03.31.12
Posted in News Roundup at 11:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Qualcomm has clarified their views today regarding the presentation of two of their Atheros developers proposing that all proprietary drivers be killed for good across all platforms and replaced with open-source drivers.
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As the latest work queued up for merging in the Linux 3.4 kernel is the Btrfs file-system pull, which Chris Mason describes as “pretty big, picking up patches that have been under development for some time.”
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This board is certainly capable of single digit power draw, at least with certain specific setups. With Linux, running the latest kernel (at least 3.3.0) is recommended to achieve lower power consumption. MeeGo with it’s included proprietary xorg driver for CedarView Atoms shows that Linux can achieve similarly low power draw as Windows 7 with an optimized graphics driver. What remains to be seen is if the Linux kernel developers will have access to enough information about the PowerVR SGX 545 GPU core to enable them to incorporate all power saving features of this GPU into the Linux kernel DRM driver.
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Applications
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Want to learn the art of writing a screenplay? Check out Trelby, open source screenwriting software you can try right now if you’re a Linux or Windows user.
Whether you’re an aspiring writer or a planning on becoming a YouTube star, knowing how to write a script is an essential skill. It’s possible, of course, to write a screenplay using Microsoft Word, but using software built for screenplays saves a lot of time. Formatting for screenplays is very specific, so why waste time imitating it? It will just frustrate you, distracting you from your writing.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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Do you want to play a game with extreme violence in a background populated with characters that are American Caricatures ?
Welcome to Postal 2.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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A few months ago I took a look at KDE-Telepathy from within Fedora Rawhide. I said I would check it out after upgrading to Fedora 16 and then I got busy getting ready for the arrival of my daughter. (my first kid) So I just kept using Kopete for my multi-protocol IM needs. It’s the only way I keep up with anyone on Gchat or Facebook chat because I refuse to have to keep any specific tab open on my web browser for chatting. Also, it tends to be more annoying to chat – instead of chatting in a small window that I can put off to the corner of whatever virtual desktop or activity I’m in, I’d need my entire web browser.
But recently I came across this blog post in planet KDE that talks about what’s coming in KDE-Telepathy 0.4. I really like logging for my chats because it can be very useful to go back and look for a reference or a URL that someone mentions. So, even though there isn’t an easy way to view the logs right now, the fact that the logs are being saved was enough to allow me to over to KDE-Telepathy. I’m also really excited for the Gchat-like interface coming in 0.4. It’s mentioned in that previous link as well as here.
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GNOME Desktop
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There’s a new simulation game in town and this one is aimed straight for the Linux user. With Linux Tycoon, you can design, build, and manage your very own Linux distribution and compete with other distros for users. “Basically take all the fun parts of building your own Linux Distro… and take out all the work. Bam! Instant entertainment!”
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Inc. (RHT) jumped 15 percent after the software maker forecast earnings that beat analysts’ estimates.
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Debian Family
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The Debian Project is pleased to announce that it is joining the Open Source Initiative (“OSI”) as an affiliate. The OSI was founded in 1998 by Eric S. Raymond and Bruce Perens, with the aim of explaining, advocating, and protecting the term “open source”. Debian shares the OSI’s desire to encourage Free Software. Debian’s Social Contract commits it to producing a system which is 100% free.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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A quick update: we’ve uploaded digital versions of the latest issue and our previous issue to Ubuntu’s Software Centre, and we’ll try to do the same for future issues as well.
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Depending upon your hardware, the power consumption when running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS can either be at its best or worst. Here’s a look at the two power consumption extremes of the Precise Pangolin.
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I’ve been an Xfce user since 2004, this post from last year documents my UI adventures. It’s been my Desktop Environment of choice for my whole professional career as a systems administrator and I’m very set in my ways configuration-wise at work. These days I help out with the Xubuntu team on marketing, website, release notes and testing. I really love Xfce and I’ll continue to use it and contribute to Xubuntu (we had our beta2 today too, and formal release of our new branding!).
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Almost there! Day by day we are getting closer to the final stable release of Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin the long term support release. Today the second beta release is available to download for the testing purposes. So, let’s check the recent changes to Ubuntu Precise Pangolin highlights.
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The Ninja Block not only runs on open software, but it itself is open hardware, with designs available under Creative Commons. It also includes a 3D printed case. Prices start at $155 AUD ($160 USD, £100 GBP) for the basic device, with external sensors costing more. You can pre-order from the Ninja Blocks website.
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Phones
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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According to a report in The Wall Street Journal citing “people familiar with the matter,” Google intends to go head-to-head with Apple’s iPad by selling co-branded Android tablets. Google, of course, has its hands tied with regard to its lofty goals to become a big player on the hardware scene, as it waits for its $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility to be approved. Is Google biting off more than it can chew with its smartphone and tablet plans?
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The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) announced that Apache Rave, the organization’s open-source mashup platform, has graduated from the incubator to become a top-level project.
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) announced that Apache Rave, the organization’s open-source mashup engine, has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a top-level project (TLP).
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Ever wonder where the phrase “jump the shark” came from? It’s dates back to the once wildly popular TV show Happy Days. It’s widely accepted that the show lost its way, and its audience, in an episode where the lovable hero “Fonzie” jumps a shark on water skis in a pathetic attempt to keep the audience’s attention. I wonder how if Firefox jumped the shark when its parent company Mozilla decided to put Firefox on a hyper-accelerated release schedule last summer. Today, five releases later, Firefox keeps falling farther behind Google’s Chrome in popularity, it’s not very stable, and it can’t keep up with Chrome in speed.
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Public Services/Government
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The United States and India jointly launched a new Web portal to distribute an open source software applications to help governments manage and release their data to the public, according to an announcement on March 30.
The “Open Government Platform” website will make available code, tools and processes to government agencies and to developers, analysts, media, academia and the public to make government data more transparent and useful, officials said in the news releases.
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Openness/Sharing
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Posted in Europe, Google, Microsoft, Open XML, Standard at 7:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: An update on what Microsoft is doing in the UK and what it is trying to do to HTTP
IN ORDER to delay the inevitable, Microsoft has been fighting against industry standards.
Here in the UK, Microsoft corrupted the BSI (resulting in a lawsuit) and according to this new report, Microsoft is now trying to override government policies:
Microsoft has been trying to persuade the British government to break its promise to back a single document format, Computer Weekly has learned.
If Microsoft’s lobbying succeeds it will require the Cabinet Office to erase yet another crucial element of its flagship ICT Strategy, giving the software giant trump cards over the standard that set the terms of competition for its competitors.
Microsoft advised the UK Cabinet Office to appoint two official document standards, one of which should be its own Microsoft Office Open XML format. The other, Microsoft said in private lobbying, should be the one government officials have favoured and has been widely assumed to be the one sure thing in the coalition government’s technology policy: the Open Document Format.
The government’s ICT strategy made a single, open document format the primary objective of its open standards policy when it was published last year.
“The first wave of compulsory open standards will determine, through open consultation, the relevant open standard for all government documents,” it said.
Though Cabinet Office since retracted its open standards policy after lobbying from Microsoft on another issue, putting it out to public consultation, it has given no sign that its promised official document standard may also be up for grabs.
This is yet another example of Microsoft’s OOXML abuses in the public sector. On the Web too, based on reports like this one, Microsoft is trying to deviate from the standard and the summary at Slashdot says:
MrSeb writes “HTTP, the protocol that underpins almost every inch of the world wide web, is about to make the jump from version 1.1 to 2.0 after some 13 years of stagnation. For a long time it looked like Google’s experimental SPDY protocol would be the only viable option for the Internet Engineering Task Force to ratify as HTTP 2.0, but now out of left field comes a competing proposal from Microsoft. Lumbered with the truly awful name of HTTP Speed+Mobility, or HTTP S+M for short, Microsoft’s vision of HTTP 2.0 is mostly very similar to SPDY, but with additional features that cater toward apps and mobile devices. ‘The HTTP Speed+Mobility proposal starts from both the Google SPDY protocol and the work the industry has done around WebSockets,’ says Jean Paoli from the Microsoft Interoperability team. Basically, the S+M proposal looks like it’s less brute-force than SPDY: Where server push, encryption, and compression are all built into SPDY, Microsoft, citing low-powered devices and metered connections, wants them to be optional extensions. Judging by the speed at which the internet (and the internet of things) is developing, I think MS’s extensible, flexible solution has its merits.”
Microsoft is using Google’s behaviour as an excuse for its own. Nobody benefits from this. Knowing Microsoft’s history, its control of so-called ‘standards’ leads to disasters. The same cannot be said about Google. █
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Posted in Patents, Tivoization at 7:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Despite elimination of file system patents, the road remains long in the struggle for software freedom
THE FFII’S mailing lists started debating the news about Microsoft’s FAT patents. “You know the malaria thing,” said their president, quoting Richard Stallman as saying that “fighting patents one by one will never eliminate the danger of software patents, any more than swatting mosquitos will eliminate malaria.”
One subscriber asked: “It is the same patent that was recognized by German Court?”
“Yes,” replied another person, “it is 352 patent.”
We wrote about the ruling in Germany before.
Shane McGlaun notes that:
I’m betting this is really good news for smartphone makers. Open-source poster boy Linus Torvalds stepped up and helped stop a Microsoft patent from being used to choke licensing fees out of other companies. The patent Microsoft owns is being used to force Google Android and Linux handset users to pay licensing fees.
This is indeed, based on what the OIN's CEO told me, what Microsoft often uses to tax Linux and Android. Torvalds’ fight against the FAT patent (he thinks the patent fight is a sign of Microsoft's business dying) is definitely big news and one that other pro-Linux sites are addressing:
There is a Microsoft patent #352 which deals with “storing filenames with lots of characters in old filesystems such as the Windows FAT (File Allocation Table) filesystem that are designed to use very short filenames. Mobile phone makers use this type of technology so that their devices interoperate with other operating systems, including Windows,” reports Wired. You can read more about the patent here.
This whole development helps show that Torvalds takes a stand against patents, even though he tolerates and even “likes’ Tivoization. We ought to remember that TiVo is bad not just for this practice but also for patent aggression. As one Microsoft booster puts it:
TiVo today accused Motorola and Time Warner Cable, a Motorola Customer, of violating patents covering the company’s digital video recorder technology.
Let’s hope that Torvalds will decide to do about Tivoization what he already does about software patents. Both are detrimental to users of software, which is just about everyone in the twenty-first century. █
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Posted in Apple, Oracle at 7:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this” –Steve Jobs
“Steve Jobs is my best friend, and I love him dearly” –Larry Ellison
Jobs image licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (version 1.2 or any later versions); Ellison patch By Thomas Hawk
Summary: Several new articles of interest about the lawsuit over Android
THE case of Oracle versus Google proceeds without settling. As one article from ZDNet puts it:
Oracle reportedly refused the offer on the basis that it was too low. The company had previously been claiming infringement across seven different patents, but was told by Judge William Alsup to slim down the claims.
If a settlement cannot be reached, the trial is scheduled to begin on 16 April.
Oracle declined to provide comment in response to a ZDNet UK request. Google had not responded at the time of writing.
Pogson says that Oracle’s position is worse than he thought, having followed this legal battle through well-researched articles from Groklaw. The H concurs with ZDNet:
After Magistrate Judge Paul S. Grewal had ordered Oracle and Google to hold another round of talks before the start of their trial, Google has now offered settlement terms that were promptly rejected by Oracle. The company is suing Google for allegedly violating some of its Java-related patents and copyrights on the Java API in the Dalvik virtual machine that is part of Android.
Google had offered Oracle 0.5% of Android revenues until the end of 2012 – at which point Oracle’s patent RE38104 expires – and going forward 0.015% of revenues until April of 2018 (based on patent 6,061,520). This deal would have been subject to the fact that Oracle could actually prove violations of these two patents. Oracle, however, turned the offer down as too low.
The latest from Groklaw says this:
The parties have responded to the Court’s request for supplemental briefs on certain copyright issues. The Google brief addresses the issue of whether Apache Harmony, and its incorporated APIs, are subject to a field-of-use restriction imposed by Sun. (831 [PDF; Text]) Oracle’s brief addresses the applicability of Baker v. Selden. (833 [PDF; Text])
Google asserts that Sun’s field-of-use restriction only arose if you licensed the Java technology development kit (TDK) to assure compatibility between your version of Java and the standard version produced by Sun, and if you took that license and assured compatibility, you were then licensed to use Sun’s Java trademark to reference your compatible version. The Apache Foundation was never willing to license the TDK under those conditions, never did so, and refrained from calling or referencing Harmony as Java. As a consequence, Harmony has never been subject to the TDK field-of-use restrictions, and Sun never attempted to enforce those restrictions against Apache. Assuming the API implementations used by Google are those found in Apache, and given that Google does not refer to Android as Java or Java-compatible, this would appear to be a compelling argument.
Oracle, a GNU/Linux user, has oddly enough been trashing its reputation with this case. Who benefits? Apple. █
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Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Google at 6:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A glimpse at Apple defects and market trends
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03.30.12
Posted in News Roundup at 5:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The current impact on the budget for the LiMux project amounts to a total of €11.7 million,” (US$15.6 million) Ude wrote in a reply to questions asked by Marian Offman of the Christian Socialist Union on March 19. The questions were asked because the party was concerned about a failed migration from Windows to Linux in Vienna.
The city of Munich started the LiMux project in 2004 and began migrating from Windows NT to a fully open source desktop infrastructure in 2006.
The CSU does not have to be worried that the Vienna scenario is going to happen in Munich, Ude assured the city council. If the city had maintained the Windows infrastructure as it was in 2005, the associated costs would have amounted to €11.8 million. However, since then the number of computers increased significantly, and Munich would have spent an additional €1.65 million on new software alone, Ude said.
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Kernel Space
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It seems to be a bad time to be a Linux website. After a September 2011 breach on kernel.org and several other Linux Foundation web sites, it appears that community site Linux.org has been down for quite a while as well.
The reason for Linux.org’s removal is not completely known, though it does not seem to be the result of an attack, but rather a planned renovation of the popular site. The renovation plans are not outlined publicly, nor is any timeline, but signs of life are indicating that Linux.org is about to come back to life eventually.
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Graphics Stack
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Here are some updated benchmarks of the AMD Radeon HD 7950 “Southern Islands” graphics card under Linux with the proprietary Catalyst driver.
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The DRM render-nodes work has been revived. This DRM branch originally started out when working on support for enabling two X.Org Servers to run off of a single graphics card.
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Applications
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The long-awaited and much anticipated 2.8 release of GIMP is right around the corner! Wait, I know, you’ve heard this before. You were expecting it at the end of 2010, and then in 2011, and so on… Well, fear not because it’s really coming in less than 45 days! Want proof? Nothing could be more clear than this infographic.
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Proprietary
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Update: I’ve now been able to attain independent confirmation with Valve (here). This isn’t an April Fools’ Joke or anything else. They’re in need of more Linux folks; will try to get more information to share after the first of the month, since many Phoronix Forums users remain unconvinced about any Valve Linux interests.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)/Qt
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From the mailing list message describing these iOS-porting problems, “As this is a bit of a show-stopper as far as I’m concerned (as a widget-only version of Qt5 doesn’t add any value over a widget and QML version of Qt4.8), I’m not seeing any point in doing a Qt5 port to iOS if V8 is a hard requirement (unless the above issues can be resolved somehow)…There’s no platform plugin yet either, so no way to even test V8 on iOS AFAIK. If anyone knows a way to test V8 without GUI, Declarative or OpenGL, then that may be a starting point at least, because IMHO there’s no point in starting a platform plugin until this issue is resolved.”
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Red Hat Family
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Open source software company Red Hat Inc., believes that companies like VMware Inc., and Microsoft Corp., are skewing the definition of open cloud by claiming that their virtualization products are open when in fact they are closed.
Speaking at a round table conference in London this week, Scott Crenshaw, head of Red Hat’s Cloud Business Unit, said that several virtualization vendors have started to claim they are open as a marketing gimmick.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Time for a personal confession: I hate using Windows. I think Android and Linux go together like peas and carrots, or whatever that famous movie said. Because Android is so Linux-based, with similar file structures and terminal commands, it is worth any Android enthusiast’s time to learn some basic Linux tools. One of the most commonly used Linux distributions is Ubuntu; it’s extremely user-friendly, and you might actually be surprised how easy doing work involving ADB on your phone can become once you invest a brief amount of time in Ubuntu. The biggest complaint I usually hear regarding ADB is that it’s an enormous pain to get it installed and set up properly, and then there are those dreaded driver issues. One RootzWiki developer and script writer, Tahl, has written a script for use in Ubuntu that can make your life a lot easier.
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The ambitious Raspberry Pi is in troubled waters again. After recovering from the manufacturing hiccup when the factory soldered in non-magnetic jacks. Now, it is facing a new challenge. The distributors of Raspberry Pi, both RS Components and element14/Premier Farnell have refused to distribute the Raspberry Pi until it has received the CE mark.
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So far, everyone scrambling to get their hands on the much sought after Raspberry Pi seem to be hoping to use it as a media player. The cheap Linux computer is capable of decoding 1080p video, and its low profile makes it ideal for the living room. Clearly, everyone needs to think a little bigger. One enterprising user has managed to port a ZX Spectrum emulator to the computer for some retrotastic gaming.
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Phones
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Android
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A report from the Guardian that Google only generated $543 million in revenue from Android is based on bad information, says a source close to Google.
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Android/Linux is a global product made from the Linux kernel globally and Android developed by Google. It mostly runs on ARM (UK) but is invading the x86 space as well. Retail shelves around the world usually display Android/Linux devices prominently and in many regions, consumers and businesses can buy GNU/Linux PCs sometimes locally produced but also supplied by global OEMs.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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OSI is very pleased to welcome two important new members to the Affiliate scheme for community groups. They are CENATIC and Debian.
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The Kubatana initiated open source project, Freedom Fone, won an award for Innovation in Media technology at a ceremony organized by the Index on Censorship. The award category recognized Kubatana for innovation and original use of new technology to circumvent censorship and foster debate, argument or dissent. The category is supported by popular web giant, Google.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has launched an online game that runs completely inside a web browser. Which means, the game doesn’t use any plugins to run in your web browser as it is fully developed using HTML 5 and JavaScript.
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SaaS
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Today, the Obama Administration is announcing the “Big Data Research and Development Initiative.” By improving our ability to extract knowledge and insights from large and complex collections of digital data, the initiative promises to help accelerate the pace of discovery in science and engineering, strengthen our national security, and transform teaching and learning.
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Education
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Sakai CLE, a learning management system, is open source software. This makes Sakai different from its competitors because it is engineered by a community of developers, rather than being developed solely by The Sakai Foundation.
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FSF Events
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Public Services/Government
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“Data belongs to all of us. Sooner we realise as government… better it is for all of us because then government and citizen will collaborate with each other. This project tells us what data can be shared and can be put in public domain,” Telecom and IT Minister Kapil Sibal said while launching the Open Government Platform (OGPL).
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Openness/Sharing
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The team behind the device began taking advance orders this week, and the first Ninja Blocks and sensor packs started shipping from home nation Australia this morning to folk who backed the endeavour on Kickstarter.
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Open Data
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Azavea’s OpenDataPhilly.org open source code has popped up in an open data catalog at Open San Diego, which launched in beta last week.
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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Karlsruhe, 28 March 2012 – 1&1, GMX and WEB.DE receive the German Document Freedom Award for the use of Open Standards. The prize is awarded by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure e.V. (FFII). 1&1 is awarded for automatically adding XMPP for all customers of their mail services. The Document Freedom Award is awarded annually on the occasion of Document Freedom Day – the international day for Open Standards. Last years winners include tagesschau.de, Deutschland Radio, and the German Foreign Office.
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The other day when I was trying out Haiku, I had a sudden brain wave. How many operating systems – old or otherwise can I really name? And how many of these have I actually used? To tell you honestly, I could name only a few including the ones I have used. Of course, I lumped all Linux distributions as one entity.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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EIA Washington recently published data revisions to global oil production, going back at least twenty years. Here, I update annual average oil production for Non-OPEC, which used to account for 60% of total global supply but has had trouble sustaining increases–even in a high-priced oil environment. As of 2011, Non-OPEC supply fell to 57% of total global share, the difference being made up of course by OPEC.
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Finance
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The unemployment rate in the United States fell from 9.1 percent in the summer of 2011 to 8.3 percent in February. This decline, the largest six-month drop in the unemployment rate since 1984, has surprised many economic forecasters. The decline is even more surprising because recent real GDP growth appears to have been around trend at best, whereas in early 1984, growth was more than 7 percent. Our next six posts in Liberty Street Economics will discuss prospects for the U.S. labor market given this surprisingly quick decline in the unemployment rate. In this opening post, we outline some of the themes examined in this series and provide a brief summary of our conclusions. But first we develop a simple framework to place the unemployment rate in context with the rest of the labor market.
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In an earlier article, EU’s selective Lessons from Greece, we saw that EU Parliament’s investigation of the financial crisis (CRIS), and the hearing Lessons from Greece (ECON/7/02578), lacked the resolve to address the Greece/Goldman secret loan that was allegedly improper and exacerbated Greece’s ills.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Federal authorities are investigating two Wisconsin nonprofits associated with Wisconsin political veteran Mark Block, former campaign manager for presidential candidate Herman Cain and former director of the state chapter of the Koch-founded-and-funded Americans for Prosperity. The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) filed a letter with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) requesting such an investigation last November.
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The poster child for the government adoption of Linux, the City of Munich, is reporting that it has saved more than a third of its IT budget in making the move.
According to Golem magazine, which we get for the advanced pottery projects, the city experienced the minimum disruption in shifting to things more open saucy.
The city said that it saved 4 million euro in licensing costs.
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For the past five years, Peter Jansen, a Canadian scientist whose PhD is in neural computation and cognitive modelling, has been developing a series of open source hardware “tricorders” — handheld sensor packages running GNU/Linux that can be used by everyday people to make and record observations about the world around them. There are several versions of the tricorder, some with sensors attached (atmospheric, electromagnetic, spatial), others that are “blank,” with places to mount your own sensors. The latest version, the Mark IV, is still in development, and is intended to be mass-produced at low cost.
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Desktop
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The Raspberry Pi folks have been getting a lot of attention for their $35 PC with an ARM-based processor and support for some open source software. But as the cost of computer components continues to drop, the Raspberry Pi is hardly the only inexpensive PC capable of running Linux.
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Kernel Space
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Ubuntu 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin” can boot faster… sometimes. If you are not lucky, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS can boot more than twice as slow as Ubuntu 10.04, the previous LTS release. Here are boot performance results of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS running on six distinct notebooks and comparing the Bootchart results upon clean installations of Ubuntu Linux going back as far as six years from the days of the Ubuntu 6.06 LTS “Dapper Drake” release.
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Graphics Stack
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Shinpei Kato, the developer that last year at XDC2011 Chicago presented TimeGraph as an open-source GPU Linux command scheduler and PathScale’s GPGPU run-time, has something new to share. Shinpei’s latest project is Gdev, which comes down to being an open-source CUDA implementation that’s competitive to NVIDIA’s proprietary stack.
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Applications
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Looking for a tablet that can serve as an eReader and possibly more while not wanting to support the corporate giants in the business such as Apple, Samsung or Nokia? Then MakePlayLive might have the solution for you.
The company has started to take orders for its 7-inch form factor Vivaldi tablet, one of the first tablets that is available using an open source operating system rather than iOS, Android or any of the other operating systems currently on the market.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) soared up 16.19% to $59.69.
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Red Hat Inc. RHT-N is red hot. The software maker’s shares were up 19 per cent Thursday, hitting a 12-year high, after an earnings report that highlighted how much Red Hat is benefiting from a shift in the way big companies meet their technological needs.
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It’s not that it’s sour grapes or anything… for me, the sense that Red Hat would make this milestone was a bit inevitable, and I never really saw any real chance that they would fail to make this goal. Seriously, it would have taken a disaster to stop Red Hat’s strong growth.
While I can see the value of celebrating milestones like these, I really wonder if this whole notion of basking in the reflected glory of Red hat as proof that an open source based company can Make It Big is a good idea.
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Red Hat has been a public company since 1999, but according to its CEO the company still has a lot of opportunities left to capture. Red Hat reported its fiscal 2012 earnings late Wednesday, passing the $1 billion mark in revenues for the first time.
Red Hat is the first pure play open source and Linux vendor to achieve the $1 billion milestone. For the year, Red Hat’s revenues were reported at $1.13 billion for a 25 percent year-over-year gain. GAAP Net Income for the full year was reported at $146.6 million or $0.75 per diluted share, which is a dramatic gain over the $107.3 million or $0.55 per diluted share reported for fiscal 2011.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Everyone always talks about making their computer faster and faster, but what about if you wanted to make it slower? It’s not as easy as you might think. Using the standard assortment of compatible components means that there is a point where your computer can’t really get any slower, because the old parts just won’t work with the software. For example, you can’t load Windows 8 CP on that 486 you keep in the deepest, darkest corner of the basement. While that might be true, there are ways to work around it if you are really intent on building yourself the worst computer ever.
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Flavours and Variants
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I wrote a few weeks ago about the approaching Update Pack 4 for Linux Mint Debian Edition. According to a new Mint Blog post, the release is getting near, and there is lots of good news about it:
- Lots of updates, of course. Pretty much along the lines of what I wrote previously about this. Linux kernel 3.0.2, Firefox and Thunderbird 11.x, Opera 11.62, MATE 1.2, Cinnamon 1.4, X.org server 1.11.4, and much more.
- It sounds like they realized the same thing that I suspected and wrote about last time, that LMDE has become a sort of haven for Gnome 2 users. So there are a number of options for those users, including of course the latest MATE and Cinnamon releases. But on top of that, they are creating a special repository which will remain with Gnome 2. This is important – when Update Pack 4 is released, it will automatically install Gnome 3 (and remove Gnome 2). So if you want to stay with Gnome 2, make sure that you update your repository list as described in the blog post referenced above before installing Update Pack 4.
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Operating system vendor Enea AB (Stockholm, Sweden) announced at the DESIGN West exhibition that it is now supplying Enea Linux together with some complementary technologies.
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Phones
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Nokia CEO Stephen Elop had several tough decisions to make when he came on board and replaced former chief executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo. Of course the biggest shift for Elop’s Nokia came in mid-February last year when the company confirmed that the burning platform had scorched MeeGo, and Nokia planned to dump its Linux-based mobile operating system for Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS. Nokia still went on to launch the N9, and it was widely believed that the handset would be the only MeeGo device from Nokia to ever see the light of day. According to a recent report, however, the Finnish vendor may have new MeeGo devices works.
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Android
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With the news that the Linux kernel is going to see Android compatibility, there has been a growing sense that Android apps will be finding themselves at home on the Linux desktop.
In this article, I will dive into how Android compatibility might affect the desktop Linux and what we might see happening in the near future as well. While the news of Android compatibility might seem unimportant to the casual Linux user, it could potentially mean big opportunities for Android developers.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Internet Solutions is to expand its unified cloud messaging offering to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) with fewer than 1 000 users and to the public sector – using Zimbra, VMware’s next-generation, open source, Linux-based e-mail and calendar groupware platform.
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There is a false assumption that open source is less secure. Pingdom, which claims to be big fans of the Apache HTTP web server, recently published an interview with William A. Rowe Jr., who until just recently, was the Vice President of the HTTP Server Project.
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Adobe has announced the launch of version 2.0 of its Open Source Media Framework (OSMF), an open software framework for building media players and applications, based on the company’s closed source Flash platform. Kelash Kumar, Adobe Video Solutions Group Product Manager, says that the new version of OSMF includes a number of improvements aimed at helping developers “create even more engaging experiences” and notes that the developers have “reworked the inner workings of OSMF”.
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Equalis, the leading provider of open source numerical analysis, visualization and simulation solutions for engineers and scientists, today announced that it has appointed THiRA Solution and Consulting as its partner for Korea. THiRA is a specialist Korean manufacturing operations and optimization software and services provider. It is headed by industry veterans and with extensive experience working with major Korean manufacturing companies and education institutions. The Equalis solution is based on the world’s leading open source numerical computation platform, Scilab. Through this partnership, THiRA and Equalis will drive the adoption of the Scilab application by providing customers direct access to a local, dedicated team of application specialists to quickly solve challenges.
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Web Browsers
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SaaS
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Amazon Web Services has upgraded the Linux image that runs in its cloud to include newer versions of Tomcat, MySQL and Python, while at the same time allowing enterprises to stay on older versions, the company said in a blog post on Wednesday.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Business
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Openness/Sharing
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It’s true that, in practice, a pure democracy seems untenable. What the US, or America, political system is to give citizens the ability to vote for a local representative who will then represent their interests — indirect democracy.
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All around the world, open source robotics efforts are maturing, to the point where an open source robot surgeon might even save your life, and commercial companies are taking shape around open source robot platforms. In the past week, there have been some high-profile debates about whether open source robotics software platforms are necessarily better to pursue than proprietary ones. There is a high level of disagreement on the issue.
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Open Data
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Later this year, Raleigh residents could have access to city information and data in an accessible and usable format.
As part of its plan to become an “open-source” city, staff presented information Tuesday to the Council’s Technology Committee about plans to publish more data on the city’s website.
The first step will be to create a website where the information can live. The site will link from the city’s website and provide a “one-stop shop for how the public can engage in conversation,” according to Chief Technology Officer Jonathan Minter. He said that step will be complete in April.
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Open Hardware
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IP lawyer Andrew Katz has announced a new open source hardware licence. The Solderpad Hardware License is based on and compatible with the Apache 2.0 License and has the same goals, but is aimed specifically at hardware.
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Programming
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Downloadable at the Go website, the open source Go has been positioned as a general-purpose language suitable for uses ranging from application development to systems programming and offering such features as garbage collection and concurrency. It also is intended to be easy to program.
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Google Open Source Programs Office (OSPO) member Carol Smith has announced that the student application period for this year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC) event is now open. Students have until 19:00 UTC on Friday 6 April to submit their proposals to one of the 180 accepted 2012 mentoring organisations.
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Finance
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A review of 15 investment banks released on Thursday by Britain’s financial regulator showed that a majority lacked adequate anticorruption and bribery checks.
The Financial Services Authority said its review of the banks, including eight major global investment banks, had found that about half had an inadequate bribery risk assessment. The review, conducted during the second half of 2011, also found that managers were not sufficiently knowledgeable about anticorruption and bribery laws.
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A divided House approved a $3.6 trillion Republican budget on Thursday recasting Medicare and imposing sweeping cuts in domestic programs, capping a battle that gave both political parties a campaign-season stage to spotlight their warring deficit-cutting priorities.
But the partisan divisions over the measure, which is dead on arrival in the Democratic-led Senate, also underscores how tough it will be for lawmakers to achieve the cooperation needed to contend with a tsunami of tax and spending decisions that will engulf Congress right after this fall’s elections.
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An annual report from a regional Federal Reserve bank is typically a collection of banalities and clichés with some pictures of local worthies who serve on the board.
And so it is with this year’s annual report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, whose pages are graced by the smiling, stolid portraits of board members who run local companies like Whataburger Restaurants.
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When it comes to Wall Street, liberals and conservatives can agree on at least one thing: The government should avoid bailing out big banks on the taxpayers’ dime. Dodd-Frank was supposed to make that less likely to happen. But it’s uncertain whether that will actually happen, as the new regulation has no explicit prohibition on bailouts.
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With oil prices still in the stratosphere, the rumblings are getting louder that the world’s nations may release some of the crude they have saved up in their strategic reserves. On Thursday, French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said there was a “good chance” that the United States and Europe will tap those reserves.
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Spanish workers enraged by austerity-driven labor reforms to prevent the nation from becoming Europe’s next bailout victim slowed down the country’s economy in a general strike Thursday, closing factories and clashing with police as the new-center right government tried to convince investors the nation isn’t headed for a financial meltdown.
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After a four-month lobbying blitz led by firms including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) and Credit Suisse Group AG (CSGN), U.S. regulators and lawmakers are signaling they’re receptive to delaying and revising their plan to stop banks from making speculative trades on their own accounts.
Representative Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat and co-author of the 2010 law mandating the ban, urged regulators last week to simplify their first draft, while a bipartisan group of senators proposed pushing back its effective date.
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