new acquisition regulations.

      Specifically, DOD will host a public meeting Jan. 12 to “initiate a dialogue with industry regarding the use of open source software in DOD contracts,” according to a notice published in the Federal Register Monday.

  • Licensing

    • Proposed DMCA Exemption Would Unchain Device Owners

      The Software Freedom Law Center submitted comments yesterday to the U.S. Copyright Office proposing an exemption from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention provisions. If granted, the exemption would ensure that owners of personal computing devices have the right to install whatever software they choose on their devices.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

      • Data.gov goes open source, first step in government being afraid of the people

        Whether or not you voted for President Obama, it can’t be said that he hasn’t made intelligent moves in bringing the US government fully into the information age. In fact, his first executive order that he ever signed created a new information portal on the web, Data.gov, to allow web users access to information made available by the Freedom of Information act. Accessing that before was difficult because of the bureaucratic hoops people had to jump through to get the data they sought. Coming fully online in 2009, Data.gov allows web users to access a range of information, such as who has visited the White House, and be able to represent that data using visual charts. This toolset makes it much easier for US citizens to hold their government accountable for its actions.

  • Programming

    • Even More Graphical Git Clients
    • Why an Open Source Forge Matters

      A few months ago, I became “Director of Engineering” for SourceForge.net. It’s a big job that includes being “Product Owner” for the two development teams, managing support, and helping everybody do what we can to improve the site. We have over a decade of accumulated features, many of which are out of date, and little used. We have lots of technical debt. We have younger competitors with a lot of online buzz.

    • Open source, coding and the Cloak of Invisibility

      In this time of magic, who needs to know what an OS is let alone how to code one?

      Our College IT has disappeared. I knew this would happen, it’s become invisible to my students. Maybe it simply faded away when we weren’t looking properly. We use computers in class every day, many times a day; my course now utterly relies on Moodle to keep in touch, store our stuff and mark our tests; the World Wide Web is our constant companion whether on the whiteboard, laptop or phone … but we don’t ‘see’ it anymore.

    • PHP 5.4 emerges from the collapse of PHP 6.0

      With the pending release of PHP version 5.4, due early next year, the creators behind the popular Web scripting language are including the best parts of the now-abandoned PHP 6.0 project.

      “I guess you could say [PHP 6] was too ambitious,” said Zeev Suraski, one of the principal contributors to PHP as well as the chief technology officer and co-founder of PHP software vendor Zend Technologies.

Links 13/12/2011: Red Hat 6.2, Helsinki Happy With Free Software

Posted in News Roundup at 9:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Finding a Linux Job

    According to new data from The Linux Foundation, Linux jobs are pretty much evenly divided between administrator and developer jobs. But, you won’t go wrong if you focus on Android programming work.

  • TLWIR 27: Stallman Lookalike, Linux Jobs, and Free Software Donation Directory

  • Desktop

    • Old Computer? No Problem! Linux Saves The Day.

      Old Computer? No Problem! Linux Saves The Day.
      Posted on December 4, 2011, 4:31 am, by devnet.
      [Translate]

      Want to know what utilizes 54.3 MB of RAM idle at 1% CPU utilization on a Gateway M250 laptop? CrunchBang Linux, that’s what!

      It’s always a breath of fresh air when you are able to resurrect older hardware that most people would throw right into the trash with a dash of Linux.

  • Server

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • In praise of LXDE

      When it comes to using GNU/Linux, there are two well-known desktop environments – GNOME and KDE. Most users opt for one or the other and make do with their choice.

      Both GNOME and KDE are environments that are full of features and, hence, quite memory-hungry. For most people, given the configurations which are present on modern-day PCs or laptops, that is not a problem.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • KDE Commit-Digest for 20th November 2011
      • KDE Commit-Digest for 27th November 2011
      • KDE e.V. Sprint – Making KDE Possible

        Over the weekend of 19 and 20 November, KDE contributors met in Berlin for the KDE e.V. Sprint—the first ever. KDE e.V. is the non-profit organization that represents KDE in legal and financial matters and provides funding to assist KDE development and promotion.

      • KDE Telepathy 0.2 – The Future of Free Communication

        The KDE Telepathy team is pleased to announce its second release. KDE Telepathy is a suite of applications that form an instant-messaging client for Jabber, Gmail, Facebook, MSN and more. KDE Telepathy stands out from previous instant messaging solutions by being able to integrate into the Plasma Workspaces, and can also be used like a traditional application.

      • Stable Update 4.7.4 and Testing Release 4.8 Beta2 Available

        Today, KDE makes available two new releases of its Workspaces, Applications and Development Platform. 4.7.4 provides bugfix updates, new translations and performance improvments on top of the stable 4.7 series, while 4.8 Beta2 gives a glimpse at what is coming in 4.8, to be released next month.

    • GNOME Desktop

  • Distributions

    • Talking Point: Should Distros Stick to CDR Size?

      Canonical owes at least part of its success with Ubuntu Linux to the unique way that it has been distributed. From the start it has been available as a downloadable ISO image and a free CD, posted at no cost to the user. This was great news for people who wanted to install Linux but did not have the luxury of a decent Internet connection. In a sense, installing via a CDR image has always been like a kind of cache, in that you’re moving part of the content that you need onto permanent storage rather than pulling it through the network connection.

    • My Favorite Distribution Releases 2010-2011

      I was going to write about how I finally dumped Firefox for Opera, but Firefox 8 does not seem too bad and for the first time appears a bit nippier at start up. Like Dedoimedo has found, this does not look like a completely arbitrary decision to pump up the version number but actually has some small benefits, so I’m going to give Firefox another chance before it is relegated.

      The slow scrolling though remains a major annoyance, and although several supposed solutions and hacks can be found around the interwebs none of them seem to work. In any case, this should not require a hack when Chromium and Opera can do it, but traditionally Mozilla based browsers have been bad at scrolling.

    • New Releases

      • December Linux fun

        Traditionally, the last few months of the year are filled with new Linux releases. This year is no exception and here we take a look at recent releases and some planned for early 2012.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • How to replace Ubuntu 11.10′s Unity desktop with good ol’ GNOME

            Ubuntu users who dislike the Unity desktop environment have other alternatives besides sticking with “Maverick Meerkat” or jumping ship to another distro. An illustrated DeviceGuru tutorial shows how to load the GNOME Fallback mode on Ubuntu 11.10 and configure it to provide a GNOME 2.x-like experience.

            The last two Ubuntu releases — 11.04 and 11.10 (“Oneiric Ocelot”) have generated controversy among the Ubuntu faithful for pushing the Unity desktop environment and user interface in place of GNOME. Even more so than with the similarly controversial GNOME 3.x, the radically different Unity desktop is oriented toward smaller, touchscreen devices — just one of several complaints from traditional desktop PC users.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Sabily Linux review

              As well as being one of the first Linux distributions you could conceivably install for your Luddite parents without worrying too much, Ubuntu Linux has proved to be a great platform to build other operating systems off.

              This is a key strength of free software, and it means that there is a stack of Ubuntu derivatives, including the ‘official’ ones you can find on the Ubuntu website. There are distributions designed to offer a different user experience, such as the KDE-based Kubuntu, and distros such as Lubuntu and Xubuntu, which offer lightweight desktop systems.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Open Source and the Open Road, Part 2

      The Linux community is setting the itinerary for what could become the biggest leap yet toward achieving a fully connected, software-enhanced car. Two significant events are already in motion. One is the creation of the Genivi Alliance. The other event is the first gathering of Linux movers and shakers to rally ideas and products for Linux-based automotive devices.

    • Phones

      • A Response To “We Need Some Angry Nerds”

        We even had a brief shot at Linux-on-the-mobile, Android – even I was excited about it once – and look how that turned out. Is FOSS on the mobile really that great an advantage? It’s still closed, controlled, and proprietary on all sides, from the service provider on one end and the hardware on the other. And given Google’s laissez-faire approach to FOSS use and how everybody seems pretty much content to let them get away with it – how much better can it even get? Imagine that! On the mobile platform, we finally had our “year of Linux on the desktop” and nobody cared.

        Angry nerds don’t seem like such a great ally when the they aren’t angry about the thing that concerns you, do they, Mr. Zittrain?

      • Android

        • Nexus Hits the Mainstream

          While the previous two Android phones in the Nexus line have been generally well-regarded by critics, their sales numbers were far from enormous. Could that change with the Galaxy Nexus? Buzz is building for the phone, which will make its U.S. debut soon and will usher in the next version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich.

        • IOS, Android app advantage keeps rivals at bay

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

  • Free Poker DB-Advanced On-line Poker Database
  • Open Source Total Cost of Ownership 2.0

    Back in 2006, I wrote a piece for LXer called “A Brief History of Microsoft FUD”. This ran through successive attempts by Microsoft to dismiss GNU/Linux in various ways. One of the better-known was a series of “Total Cost of Ownership” (TCO) studies. By an amazing coincidence, these all showed that Microsoft Windows was cheaper than that supposedly cheap GNU/Linux.

    Fortunately, people soon cottoned on to the fact that these studies, paid for by Microsoft, were pretty worthless (here, for example, is a great debunking of the kind of FUD that was being put out in 2005.) However, one knock-on consequence of that episode is that TCO studies rather fell from favour.

  • Web Browsers

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • On Citrus UI, and a zest of realism

      A few days ago I was surprised to learn that LibreOffice was to get a brand new interface called Citrus. The series of mock-ups called Citrus are not a surprise, they are the result of the enthusiastic work of Mirek M. with the feedback of our Design team. However, the fact that a OMGUbuntu could write an article claiming that Citrus was going to become LibreOffice’s user interface got me thinking.

    • 7 Free Office Tools to Save Non-Profits Money

      If you need a desktop solution for your documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, OpenOffice.org is the leading open source software of free solutions. OpenOffice.org can read or write files from other common software platforms, save and share files in a variety of formats, including .doc, .xls and .odt, and best of all, the software suite is compatible with all common computers. Unless there are very complex features that can only be accomplished by current Microsoft Office products or similar paid software, OpenOffice.org will save money for a non-profit even as the organization grows and more computers are added.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • Helsinki city officials highly satisfied with Free Software

      City officials in Helsinki, Finland, are overwhelmingly satisfied after trying out the Free Software office suite OpenOffice.org on their laptops. 75% of 600 officials have been using OpenOffice.org exclusively since February, as part of a pilot project where the city installed the program on 22,500 workstations.

      In the spring of 2011, the city installed the Free Software office suite OpenOffice on 22,500 desktops. On the laptops of 600 officials, it was deployed as the only office suite. Even though these latter users only received a written manual and no actual training, still 75 % of the users where satisfied. The pilot project is based on an initiative by Helsinki city council member Johanna Sumuvuori.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

      • Unlocking the goldmine: new legal proposals to open up Europe’s public sector

        Already out there, many institutions have freed up their public data; and many people are making use of them. The UK, France and Denmark are leading the way in Europe; while all together, public sector information generates over 30 billion euros per year in economic activity, with services from geo-location services to weather forecasts.

  • Programming

    • Is a Computer Science Degree Worth It?

      “I suspect that in some areas of software development, a CS degree is extremely helpful, but I don’t think it is ever required,” said Slashdot blogger Chris Travers. “One thing the open source community is very good at doing is encouraging people to learn by both doing and by talking to those with a great deal of formal training or knowledge.” Such transfers of knowledge “can be compared to apprenticeships in the old guild system.”

    • git / cgit updated
    • 7 Reasons that Rexx Still Matters

      You might think of the dynamic language Rexx with nostalgia, but without a sense of urgency to program in it. René Vincent Jansen offers several convincing reasons that it ought to be in your programming toolbox.

    • SourceForge runs the Women in Open Source Survey
    • OS Wars in 2011

      It has become fashionable to say it’s always about applications and not the platform when someone chooses in IT. I don’t buy that for a minute, otherwise you would find all OS’s represented fairly on retail shelves. That said, it is interesting to look at platforms used to download software from servers.

Leftovers

  • This 32-Year-Old Entrepreneur Is Bent On Beating One Of Microsoft’s Largest Businesses

    The term “Enterprise 2.0″ is thrown around a lot these days. It refers to a class of companies that are taking ideas from companies like Twitter and Facebook and applying them to workplace software.

    It’s led to the rise of a whole new batch of startups with red-hot valuations. Jive, an enterprise social network, filed to go public earlier this year and is valued at $573 million, while Box.net turned down a $500 million buyout offer earlier this year.

  • No, You Won’t See Me on Facebook, Google Plus, nor Skype

    Most folks outside of technology fields and the software freedom movement can’t grok why I’m not on Facebook. Facebook’s marketing has reached most of the USA’s non-technical Internet users. On the upside, Facebook gave the masses access to something akin to blogging. But, as with most technology controlled by for-profit companies, Facebook is proprietary software. Facebook, as a software application, is written in a mix of server-side software that no one besides Facebook employees can study, modify and share. On the client-side, Facebook is an obfuscated, proprietary software Javascript application, which is distributed to the user’s browser when they access facebook.com. Thus, in my view, using Facebook is no different than installing a proprietary binary program on my GNU/Linux desktop.

    Most of the press critical of Facebook has focused on privacy, data mining of users’ data on behalf of advertisers, and other types of data autonomy concerns. Such concerns remain incredibly important too. Nevertheless, since the advent of the software freedom community’s concerns about network services a few years ago, I’ve maintained this simple principle, that I still find correct: While I can agree that merely liberating all software for an online application is not a sufficient condition to treat the online users well, the liberation of the software is certainly a necessary condition for the freedom of the users. Releasing freely all code for the online application the first step for freedom, autonomy, and privacy of the users. Therefore, I certainly don’t give in myself to running proprietary software on my FaiF desktops. I simply refuse to use Facebook.

  • The Download.com Debacle: What CNET Needs to Do to Make it Right

    The blogosphere has been buzzing about revelations that CNET’s Download.com site has been embedding adware into the install process for all kinds of software, including open source software like NMAP. For the unwary, some of the ads could have been read to suggest accepting the advertised service (e.g., the Babylon translation tool bar) was part of the installation process. Users who weren’t paying attention may also have clicked “accept” simply by accident. In either event, after their next restart, they would have been surprised to find their settings had been changed, new tool bars installed, etc. Gordon Lyon, the developer who first called public attention to Download.com’s practices, found a particularly egregious example last night: a bundled ad for “Drop Down Deals,” an app that, once installed, spies on your web traffic and pops up ads when you visit some sites. It’s hard to imagine that many users would choose that app on purpose.

  • Download.com Caught Adding Malware to Nmap & Other Software
  • U.S. Continues to threaten Internet freedom

    Incredible – 800,000 signatures in a few days, Congress is dithering and a senator will vote to block the reading of our petition for a few hours! Let’s get 1 million – sign the petition…

  • “8″ Roll-out A Year Away

    I think by the time “8″ will be released, it will already be obsolete. Likely Android will release a couple more times between now and then. M$ is sunk up to its axles in bloat while the world scampers along on small cheap computers.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Insurers Use PR Playbook to Keep Us in the Dark About Health Insurance

      If you wonder why the health insurance industry has to set up front groups and secretly funnel cash to industry-funded coalitions to influence public policy, take a look at the most recent results of the Kaiser Family Foundation’s (KFF) monthly Health Tracking Poll.

      In its November poll, KFF added a few new survey questions to find out exactly which parts of the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare are the most popular and which are the least popular. Insurers were no doubt annoyed to see that the provision of the law they want most — the requirement that all of us will have to buy coverage from them if we’re not eligible for a public program like Medicare — continues to be the single most hated part of the law. More than 60 percent of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of that mandate.

    • Rick Perry’s Big Health Care “Oops”

      Last week, Dr. Michael C. Burgess, tweeted this directive: “Mark your calendars: Rick Perry will join Health Caucus’ Thought Leaders Series next Wednesday, December 7 @ 5 p.m.”

      Eager to hear what thought leadership the Texas governor and presidential candidate would be imparting, I marked my calendar as Dr. Burgess prescribed. Imagine my dismay when I learned yesterday morning that Perry would be sharing his thoughts behind closed doors. The media and public, it turns out, had been disinvited.

      Burgess, a Texas Republican, chairs the Congressional Health Care Caucus, which, according to its Web site, “is committed to advancing reforms that reduce costs, increase patient control, expand choice, and promote cures.”

    • We Are Farmer Brown

      But Brown, far from operating a mega-dairy or even distributing milk to retailers, milks one cow. After he and his family provide for their own needs, the remaining milk is sold from their farm stand. Brown said in a speech to supporters, “I’m not a milk distributor. I’m a farmer. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to be, it’s all I’ve ever done.”

    • California is Farmer Brown
    • Raw Milk Freedom Riders Take on Chicago

  • Security

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • New York Should Become the First State to Ban Fracking
    • Is Associated Press Working for the Fracking Industry?

      That’s what millions of readers are asking after seeing a piece that asserted:

      “The vast Marcellus and Utica shale formations are already paying off in thousands of wells in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, bringing great wealth to landowners and jobs throughout the region.”

    • Transition to Renewables and The Forward Speed of Economies

      From CarbonTracker.org comes this very useful accounting of global fossil fuel reserves, by market listing on stock exchanges. The risk identified in their report, Unburnable Carbon – Are the World’s Financial Markets Carrying a Carbon Bubble?, is that markets have accorded value to energy resources which may never be extracted. The reason? A rather hopeful one. According to the group: “the threat of fossil fuel assets becoming stranded, as the shift to a low-carbon economy accelerates.” The report pays particular attention to the value of London listings, a country which itself has dwindling fossil fuel resources.

  • Finance

    • How The European Endgame Will be the Death Knell for Modern Economics
    • The End of Growth in the United States

      With one month to go in the data series, US Total Non-Farm Payrolls have averaged 131.08 million in 2011. The problem is that the US is a Very Large System, and needs growth to support its array of future obligations, primarily Social Security and the debt it incurs to run its military budget, and other entitlements. If you had told someone ten years ago that Total Non-Farm Payrolls would be at similar levels in 2011, that likely would have sounded impossible, or extreme. But the fact is, US Total Non-Farm Payrolls averaged 131.83 million ten years ago, in 2001. The implications for this lack of growth are quite dire. | see: United States Total Non-Farm Payrolls in Millions (seasonally adjusted) 2001-2011.

    • Robosigner Tries to Burnish its Image

      Lender Processing Services, Inc. (LPS) of Jacksonville, Florida — one of the most notorious processors of fraudulent home foreclosure documents in the country — has donated 1,000 tickets for a professional football game between the Jacksonville Jaguars and the San Diego Chargers to Jacksonville Area USO.

    • FOX News, OWS, Banksters, and Bombs

      Scanning the horizon for someone to blame for the latest attack on Germany’s largest bank, FOX news pundit Dan Gainor worked “the Internets.” Did he detail Deutsche Bank’s track record of making friends by ripping off consumers and foreclosing on their homes? Did he mention that Deutsche Bank stirred public ire when it was bailed out by multiple governments, including two billion from the U.S. Federal Reserve? Did he even bother to notice that it was widely reported that an Italian anarchist group had already claimed responsibility for the attack?

      No. In his piece on FOX News, “Left, Obama Escalate War on Banks Into Dangerous Territory,” Gainor decided to go after the bank-busting activists at the Center for Media and Democracy in Madison, Wisconsin, specifically our BanksterUSA.org site, because the Bankster masthead is riddled with bullet holes.

    • Thomas Friedman Is Flat: More Nonsense on Economics In the NYT

      The NYT continues its policy of affirmative action for people ignorant of the world by allowing Thomas Friedman to write two columns a week on whatever he chooses. Today he talks about the job crisis.

      He does get some things right in pointing out that we have a huge shortage of jobs. He also notes the growing crisis posed by long-term unemployment in which millions of people are losing their connections to the labor market and risk being permanently unemployed.

      However he strikes out in his dismissal of manufacturing as a source of jobs and calling for more high tech centers like Austin, Silicon Valley and Raleigh-Durham. When the dollar falls to a sustainable level it will have an enormous impact in improving the competitiveness of U.S. manufacturing. We stand to gain more than 4 million manufacturing jobs once we get the dollar down to a sustainable level.

    • Robert Samuelson Does Some Serious Fed Apologetics

      The Federal Reserve Board is a perverse animal. While ostensibly a public institution, the banking industry has the extraordinary privilege of being able to pick 5 of the 12 members of its most important governing body, the Open Market Committee (FOMC). The banks also get to have 7 other representatives sit in on the FOMC’s secret meetings. Given this structure, it is not surprising that people who do not believe that the banks necessarily place the interest of the general public first are suspicious of the Fed.

    • Wonkbook: The real unemployment rate is 11 percent

      Typically, I try to tie the beginning of Wonkbook to the news. But today, the most important sentence isn’t a report on something that just happened, but a fresh look at something that’s been happening for the last three years. In particular, it’s this sentence by the Financial Times’ Ed Luce, who writes, “According to government statistics, if the same number of people were seeking work today as in 2007, the jobless rate would be 11 percent.”

    • SF becomes first US city to top $10 minimum wage

      David Frias works two minimum-wage jobs to squeak by in one of the most expensive cities in America.

      Come New Year’s Day, he’ll have a few more coins in his pocket as San Francisco makes history by becoming the first city in the nation to scale a $10 minimum wage. The city’s hourly wage for its lowest-paid workers will hit $10.24, more than $2 above the California minimum wage and nearly $3 more than the working wage set by the federal government.

    • msnbc.com: Middle class workers are under attack
    • A Secret Scandal

      The government and the big banks deceived the public about their $7 trillion secret loan program. They should be punished.

    • Solyndra Schadenfreude As Goldman Sachs Played Key Role

      While we are not completely shy of saying we-told-you-so, in the case of the players in Solyndra’s fantastic rise and fall, we are more than happy to. Back in September we highlighted Goldman Sachs’ key role in the financing rounds of the now bankrupt solar company and this evening MarketWatch (and DowJones VentureWire) delves deeper and highlights how the squid has largely stayed out of the headlines (what’s the opposite of lime-light?) in this case despite its seemingly critical assistance and support from inception to pre-destruction.

    • The Goldman Saching of Europe

      I don’t want to sound alarmist but it looks like Goldman Sachs has taken over Europe. The continent has succumbed to the dictates of global finance, there was no choice. The bankers are holding us all to ransom and have done since the beginning of the GFC in 2008.

    • Europe’s Transition From Social Democracy to Oligarchy
    • U.S. Senate has just passed a bill that effectively ends the Bill of Rights in America
    • Huge Eurobank, rated ‘Britain’s worst,’ now accused of gouging US consumers

      The accusations are as outrageous as they are plentiful: Hundreds of “robocalls” — in one case, 800 to a single person — to collect auto loan debts; illegal repossession of cars from active duty military deployed overseas; late fees assessed three years after the fact and then compounded into $2,000 or $3,000 bills; harassing calls to friends, neighbors, co-workers — even children — on cell phones. And now, a flurry of lawsuits filed around the country, and lawyers fighting over potential clients.

    • Occupy Princeton Hijacked a Goldman Sachs Recruiting Event
    • Goldman Sachs whistleblower threatened with the sack

      A solicitor at HM Revenue & Customs who turned whistleblower to disclose that senior managers had quietly let off Goldman Sachs from paying millions of pounds in tax penalties is facing disciplinary procedures and possible prosecution for speaking out.

      Osita Mba has worked within the Revenue for at least four years and claimed to have personal knowledge of the deal that allowed the bank to write off a £10m bill.

    • Why Goldman Sachs Always Escapes Criminal Prosecution

      60 Minutes has been doing a lot of reporting on the financial crisis in order to find out why no bankers or mortgage servicers have been criminally prosecuted for fraudulent practices. When Obama was asked (see videos below) why no one was prosecuted for causing the financial crisis, his reply was that the actions of the banks were not illegal. What he is saying is that it is legal for the banks to take down the financial system by using sub-prime mortgages to create securities that were meant to fail and to sell those same securities to investors, like pension funds and municipalities, and at the same time bet against the whole mortgage market in order to make billions in profits.

    • Wealthy Patriots Wage Class War

      A strange thing happened in Chicago on Thursday, December 8. An audience of well-heeled professionals, a mixture of Democrats and Republicans, packed a room at the Drake Hotel to hear Robert Shiller, a Yale professor, give a presentation on the housing market. A few members of the audience were in the top 1%, and the balance of the audience was probably in the top 2%-5%. At the end of the presentation, there was a bi-partisan revolt.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Will “Obamacare” Force Americans to Buy Junk Health Insurance in 2014?

      The money that patients’ rights advocates have to spend trying to convince the Obama administration that Americans should have decent health care benefits pales in comparison to the boatloads of cash insurers and their corporate allies have on hand to do largely the opposite. But at least the advocates are now in the game.

  • Censorship

    • No disconnect – ICT helping Human Rights across the world

      There’s been a huge amount of interest in my announcement of a “no disconnect” strategy, to improve internet freedom around the world. In particular, there has been a lot of interest in my choice to invite Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg to assist me with this work.

  • Privacy

    • Internet BitTorrent Spies

      The latest example of what you do on the Internet is no where near as “private” as you think it is comes from a new Russian site, YouHaveDownloaded. This site claims to track 20 percent of all public BitTorrent downloads… and tell the world who they’ve found downloading what. So, that final episode of Dexter? The DVD rip of Cowboys & Aliens? That copy of Call of Duty Modern Warfare? And, that illicit video of Smoking Hot Grannies that you really, really don’t want to talk about? Yeah, your permanent record of what you’ve been downloading off BitTorrent sites may all be available for the amusement of your friends, neighbors, and, oh yes, the copyright owners.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • RespectMyNet: Internet Restrictions on the Table of EU Regulators

      Paris, November 30th, 2011 – La Quadrature du Net met with European body of telecommunications regulators, BEREC, which is currently listing Internet access restrictions imposed by telecoms operators across the EU, as requested by the EU Commission. Thanks to the RespectMyNet.eu platform and thanks to the participation of citizens from all over Europe in unveiling these harmful practices, BEREC cannot ignore any longer the widespread access restrictions which undermine freedom of communication, privacy, as well as competition and innovation online. By further contributing to RespectMyNet, citizens can help increase pressure on the Commission to legislate on Net neutrality.

    • Internet censorship against streaming in France?
    • Freedom Online: Stop the Double-Speak!

      The Netherlands are convening a high-profile conference to discuss freedoms online. As the United States and Europe pose as defenders of freedom online, La Quadrature recalls that their Internet policy is going in the other direction by supporting censorship, through the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement (ACTA) and other initiatives.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

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