11.18.09
Posted in Asia, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Windows at 11:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“It’s easier for our software to compete with Linux when there’s piracy than when there’s not.”
–Bill Gates
Summary: China demands that Windows XP should not be sold, but in a state where Microsoft turns a blind eye to counterfeiting the impact will be low
THIS morning we wrote very briefly about the verdict which bans sales of Windows XP in China. “Microsoft ordered to halt Win XP sales in China,” says news coverage that we cited earlier.
Microsoft has been ordered to stop selling Windows XP in China after a court ruled that certain fonts in the operating system infringe on a Chinese firm’s intellectual property.
The following newer article says that “China orders Microsoft to halt some Windows sales”
Microsoft Corp has been ordered by a Chinese court to stop selling versions of its Windows operating systems that include fonts designed by a local company, citing a violation of licensing agreements.
So what will Microsoft do? Well, over in China Windows gets copied more often than bought (Microsoft reportedly sold just 244 copies of Windows Vista in its first two weeks, despite a huge population size), so the impact will be small regardless of appeals and reversals. Microsoft is actually happy to see people who illegally copy its software. Homer/Slated put it as follows earlier in the day:
In fact Microsoft do benefit from piracy, in exactly the same way they benefit from dumping “products” (i.e. licenses) at a loss (assuming it is even possible to make a loss on something so ethereal, which can be reproduced virtually for nothing, as “permission to use”). The purpose of dumping (and the benefit of piracy) is market saturation, which has the short-term effect of excluding competition at a loss, but the long-term effect of ensuring market dominance, which assures the continued survival of the company, increased profits, and little need to rely on marketing or product improvement, in the absence of any competition.
It’s a deeply cynical business development method that favours attacks on the competition over self-improvement. Why improve oneself when one can simply destroy others, thus becoming “improved” by default?
“If they’re going to pirate somebody, we want it to be us rather than somebody else” ~ Jeff Raikes, former Microsoft Business Group president.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=198000211
“As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours.” ~ Bill Gates.
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-212942.html
“[Microsoft] are willing to lose money for years and years just to make sure that you don’t make any money, either.” – Bob Cringely.
http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2007/07/cringely-the-un.html
All that remains is to maintain that dominance, by suppressing others’ attempts to (re)enter the market. Microsoft accomplishes this in three ways: Lobbying, propaganda, and exclusive contracts. In this way their monopoly is protected by a closed-shop system, comprising partners and other paid agents persuaded to exclusively promote the Microsoft stack … criticising and rejecting everything else. The result is consumers are inundated with pro-Microsoft propaganda on the one hand and denied access to competing technology on the other. IOW, Microsoft is engaged in racketeering, and is tolerant of those who don’t pay the protection money, because non-payers nonetheless help support the ecosystem which protects Microsoft’s racket.
For improved perspective, also see [1, 2]. █
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Posted in Deception, GNU/Linux, Kernel, Microsoft, Novell at 11:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Mobile king Symbian put to rest, giving another huge endorsement to Linux which will replace it
It’s not just supercomputers where GNU/Linux is a winner; in mobile phones too, based on several independent predictions from industry analysts, Linux is expected to become dominant. Smartphones are a growth market, despite the deprived economy.
The latest news is that Nokia will be replacing Symbian with Linux. This news is dynamite because Symbian is the dominant mobile platform at the moment and it is owned only by Nokia.
Nokia says it will replace Symbian with its Maemo Linux by 2012.
It is already happening.
“NSeries Nokias Say Goodbye to Symbian, Hello to Maemo
[...]
Here’s a bold statement: Symbian S60 is simply not good enough. I’m sure that many Nokia owners and analysts who know that Symbian currently holds around 50% of the smartphone OS market would disagree. But I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the new generation of smartphones – primarily Androids, the iPhone, and webOS based devices – are simply better than Symbian S60 and Windows Mobile (up to) 6.5 when it comes to doing what the users today want from a smartphone: browsing the web, using Facebook and Twitter, gaming, and finding simple apps that will satisfy their specific needs.
Nokia’s migration to Linux is fantastic news, but ‘Microsoft Enderle’ is already attacking Nokia using revisionism — a subject that we wrote about just days ago when another Microsoft partner did its own share of revisionism.
In his typical way, Microsoft’s close ally Rob Enderle [1, 2] rewrites the history of Novell along the lines of “it was all Novell’s fault”. He also keeps warping the history of Netscape in this way and if Microsoft is allowed to get away with it (via partners and people whom it hires), then it’s truly sinful to future generations. These Microsoft boosters are putting out there newer articles that modify the past and (over)write it differently; this tends to get precedence in search results because of age (more recent items prioritised). Other examples of revisionism are listed below. █
Related posts:
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Posted in Hardware, Microsoft, Security, Vista, Vista 7, Windows at 10:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: More concrete problems, some of which artificially introduced, in Windows Vista and possibly its successors
LAST WEEK we saw Vista 7 getting cracked and the ramifications are highlighted as follows:
Trojans likely to follow Win 7 activation hack
[...]
Trojan attacks are likely in the wake of the Windows 7 product activation system cracks developed last week, less than a month after the release of Microsoft’s latest operating system.
The reality behind Vista 7 is not a convenient one and as it turns out, based on one of our readers, a “Microsoft hardware licence” is now required in Vista — an antifeature which was probably inherited by Vista 7.
That 32-bit editions of Windows Vista are limited to 4GB is not because of any physical or technical constraint on 32-bit operating systems. The 32-bit editions of Windows Vista all contain code for using physical memory above 4GB. Microsoft just doesn’t license you to use that code.
[...]
For the question of whether 32-bit Windows Vista will use all your physical memory, the hard-coded limit of 4GB is dominant as the maximum address for the ordinary kernel, which truly cannot form addresses for physical memory above 4GB, but the license limit is dominant for the PAE kernel. If you have physical memory above 4GB and wonder how it can be that the PAE kernel does not use that memory, the answer is licensing. The 32-bit code for using memory beyond 4GB is present in Windows Vista as Microsoft supplies it, but Microsoft prepares license values in the registry so that this code never gets to work with any physical addresses above 4GB.
This is ridiculous. There will probably be more coverage of this in days to come, so a followup is likely. Artificial limitations are a mockery as code is infinitely abundant. █
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Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Windows at 10:17 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Edited in response to a similar figure with
inversed shares from Digg (click to enlarge)
Summary: Where technical merits are considered rather than marketing and consumerism, GNU/Linux crushes the competition and continues to gain
OUR constant stream of daily news/links hopefully demonstrates that Linux is taking over the embedded/devices market. Another market where GNU/Linux has great power is one of the most luxurious ones and although it involves proprietary software higher up the layers, it still helps justify heavy development on Linux and accompanying parts, GCC included.
Glyn Moody offers this perspective on the latest numbers from TOP500.
Yes, as this shows, GNU/Linux is just as dominant in the supercomputing world as Windows is on PCs. However, unlike Windows on the desktop, which is slowly losing market share (not much, but a little), GNU/Linux is actually *gaining*: six months ago it had 88.60%. Windows, by contrast, remains stuck at a rather pathetic 1% – that’s just five machines in the top 500.
GNU/Linux also rules the most powerful machine.
Poor Apple and Microsoft are nowhere in sight. How come?
Here is a new article that touches on the subject:
Lack of Innovation a Commonality for Microsoft, Apple
[...]
Where did Windows come from? Put very simply, Bill Gates couldn’t be bothered to write his own operating system for the IBM PC, so he bought the rights to QDOS from Seattle Computer Products instead. Then he got the idea for Windows from Apple, and Microsoft’s latest innovation is, apparently, the 20 year old sudo concept.
[...]
It’s no surprise then that of the world’s most powerful computers included in the latest Top 500 Supercomputing list, just under 90 percent run Linux. The number of Windows and OS X machines in the list can be counted on one hand.
To make matters worse, Apple hardware is once again shown to be inferior to some of the ‘commodity’ options GNU/Linux runs on.
Macs not all that for reliability
[...]
A survey of 30,000 laptops has found one in three machines die within three years and netbooks do even worse, suffering 20 per cent more hardware failures than larger laptop machines.
This agrees with other such studies from 2009.
How about this new survey about Microsoft hardware?
CNET UK’s games console reliability survey: 60 per cent of Xbox 360s have broken
[...]
Sixty per cent of Xbox 360s have kicked the red-ringed bucket, compared to 16 per cent of PS3s and just 6 per cent of Wiis, according to our survey on the reliability of games consoles in the UK.
A recent survey and other such surveys agree with these numbers. Apple and Microsoft just cannot produce decent hardware, let alone an operating system that’s competitive where bare metal — not sugar coating and marketing — truly matters. █
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Posted in IRC Logs at 9:52 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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To use your own IRC client, join channel #boycottnovell in FreeNode.
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:39 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Much as we’d rather not have to say it, Windows users continue to be the majority around here, and in fact they have grown slightly. Here’s the breakdown, with our previous figures in brackets:
1. Windows: 55.47% (55.11%)
2. Linux: 35.95% (34.47%)
3. Macintosh: 7.29% (9.19%)
4. iPhone: 0.38% (0.45%)
5. Unknown: 0.36% (0.35%)
6. SunOS: 0.17% (0.07%)
7. iPod: 0.11% (0.14%)
8. Android: 0.08% (0.05%)
9. FreeBSD: 0.08% (0.08%)
10. SymbianOS: 0.05% (0.03%)
11. OpenBSD: 0.01% (0.01%)
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Google
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Rumors have been swirling for days about the possible delivery of a beta version of Google’s much-discussed Chrome OS this week, as we noted last Friday. I pinged a few people at Google to get some clarity, and while they didn’t provide me with a specific answer as to whether the download will arrive this week, they did send me an invitation to a press event at Google’s Mountain View campus on Thursday morning, billed as “an update on our progress with Google Chrome OS.” In other words, it sounds like we’ll get to try it very soon.
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The search giant has arranged an event for journalists Thursday at its headquarters in Mountain View, California, just days after rumors circulated that the code might soon be released.
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Google Chrome is a nifty little browser, but to date it’s hardly had the impact of Mozilla’s Firefox. That’s partly because it’s still Windows-only, but we suspect it’s largely because you can’t use extensions. Both of those things are about to change.
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That space used to be occupied by the themes gallery, but in the newest versions of Chrome and Chromium on Mac, Windows and Linux the jigsaw pattern appears instead. A couple of sample extensions, built by Google, are already working – a Google Mail Checker and BuildBot Monitor.
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Desktop
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Aiming a computer OS at seniors, especially when put onto overpriced hardware, smacks at best of do-goodism and at worse of cashing in on the uninformed. What is wrong with a cheap old PC running Ubuntu? Stick the relevant icons on the desktop, make ‘em big and off you go.
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Server
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Opengear Monitor comes with the popular infrastructure monitoring system Nagios pre-installed in a 1RU CMS6100 hardware appliance, and is capable of managing up to 255 distributed hosts and more than 1,000 services. A wide variety of plugins for Nagios means the system is extensible for monitoring additional apps and services.
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Brown and his team have been testing a way to keep personal and business separate at the client level. Using lightweight Linux operating systems on top of an open source Xen hyper visor, users are able to run one OS for personal use and one for business on the same machine whilst making sure the two don’t meet and cause any security breaches.
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It’s interesting that Isilon is offering this product as Parascale is telling customers to stick their scale-out NAS vault in the cloud using loosely-coupled vanilla Linux X86 servers. Isilon’s approach is to have a tighter coupling between high-powered X86 servers in its clusters and sell on both performance and scalability.
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Habl Consultancy, an Open Source and Linux solutions provider headquartered in Dubai Silicon Oasis announces a 24x7x365 Linux help desk support for the entire Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.
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The Linux appliance is designed to provide affordable messaging to small and medium-sized businesses, with 400 mailboxes and 300 hours of storage.
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Software solutions company Openwave Systems Inc (Nasdaq:OPWV) has launched a Linux-based, proactive service mediation and policy management solution Openwave Integra 3.0, the company revealed on Tuesday.
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Kernel Space
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Yesterday marked the release of Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 and it was the best version yet with the addition of many new exciting and useful features. While this release was gratifying, there are much greater plans for the Phoronix Test Suite going into the next decade. It has already been shared that Windows support is coming, but there are other huge features coming too as soon as Q1’2010. Up to this point, most of the tests and the design of pts-core (the Phoronix Test Suite engine) have been focused on quantitative benchmarks with many of the tests spitting out a frame-rate, time, or some other measurement.
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AMD has today pushed out their Catalyst 9.11 Linux driver. This release contains support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and initial support for OpenSuSE 11.2 along with a handful of minor bug-fixes. This release does also contain proper support for the Radeon HD 5750 and Radeon HD 5770 graphics cards so that users do not encounter the “unsupported hardware” watermark any longer. Beyond that there isn’t much to look at nor are there any XvBA improvements.
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Ubuntu 9.10 (with the 32-bit and 64-bit wins being added together) had won about ten of the sixteen benchmarks in this Mac OS X vs. Ubuntu Linux comparison. Mac OS X 10.6.2 though had a particularly strong advantage in the heavy computational tests like Crafty, the ray-tracing benchmarks, and PostgreSQL. Snow Leopard, however, had performed quite poorly with the NVIDIA graphics due to the regression we pointed out earlier in this article. Hopefully the bug that is seriously hampering the NVIDIA OpenGL performance on Mac OS X when running at different resolutions will be fixed in the near future.
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Ubuntu comes with a nice application called “Hardware Drivers” (a.k.a. jockey-gtk) for installing proprietary drivers for wireless cards and other devices that lack open-source support. This is great, except when your only connection to the Internet is wireless and you have no way to download the driver or firmware you need. Here’s why this situation should change.
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Applications
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For a profit-making business to be successful, the customer must rank as the most important part of the chain. After all, without customers the business would not even exist.
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In the last few days I’ve been working with Auke Kok on adding some new features to the PowerTOP tool.
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Desktop Environments
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Networked applications and social computing were high on the developers’ agenda for the newest version of this highly-anticiapted open source desktop environment.
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Even though it’s a point release, the latest Amarok comes with some major new features and all the benefits of the 2.2.0 release. Dubbed “Weightless,” the 2.2.1 release is full of bug fixes and polishing from 2.2.0 release as well as improvements to music management, podcasts, and the ability to update Amarok scripts.
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I think I am falling in love with the KDE desktop again simply because it is the power-user’s desktop. There are so many controls and things to configure that I am sure many KDE 4 desktops do not look anything alike. The stability has improved greatly and so has the software. I would encourage anyone who is a KDE 4 skeptic to give it a shot; it may just change your perspective, just like it did mine. Good work KDE team, keep it up!
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Windows Live Writer is a well known blog authoring desktop tool for windows, but if you are a Linux user then go for KBlogger. We had earlier discussed about using Google Docs as a blog authoring tool which can be used in Linux as well but if you want to have a desktop application then KBlogger will fulfill your requirement.
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New Releases
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XtreemOS 2.0 features the addition of a new Xosautoconfig tool that assists Grid administrators and users to quickly deploy XtreemOS nodes on Grids, Virtual Machines and test beds. Additionally, the 2.0 release allows for the creation and management of dynamic virtual organisations, supports Application Execution Management (AEM) and includes a replicated and distributed object-based file system called XtreemFS.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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The Linux Mint team has announced the first (RC1) release candidate of the Ubuntu 9.10-based Linux Mint 8. Meanwhile, the Fedora community has released the final version of Fedora 12, and an eWEEK review praises the release for its improved system privilege management and virtualization features.
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Fedora 12, codenamed “Constantine,” made its debut this week, aimed at providing users with a long list of improvements for both servers, desktops and netbooks.
While the latest installment of the Red Hat-sponsored community Linux distribution offers many new features, at the top of the list for users including Fedora’s project leader, Paul Frields, are improved networking capabilities that raise the bar for mobile connectivity on Linux.
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For systems administrators using Samba, GFS2 Clustered Samba has been added and improvements in high-availability clustering is designed to make sharing data across machines easier and more reliable.
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It’s an orientation that Frields sees as central to the GNU/Linux distribution’s rapid growth over the last five years, as well as the focus in the new Fedora 12 release.
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There is a great third party product for Fedora called Easy Life that you can download that installs and configures a ton of settings by default for you (ubuntu users may compare it to the deceased automatix).
It does the following:
* Sets “sudo” command up for your regular user;
* Configures RPMFusion repository for extra and non-free software;
* Installs Flash Player plugin;
* Installs all kinds of multimedia Codecs (h264,divx,xvid,mp3 etc);
* Installs additional fonts;
* Installs Skype;
* Installs Sun Java and Sun Java Plugin for Firefox;
* Integrates Sun Java with system-switch-java;
* Installs Google apps (Picasa, Desktop);
* And many others…
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Upgrade seems to be a better option when you have a lot of stuff installed on your system and you don’t want to restore configurations for all of them after a fresh install.
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We asked him if there are any particularly interesting new features in the Fedora 12 release that haven’t been extensively highlighted by reviews. One example that he thinks deserves a closer look is the new automated bug reporting feature that makes it easier for users to help identify problems. This is an example of how Fedora is lowering the barriers to entry for new contributors and making the development process more inclusive in simple ways.
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Fedora 12, codenamed Constantine, is released! Just for the info, Fedora is an RPM based Linux Distribution, an Operating System in other words, developed by the community supported Fedora Project and sponsored by Red Hat. Fedora contains only free and Open Source software. Some of Fedora’s 12 new features are Gnome 2.28, KDE 4.3, better web cam support!, and many others. Finally presto is enabled by default which means smaller updates to be downloaded and faster updates also!
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Q1. Can you talk a bit about your work with the OLPC/Geode? Was the OLPC’s decision to move to ARM related to your interest in bringing Moblin support to Fedora Mini?
A1. I got involved in OLPC through the original request for interest about a Fedora for Small Devices to the main fedora-devel mailing list. I originally started looking at reducing dependencies in Fedora so it would more easily fit in small spaces, and was looking at GNOME Mobile and Hildon for MID style devices. I was already a package maintainer of a number of packages useful to smaller devices. One of the Fedora people (Jeremy Katz from memory) involved in OLPC directed me towards the Fedora-OLPC inititive to get their changes upstream, and asked if I was interested in helping out as they were doing similar things and could do with some help. I was hooked.
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Debian Family
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I was just recently blown away by what I can accomplish with the Debian installer on getting Debian installed on a system. I used to think that the openSUSE installer was the most flexible Linux installer, with Anaconda running a close second, but I think I’m going to at least put the Debian installer in a 2-way tie for first with openSUSE. The only reason I would say that, is because the openSUSE installer uses a hub-and-spoke design to installing the operating system. This means you can pick and choose what you want to install, rather than going through the entire installer itself. Further, the openSUSE installer supports installing from a SMB share on a Windows network, with neither Anaconda nor the Debian installer support (that I can tell).
[...]
The options seem to be virtually endless! I was a Red Hat and SUSE trainer for a bit, and I really grew to love the Anaconda an openSUSE installers. They are powerful, flexible installers. However, after learning what was possible with Debian, it seemed clear to me that the Debian installer held the upper hand. Not because I prefer Debian for my default operating system on all my computers, but because of what was immensely possible with it.
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Everyone, community members, developers, Canonical employees, Mark Shuttleworth, Jono Bacon, we all pronounce it a little bit differently. I’ve heard eww-boon-too, eww-bun-too, yoo-boon-too, yoo-bun-too, oo-bun-too, oo-boon-too and a few more that I can’t figure out how to phoneticize.
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Although Ubuntu 9.10 comes with pretty themes and a new set of icons, you might want to add your personal touch to your desktop. I will try to give you some ideas to add more beauty to Ubuntu 9.10.
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So far, Dell has shown little interest in Ubuntu servers and has focused mainly on Ubuntu notebooks and netbooks. But I’ll be curious to get an update from Dell following the Ubuntu Developers Summit.
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McObject is shipping the final version 4.0 of its flagship ExtremeDB, a Linux-ready, in-memory database for real-time applications, adding a new API and improved multi-user performance. McObject also announced two new customer wins: the MyYearbook social networking site and SCL Elements, the makers of the Can2Go wireless automation system.
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Diamond Systems announced a series of “embedded application servers” based on previously released PC/104 SBCs (single board computers). The Octavio-HLV and Octavio-ATHM run Linux 2.6 on 800MHz Vortex86DX or 500MHz Via Mark CoreFusion processors, respectively, include cableless construction, and sport soldered-on memory, the company says.
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Envive, Inc. announced a Linux-based, HD-ready media server that offers up to 14TB of network-attached storage (NAS) capacity. The TheaterStation Multi-Zone Digital Media Management System with Centralized Networked Storage is available with TheaterStation “TSClient Mini” satellite devices, as well as several NAS storage options, the Carrollton, Texas-based company says.
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Android
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Mentor Graphics is shipping an Android development platform for the Texas Instruments (TI) OMAP35x system-on-chip (SoC) family. The Android Development System for OMAP35x supports TI’s OMAP35x evaluation module (EVM) and open source BeagleBoard development boards, says the company.
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Manufacturer Innovative Converged Devices (ICD) has released the specifications for a sleek and sexy touchscreen tablet onto which it plans to install the Eclair edition of Google’s Android OS.
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The Dalvik team have disclosed that the recently released Android 2.0 code includes the source code for a Just In Time (JIT) compiler for Dalvik. A JIT compiler takes bytecodes and compiles them to native code for faster execution. The JIT compiler in the Android Open Source Project’s release is a development snapshot and therefore is not enabled in Android 2.0, but developers can enable it for testing when compiling the “eclair” source code.
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ARM
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ARM sees Android as a useful vehicle to help push its processor architecture into a wider range of devices, and fend off the march of Intel’s low power Atom range into its key mobile and embedded territories. It has been assembling a broad ecosystem around its Android efforts, targeted at products as diverse as digital photo frames and netbooks, and its latest move is to set up a web site to make it easier for companies to ‘productize’ Android.
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ARM launched its Android Solution Centre today, created as a resource for designers and developers of ARM technology-based products running on Android, the open-source platform from the Open handset Alliance. The community has the support of more than 35 ARM partners.
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ARM has unveiled a new alliance of 35 tech firms to speed up the use of devices using Google’s Android operating system.
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ARM has unveiled a place where Android developers can help each other be Android developers.
The chip designer calls this place The Solution Center for Android, boasting that “more than” 35 ARM-friendly developers have already joined the fun.
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Phones
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The debate over Droid v. iPhone rages on, but lots more Android surprises are on the way. Get ready for the Google Phone. It’s no longer a myth, it’s real.
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One analyst predicts a 900 per cent increase in Android smartphone adoption over the coming months. Others think Android will surpass the Iphone in worldwide adoption by 2012, with 14 per cent of the global smartphone market.
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Sub-notebooks
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Launched two years ago by Intel and now hosted by The Linux Foundation, Moblin is a Linux platform aimed at netbooks and mobile internet devices.
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This is the theme of “The Changing Role of the Enterprise in the Open Source Community,” a talk given by Tim Golden, Open Source Software Infrastructure Strategist at Bank of America during last week’s End User Collaboration Summit. The Summit, hosted by the Linux Foundation, gathered high-level Linux maintainers and Linux developers to collaborate with senior IT leaders from the largest and most dynamic Linux users in the world.
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Notice a trend? Open source is “stealing” away closed-sourced content management talent.
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3. I am using my own laptop, as apparently there isn’t the budget even for mices. This doesn’t bother me overly, though it does strike me as a tad cheeky. The upside is that I’m using Ubuntu in a shared production environment for the first time ever. This includes GIMP, Geany, Evolution and Firefox.
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Mozilla is cooking a new Beta Build of the next iteration of its open source browser. Early adopters will have a fresh revision, the third one since Firefox 3.6 debuted into Beta stage, available for download soon. Whether referred to as Firefox 3.6 Beta 3 or Firefox 3.6 Beta revision 3, the new release is just around the corner. In fact, Mozilla plans to release it either later today or tomorrow morning. At the start of this week, the company building the Firefox open source browser was undecided as to the specific deadline for the availability of Firefox 3.6 Beta 3/Revision 3.
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Dubbed YouTube Direct, the new open source application will allow news orgs to integrate a video upload tool directly into their sites, where they can accept and review user uploaded footage.
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Thus began the process of creating vApus For Open Source, or vApus FOS, as we like to call it in the lab.
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Since its founding in March 2009, GENIVI has grown from eight founding members, including BMW Group, Delphi, GM, Intel, Magneti Marelli, PSA Peugeot Citroen, Visteon, and Wind River, to more than 40 members and continues to drive automotive and consumer electronics connectivity, multimedia and performance capabilities through open source adoption.
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Hosted
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At the Large Installation System Administration Conference, held earlier this month in Baltimore, Eucalyptus creator Rich Wolski talked about his creation works.
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concrete5 has been downloaded about 70,000 times from SourceForge. There are over 20,000 sites on the web that routinely check concrete5.org servers for updates. That only happens if the owner is using the site editing tools frequently, so there’s likely a good deal more sites powered with concrete5 around the web. “We are really proud of that almost every other person who downloads our software up using it, but in doing the math we realized we are hosting a laughably small number of those installs on our own servers” says Franz Maruna CEO of Concrete CMS.
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Security
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The Metasploit Project announced the immediate availability of version 3.3 of the Metasploit Framework, the world’s most popular open source exploit development and penetration testing platform.
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Nearly one year after the release of Metasploit 3.2, the Metasploit Project developers have announced the availability of version 3.3 of the Metasploit Framework.
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Business
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Tech Data has launched a new program to help open source ISVs and solution providers better market their solutions to business customers.
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Since earlier this year, SugarCRM, the open source customer relationship management company, has been without a full time CEO. Larry Augustin, veteran of VA Linux, who joined the SugarCRM board in 2005, had been acting as interim CEO and today, the company announced he was to assume the post on a more permanent basis. Augustin, who was recently named most influential executive in the open source industry, said “I am delighted to lead SugarCRM, a company with a large customer base, an extensive partner network and tremendous employees”.
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KÜRT Information Security and Data Recovery Ltd. has signed a Certified Partnership agreement with Zabbix SIA, the company – creator of the Open Source IT monitoring solution Zabbix.
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eXo Platform, a major provider of open source collaborative software, has just reached an OEM partnership agreement with BonitaSoft, the first provider of open source Business Process Management (BPM) solutions.
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Government
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By many measures, the Netherlands is a great place for open-source software. In 2007, the government started to phase in a policy that gave preferential treatment to open-source software in IT purchasing decisions. Initially, at least, the policy seems to have been a success, with a July 2009 study highlighting a wide array of open-source software in use by government.
Sounds good, right?
Maybe not. According to sources within the government and others that sell to the government (both proprietary and open-source vendors), the government’s rigid definition and management of the policy has more often than not thwarted its attempts to go open.
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The European Space Agency (ESA) wants to build a repository for hosting and developing it’s open source applications, including flight software, ground software and engineering tools.
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Openness
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Information and knowledge are crucial factors in human development. We are reminded of this constantly, from the “knowledge economy” we live in, to the emotional and financial power that information and communications technologies (ICTs) have over our lives. In the words of philosopher Francis Bacon, “Scientia potentia est” – knowledge itself is power. Present-day movements for access to knowledge and the right to information have their origins in this simple and arguably ancient idea. Despite a rich history and wide intellectual acceptance, the right to know is not universally granted, and the right to know on the internet is a particularly bitter struggle in many parts of the world.[1]
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As for the open source approach, “we just figured it would be easier for everybody to contribute via a wiki than by email or meetings. We kind of hope that would [lead] to getting balanced general terms, a unified view on the process and some good assets to use for producers. We think it will evolve in iterations as an ongoing thing, in smaller and smaller movements, with more and more focus,” Wahlquist says. “Whenever there is a substantial addition, we’ll add it to the bidsheet. We would welcome anyone to endorse it, add to it or to help in any way.”
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Jimmy Wales is eating dinner alongside Princess Caroline of Monaco. Web royalty has come to meet the real thing. Wales, the man who co-founded Wikipedia eight years ago, is in Monaco to be awarded the Monaco Media Prize at the principality’s annual invite-only media forum.
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Programming
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Gerrit, a Git-based system for managing code review, is helping to spread the popular distributed revision control system into Android-using companies, many of which have heavy quality assurance, management, and legal processes around software. HTC, Qualcomm, TI, Sony Ericsson, and Android originator Google are all running Gerrit, project leader Shawn Pearce said in a talk at the October 2009 GitTogether event, hosted at Google in Mountain View.
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RubyMine 2.0 features improvements in refactoring and code analysis, as well as a set of tools for code changes in software projects
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Over the years of my observation, coverage and participation in open source software, SourceForge (both the code repository site SourceForge.net and the corporation) has typically served as one key barometer of where things stood. However, this began to change a couple of years ago, when I wrote about how the resources for finding, understanding, assessing open source software were growing. Today, we see that the bulk of open source software — both code and communities — have nothing close to a single home or destination. Today we see that the SourceForge destination has given way to Google Code, GitHub, Eclipse, Codeplex, Wazi, individual forges for projects and vendors and other places where open source software and its communities conduct their business.
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WITH A LOT of debate currently underway about the development of the Internet, both in terms of form and function, the World Wide Web Foundation (W3F) has expanded it operations globally to help promote the web for good causes.
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A major weapons manufacturer has exhibited a so-called “Black Box” which could be fitted to small arms – for instance rifles or submachine guns – and record details of every shot fired, potentially including location, target and even user identity.
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From Nov 10th to Nov 13th the Brazilian Government hosted a public hacking contest to test the robustness of its voting machines. 38 participants from private and public IT companies (including the Brazilian Federal Police) were divided into 9 teams, which tried several different approaches to try to tamper with the software installed on the machines, and even to physically interfere in other stages of the process. All attempts (aside from a minor one which would not compromise the overall results) failed, and observations from the participants and neutral observers will be taken into account to improve the process even further.
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Global fertility rates are falling at a jaw-dropping pace – with vast economic and social consequences for all of us
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World leaders cannot use the global recession as an excuse to delay action on climate change, according to leading economists. In a new analysis they predict that the economic downturn will cut carbon emissions by 9% by 2012 and delay the onset of “dangerous” climate change by just 21 months.
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Finance
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Taxpayers have done their share. They have put trillions of dollars at risk in an effort to stabilize the financial system and have gotten little in return. Too many banks are not lending to small businesses, they are not helping American families facing foreclosure, but they are raising credit card and other bank fees at a rapid clip.
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A row blew up last night after Gordon Brown promoted plans for an international tax on City dealing that could raise funds for the world’s poor and help developing countries tackle climate change.
No sooner had the prime minister floated the idea of a tax on bank transactions than it was shot down by US treasury secretary Timothy Geithner, Canadian finance minister Jim Flaherty and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the IMF.
At a G20 meeting in St Andrews, Scotland, Brown said the “social contract” between financiers and the British public had broken down and needed to change.
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AstroTurf
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BHP-Billiton ditched its steel interests long ago and is now one of the world’s biggest miners and exporters of coal for power stations. It is also a member of the WCI. In its report, titled Securing the Future: Financing Carbon Capture and Storage in a Post-2012 World, the WCI argue that there is an urgent need for massive funding of CCS trials by governments and with a generous slice of revenues from emissions trading schemes. Current funding, the WCI claims, is “too slow to allow necessary global GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions reductions goals to be achieved.” Not surprisingly, they identify that “the appetite for this will largely hinge on public acceptance.”
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Look out Timberland.
Nike foe Jeffrey Ballinger has the New Hampshire-based maker of outdoor wear – primarily boots – in his sights.
Ballinger has cult hero status in the labor movement.
His big deal?
Exposing mistreatment of Nike contract workers in Indonesia in the mid-1990s.
And kicking off the global anti-sweatshop movement.
Ballinger had Nike on the run.
Hundreds of articles appeared in newspapers around the world.
And if it wasn’t the headline – it was the underlying story – Nike mistreats its workers.
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Internet/Censorship/Web Abuse/Rights
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The MPAA is pressuring the FCC for the authority to cripple recording devices using so-called “Selectable Output Control” (SOC).
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A £2bn scheme to monitor all electronic communications remains within the Home Office’s financial plans, despite the government postponing the relevant legislation.
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Other commenters on Stltoday.com are now having a field day, calling Greenbaum a “Thought Nazi” and suggesting that he be fired for outing the commenter to his employer.
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Reader Cannen alerts us to yet another column by yet another old school newspaper guy whining about the fact that “the people” now have the ability to have their voices heard. What’s funny is that his own column seems to contradict his statements.
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LONDON: A British soldier who faces up to 10 years in jail for speaking out against the war in Afghanistan will go before a military judge this week to discover if he will remain in an army jail while he awaits trial.
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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Cover the windows, stay indoors and bunker down — the war on file sharing has reached Australian shores. Copyright owners have a fair claim to their content, but is it fair to saddle internet service providers (ISPs) with the responsibility of policing their users? And just as file sharers are stealing copyrighted content, should copyright enforcers be able to steal our privacy?
The current legal case between Australia’s third largest ISP, iiNet, and Hollywood studio copyright representative, Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT), brings these issues to the fore. Under the auspices of AFACT, Hollywood studios, including Walt Disney Studios, Universal Films, Paramount Pictures and Twentieth Century Fox, decided to sue iiNet late last year. The companies allege iiNet did nothing to help the studios enforce their copyright — a key requirement to be eligible for Safe Harbour provisions under the 2006 amended Copyright Act.
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Michael Fricklas, Viacom’s general counsel, tells a group of Yale Law students that he’s a huge fan of fair use, doesn’t want to take down your YouTube mashup, and has no plans to start suing P2P users in federal courts—but he still loves DRM and “three strikes” laws.
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MySpace, rumored to be on the verge of purchasing the free music streaming site imeem, is struggling to keep up with its own payments to music copyright holders, according to a top News Corp executive — a problem that has plagued every other licensed free music service.
The digital music doubters could be right with the contention that advertising revenue can’t cover the costs of licensing music. Meanwhile, illegitimate free music sources continue to proliferate, rendering paid music subscriptions irrelevant for most music fans.
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Paul Zukofsky, heir to poet Louis Zukofsky and his copyrights, thinks he gets to decide what “fair use” is — and it doesn’t include quoting his father, even for an academic dissertation, without Paul’s permission and, in many cases, a fee. He says he generally waives the fee for dissertations, but you are then forbidden to publish the dissertation.
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Posted in FSF at 8:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Richard Stallman clarifies a joke
* From: Richard Stallman <rms gnu org>
* To: foundation-list gnome org, gnome-women-list gnome org
* Subject: For avoidance of misunderstandings
* Date: Sat, 14 Nov 2009 06:22:47 -0500
Some of the people in the audience in my speech in the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit thought that my joke about the Virgin of Emacs was intended to make some kind of statement about women.
I was surprised by that reaction, since I had told the same joke dozens of times and this is the first report of interpreting it that way. In any case, it was a misunderstanding: the only intended meaning of the Cult of the Virgin of Emacs is to parody another Cult of the Virgin. The whole St IGNUius routine makes fun of me, the free software movement and religion, through parody.
To be abundantly clear, my views about women in connection with free software are simply that they deserve freedom in using computers, just as men do. Some women already appreciate this freedom and have become free software activists. We need more people, regardless of sex, to do this, so that someday all women, and all men, will enjoy the freedom that free software offers.
Misunderstanding is not a good outcome. To help avoid misunderstandings of this kind in the future, since August I have changed the joke so that the Virgin of Emacs can be of either sex.
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