04.17.10
Posted in Asia, Deals, GNU/Linux, Google, Kernel, Kyocera Mita, LG, Microsoft, Patents, Samsung at 6:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The IBM-led Linux Foundation allows Microsoft to make money from Linux by accepting another member which engages in this questionable practice
BASED on the news [1, 2, 3], LG Electronics has joined the Linux Foundation. This foundation typically accepts anyone regardless of policy on software patents and even an intricate relationship with the company that litigates against Linux. Here is the official announcement:
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that LG Electronics is its newest member. LG will participate in the Linux Foundation’s events and community development efforts.
A lot of people may no longer remember LG’s treasonous pact with Microsoft. LG is paying Microsoft for Linux (we call it “Ballnux” when that happens) and it is rather discouraging to see many announcements this month about Ballnux devices from LG [1, 2, 3]. Microsoft is making money from both Windows and Android now, thanks to LG. Here is another new phone that’s coming.
Details are starting to emerge (translated) about a forthcoming Android-based smart phone from South Korean handset maker LG. From the sounds of it, the LU2300 will fit well with some of the newer “super” phones like the Nexus One and Motorola Droid.
How does Google feel about being taxed by Microsoft (at a manufacturing level) for its operating system? See the Apple vs HTC case, recalling that Microsoft used it to justify extortion against large vendors for Free software that they use. This is what Microsoft does with LG and Samsung, which is also based in Korea. Samsung must be paying Microsoft for Linux boot-up on its new sub-notebooks.
It looks ordinary enough and has largely average performance, though the extra battery life is welcome and the alternative Linux boot-up is fun.
Samsung also has some new Android phones [1, 2, 3], which are being ‘taxed’ by Microsoft behind people’s backs.
If AT&T keeps in line with their recent Android strategy, the Galaxy S could be hampered by lock-downs and restrictions.
Yes, it hardly even feels like Free software. But where is the mainstream media, which is simply not covering the fact that Microsoft makes money from Android by extorting companies like LG, Samsung, and Kyocera? This is a major issue. █
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Posted in Apple, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, Servers, SLES/SLED, Windows at 5:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Why programming with Mono (or with MonoTouch) is a risky thing to do, especially now that Novell is up for sale and Apple blocks .NET/Mono
THE Mono and Moonlight advocacy from a Microsoft MVP who is also a vice president of Novell carries on with announcements like this one. The difference between Microsoft and Novell is not quite so clear anymore.
A few days ago we found this post in Planet OpenSUSE . It’s about running ASP.NET under SUSE. Is this Novell’s vision?
Previously, I wrote an entry on setting up mojoPortal (ASP.NET web app) on SUSE Linux Enterprise with the Mono extension (link). Using the exact same steps that I described, written & tested against my Lenovo Thinkpad (x86), I can achieve the same result on the IBM System z10 BC!
As we’ve pointed out for over a week now, Apple is blocking Novell’s MonoTouch [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] and there is not much Novell can do except beg or negotiate. [via]
We are reaching out to Apple for clarification on their intention, and believe there is plenty of room for course-correction prior to the final release of the 4.0 SDK.
From Miguel de Icaza’s blog:
We have just released MonoTouch 3.0.0 with support for iPhoneOS 4.0′s new APIs. To try it out, you need to have Apple’s iPhone 4.0 SDK installed otherwise MonoTouch 2.0 wont let you download the new toolkit (since it is Apple confidential at this point).
Novell carries on pretending that it is not being blocked by Apple. In the mean time, anyone who embraces MonoTouch may see his/her work going down the drain. As we pointed out last week when someone inquired, relying on Mono in general is a bad idea because Novell is up for sale and the future of Mono is therefore uncertain. Buy hey, with C# code there’s always Microsoft’s warm embrace to run to. That perhaps is part of the plan. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, OpenSUSE at 5:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The phrase “you’re the man!” leads to a little debate about sexism in SUSE
OpenSUSE’s Henne has published “Kick Ass!” It’s a humourous post that says “You’re the man!” It is a post that offended Katarina*, who wrote: “No, I’m not and neither is 2-3 % of openSUSE users (they’re women, for clarity sake). Sure, compared to the rest of openSUSErs, it’s small minority, but still there.
“If somebody from openSUSE board will again contemplate why is it there is so few female openSUSEs, off-putting statements like this could be one of the reasons.”
This is the “boys’ club” syndrome, which actually affects not just OpenSUSE, let alone computing. There’s this stereotype of programming being done by “geeks” who are sometimes “bearded”, socially-inapt (“dorks”/”nerds”) and are male. But anyway, as Henne points out, “you’re the man!” should not be taken too literally. It’s a sweeping statement like “you guys”, which can mean girls too. Perhaps these phrases remained for historical reasons. This issue is worth bringing up especially because Ubuntu became a victim of it too. Here again is a brand new example of the phrase being used.
Planet OpenSUSE has undergone some major changes [1, 2, 3, 4]. As Pascal put it:
I just switched Planet openSUSE over to the new design.
Now watch this response to the new look of Planet OpenSUSE:
So say with me, Who the man?
This probably ought not to offend any girl. In this case in particular the author refers to one guy. And finally, this subject is worth debating because: 1) it not only affects Free software (contrary to myth); 2) it is sometimes being exaggerated and leads to even more gender tension than there ever was to begin with. █
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* She previously complained about OpenSUSE shirts that focused on men’s sizes, and that’s a fair point.
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Posted in BSD, Deception, Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Office Suites, Oracle at 8:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Worm heart versus warm heart
“Open source is an intellectual-property destroyer [...] I can’t imagine something that could be worse than this for the software business and the intellectual-property business. I’m an American; I believe in the American way, I worry if the government encourages open source, and I don’t think we’ve done enough education of policymakers to understand the threat.”
–Jim Allchin, President of Platforms & Services Division at Microsoft
Summary: Embracing, extending, and extinguishing something is hardly a case of promotion, but gullible minds remain
THOSE who refuse to learn from the past will sooner or later be devoured by the company whose CEO said that “Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.” Microsoft is all about software patents, which are inherently incompatible with Free/open source software.
One can either laugh or cry at this new sight of a press release stating:
“Companies such as Microsoft, Oracle and IBM have been active in promoting the open source community,” said Jim Miller, IWS Chairman and CEO.
This is a bizarre statement. Microsoft is a very bad example, probably the worst example one could possibly give in this case. When Microsoft supports something that it labels “open source”, this is simply done in order to sell proprietary software. Writes someone from OpenOffice.org: “Except that I have been able to talk with Paula Bach (from Microsoft) who was one of the organizers of the FLOSS usability workshop” (to make OpenOffice.org use Microsoft’s ribbon? That’s what our source alleges anyway).
The Microsoft-boosting blog at IDG writes about Microsoft’s attempt at embracing, extending, and extinguishing Ruby, using IronRuby which we wrote about in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13]. Further down the post, the writer at least points out that:
Since 2007, Microsoft has done a stream of things that angered the open source community. We don’t need to list them all here, we’ll mention TomTom, and Amazon and leave it at that.
Microsoft engages in racketeering [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] against Free/open source projects whose existence it does not approve/tolerate. This makes Microsoft hardly a “promoter” of open source; rather, it’s a predatory exploiter. IronRuby too is a case of trying to consume Ruby using .NET. More in The H:
Microsoft’s Jimmy Schementi and the IronRuby team have announced the first stable version of IronRuby, the Ruby runtime for the .NET platform’s Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR. IronRuby 1.0 is available in two versions, one for .NET 4.0 and one for .NET 2.0 SP1; the former is more .NET feature complete and has faster start up, the latter is compatible with the Novell developed, .NET compatible Mono. IronRuby is generally Ruby 1.8.6 compatible and supports Rails 2.3.5.
Thanks to Mono, right? Novell is helping Microsoft as it embraces, extends, and extinguishes Free software as an independent platform/paradigm. IronRuby is about Microsoft and about .NET. It’s not same old Ruby or Ruby on Rails (RoR). It’s all about control for Microsoft, not about independence.
Apple seems to have realised all this, so it is blocking Novell’s MonoTouch [1, 2, 3, 4], which would have enabled Microsoft to gain more control over the hypePad (Apple has just delayed its international launch after failing to meet sales expectations in the US). Here is another new article on the subject:
Such wording appears to exclude not just Flash and Java runtimes from the iPhone platform, but also cross-compilers that translate foreign platforms into iPhone binaries. That nixes technology forthcoming in Adobe’s Flash CS5 and MonoTouch, a Novell tool that allows developers to compile iPhone apps from C# code.
This whole episode has led to sarcasm that daemonises Apple.
On closer inspection we noticed that iTunes didn’t even use the real windows API! They make their own scroll system and their own chrome COMPLETELY bypassing our fantastic Windows OS. So, we’ve decided enough is enough. We’ll allow iTunes back into Windows when they (Apple) make the following changes.
* Apple MUST write a specialised version of iTunes on Windows and use Windows compilers and Windows languages ONLY
* Apple MUST use native windows controllers such as our in built Windowing system and scroll objects.
* Apple MUST lose this RIDICULOUS attitude of writing code once and deploying to multiple operating systems. Just don’t go there.
It’s not much of a satire; Microsoft has a long history of abusing “third-party” developers who target Windows. The only popular platforms that have a good record when it comes to their attitude towards developers are probably BSD and GNU/Linux. █
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Posted in Europe, Law, Microsoft, Patents at 7:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Orion Health says “no” to software patents; Europe tries a trick; cartels on human life under attack by a patent lawyer who used to participate in them
New Zealand
WE have just created this new page about software patents in New Zealand. So far we have seen that Microsoft, its lobbyists, and primarily patent lawyers are the only proponents of software patents in this country. It continues to seem that way now that New Zealand’s largest application vendor (self-acclaimed status) says that “things are getting patented. You might see a logical enhancement to your software, but you can’t do it because someone else has a patent. It gets in the way of innovation.” Here is the opening of the article in full:
Orion Health backs moves to block patents
Negatives outweigh positives, says one of New Zealand’s biggest software developers
Ian McCrae, CEO of Orion Health, which claims to be New Zealand’s largest application vendor, supports a Commerce Select Committee proposal to rule out software patents in New Zealand.
Europe
Regarding software patents in Europe, there is also some news. The president of the FFII attended events and put recordings of the CEIPI conference in some webspace of his. “There are bits on software patents,” he stressed, but they require transcribing. He has also just published six reasons to oppose the United Patent Litigation System (UPLS), beginning with:
The United Patent Litigation System (UPLS) is an international treaty which aims to create an international patent court in Europe. Here are 6 reasons to oppose the United Patent Litigation System (UPLS).
1. Democracy: this treaty creates a court system that won’t be balanced by elected legislators, turning the European Parliament or National Parliaments legislators of second zone. The legislator won’t be elected, and won’t be able to counter decisions of such court. The UPLS creates an international patent court outside of the European Union legal system, to which the European Union would have to adhere. Furthermore, the European Parliament does not have the power to initiate new laws if it wants to counter decisions of such a court.
2. Fundamental rights: No appeal to a constitutional court will be possible, in case patent law conflicts w ith other laws, such as fundamental rights. The European Union does not have at the moment a Constitution to which European citizens and companies could appeal. An international patent court such as the one created by the UPLS won’t allow appeal to upper constitutional courts, nor national constitutional courts. The recent interventions of the US Supreme Court against decisions of specialized patent courts (CAFC), notably to confront patent law with other pieces of law, shows that fundamental rights should have a place in the judicial system, and that patent law does not operate in a vacuum.
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The United Patent Litigation System (UPLS) is a back door which would potentially permit patenting of algorithms. “EU Patent system taken away from European Court of Justice,” warns this new press release from the FFII (appended below in full).
Business Europe fiercely opposes a role for the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in patent law. During a conference in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, Thierry Sueur of Business Europe disclosed the United Patent Litigation System (UPLS) was aimed to keep the ECJ away from interpreting substantive patent law under the European Patent Convention (EPC), particularly for software patentability.
Genetics
Software patents are not the only problem with the patent system. Last week we wrote about gene patents [1, 2] and now we learn about a book on “Gene Cartels”. To quote part of a new book review:
It is a shame that there are so few existing copies of Luigi Palombi’s Gene Cartels. The initial press run for this remarkable book was apparently less than 1000, yet this is a book that every policy maker even remotely connected to issues of patents, economics, and biotech should read.
Palombi’s background is in law. He worked for years as a patent lawyer, writing and arguing for biotech patents. Over time, he grew disenchanted with the scope and reach of patents being granted on biotechnology “innovations”, especially as more and more patents began to be granted further “upstream”, over things that were not inventions, but rather discoveries. He is now a researcher with the Regulatory Institutions Network at the Australian National University. He devotes his research and activism to eliminating “gene patents” and his magnum opus on the legal case against gene patents works methodically through not just recent law on the subject but the history of patent law itself.
So even patent lawyers can realise that they are leeches that mostly harm the system which they purport to be defending. █
EU Patent system taken away from European Court of Justice
Business Europe fiercely opposes a role for the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in patent law. During a conference in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, Thierry Sueur of Business Europe disclosed the United Patent Litigation System (UPLS) was aimed to keep the ECJ away from interpreting substantive patent law under the European Patent Convention (EPC), particularly for software patentability.
“Instead of explicitly seeking to sanction the patentability of software, they are now seeking to create a central European patent court, which would establish and enforce patentability rules in their favor, without any possibility of correction by competing courts or democratically elected legislators.”
–Hartmut PilchHartmut Pilch analysed in 2007: “In July 2005, after several failed attempts to legalise software patents in Europe, the patent establishment changed its strategy. Instead of explicitly seeking to sanction the patentability of software, they are now seeking to create a central European patent court, which would establish and enforce patentability rules in their favor, without any possibility of correction by competing courts or democratically elected legislators.”
Benjamin Henrion, President of the FFII, comprehends their concerns: “While the US Supreme Court can review decisions of the Texas patent courts, this recourse would not be available to Europeans. A newly created UPLS patent court would have the final say over software patentability.”
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, IBM, Microsoft at 6:44 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
A stone statue of Hercules on the way to the Hercules tower
Summary: The ‘mini-SCO’ from Seattle continues with the same talking points and gains new lobbyists, found in the form of Microsoft enthusiasts with financial interests in Microsoft’s welfare
WE HAVE created a new page about TurboHercules vs IBM. This is where we’ll keep track of the case. LWN has great new coverage (as usual), whereas IDG, in its pro-Microsoft [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] tabloid-esque fashion is letting Microsoft investor and Microsoft booster Bill Snyder write about the case as though he is an independent observer.
“IDG has published his musings under at least two separate and somewhat inflammatory headlines (with a question mark of course).”Suffice to say, Snyder takes Microsoft’s side by accusing IBM of “giving up” on Open Source. How far fetched. We saw that statement before. IDG has published his musings under at least two separate and somewhat inflammatory headlines (with a question mark of course) [1, 2]. Rather than give attention to his misinformed piece, we wish to quote the commenter, who writes: “You got a few things wrong. (1)Groklaw was created by Pamela Jones, not “Penny Jackson”. (2)Florian Mueller is not an open source activist. He is a lobbyist who will say whatever someone pays him to say. (3)IBM’s letter was part of an exchange with TurboHercules. That particular letter was in response to a claim by Bowler that IBM had no IP rights in the area covered by the emulator. IBM was just saying “yes we do.” While I don’t particularly agree with IBM’s refusal to license z/os this way, they have every right to do so. If anyone can force someone to license something in a way they don’t want to we might as well not have any licenses or copyrights. The right to license things the way the creator wants is one of the pillars of open source and free software. If you don’t like my license you are free to create your own work, but you are not free to steal mine.”
It appears as though TurboHercules has sent (or has had) one of its PR bunnies to also leave a comment and promote Jay Maynard’s blog, which takes the form of ibmvshercules.com, constantly rants about Groklaw, links to Eric Raymond’s blog, and is very much reminiscent of Florian Müller’s new attack blog against IBM. What a bunch. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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EightVirtues.com Computers and ElementHTPC.com are proud to announce the EVTV! An innovative Home Theater PC designed to deliver a fully functional computing environment for your television alongside web media services like Hulu Desktop, Boxee TV, YouTube XL, and more.
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After posting the 15 Cool and Unique Linux Desktop Workspaces, I decided to officially launch today “The $100.00 (USD) Coolest Linux Workspace Contest”. This contest is open to everyone who can show and tell us something about his/her cool and unique Linux workstation setup.
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With the increasing adoption of Linux in wide variety of environments, supporting Linux has become vital for device vendors. Being able to support Linux opens a rapidly growing market to these device vendors. For developers,the skill set to develop and maintain Linux drivers presents a lucrative career option.
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The issue isn’t that users are losing the ability to install Linux on their machines, but whether a company can remove a feature after purchase. Owners must agree to what is called an “End User License Agreement” upon purchase, which explicitly states that revisions to the firmware are expected; if the agreement also says that Sony can engage in some nefarious bait-and-switch scheme, though, the agreement can be challenged in court.
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“In a few years, you may just find that what happened to Sun happens to Apple as open source and Linux and this huge collective of companies comes back with some pretty stunning stuff,” Zemlin said.
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Server
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Cray has never made a big deal about the custom Linux operating system it packages with its XT supercomputing line. In general, companies don’t like to tout proprietary OS environments since they tend to lock custom codes in and third-party ISV applications out. But the third generation Cray Linux Environment (CLE3) that the company announced on Wednesday is designed to make elite supercomputing an ISV-friendly experience.
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Troan: Linux has always been an integral part of rPath’s focus as a company. We provide automation solutions to help deploy and manage large numbers of Linux systems, and we’re being used on deployments in the range of 15 or 20,000 Linux servers. The success Linux has had in scale-out infrastructures has created new management costs that we work to reduce.
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Launched at the Parallels Summit in February, the CloudLinux operating system is designed to increase server density by “improving stability and reliability using isolation technology to create Lightweight Virtual Environments,” says CloudLinux.
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Since Linux’s widespread adoption, enterprises have relied on open source software to some degree within the IT operations.
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Google
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The product manager Anders Sandholm behind the scenes development of Chrome and Chrome 5 OS. Two programs pursuing the same goal: faster access to Web applications.
With 40 million users, Chrome is now the third most used browser in the world. A software that Google has managed to impose only a year and a half, thanks to a marketing campaign unprecedented for a browser. This is just the beginning.
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Perhaps one of the biggest drawbacks of the anticipated Google Chrome OS has been the absence of computer peripherals compatibility. The drivers contained in printer software etc. simply haven’t been announced compatible with Google’s operating system, requiring printer owners to use Linux or Windows to print pages from the internet. Yesterday though, Google announced a significant step to repair this weakness in their operating system, with the introduction of: Google Chrome Cloud Printing.
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Kernel Space
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According to the Foundation, the open source development veterans will also contribute to the MeeGo mobile Linux platform. Collabora Ltd. director and co-founder Philippe Kalaf said, “The Linux Foundation provides a home for important projects such as the MeeGo platform,” adding that, “We’re excited to join the Linux Foundation so that we can participate directly in upstream development of the MeeGo platform, attend online and face-to-face meetings and do what we can to invest in the project’s success.”
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Google
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The Linux Kernel Archive hasn’t been too pleased with the direction Android has taken. Claiming Android’s developers offer little cooperation and are slow to patch and update their code, they parted ways last year.
But all of that may change soon, as Google has extended the old proverbial olive branch at the Linux Collaboration Summit taking place today and tomorrow in San Francisco. Executive Director of the Linux Foundation Jim Zemlin and open source and public engineering manager for Google Chris DiBona both see hope for Android to rejoin the good graces of Linux.
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The guardians of the Linux Kernel Archive, repository for the source code for the Linux open source operating system, turned the code for Google’s Android phone out the door last year. The guardians felt they were getting too little cooperation from Google and too few patches from its engineers.
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Graphics Stack
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OpenGL was released just a month days ago. Now, Nvidia has released its latest OpenGL Linux driver with full support for OpenGl 4.0 on GeForce GTX 480/470. In addition to this, Nvidia has also release four new OpenGL extensions which provides additional capabilities to developers.
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Applications
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Adding Linux Support
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Well, I can now cross yet another application off my list of apps I’d miss if I switched to Linux. TeamViewer, my remote support application of choice, has arrived — bringing its zero-config screen sharing goodness to Linux.
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In addition, the 3ware cards now include embedded Linux driver support for Linux kernel 2.6.33 and higher, allowing support for many Linux distributions.
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Instructionals
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3. Open the Kitchen in your Ubuntu Virtual Machine we created in the Kitchen Setup procedure by typing ./menu in the Terminal window in Ubuntu. Leave it open.
4. All of this is done INSIDE THE UBUNTU VIRTUAL MACHINE (that includes when I say “save to your computer” anywhere in here, means save to you Ubuntu Virtual Machine)!
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Debian Family
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In conclusion, while technically this was a minor version update, SimplyMepis 8.5 represents a big change for developers and users. As the last official KDE 3 holdout moves on, it signals the true beginnings of a new era. I still get emails every once in a while from users complaining about being forced to migrate to KDE 4 and for that body of users, SimplyMepis 8.5 is a wonderful transitional release. It presents KDE 4 in an environment that remains very similar in appearance to its previous KDE 3 desktop. For SimplyMepis users, it still very much like home. For new users, it could be a gentle introduction to KDE 4.
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Ubuntu
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This morning I woke up to write an article for Ghacks. I was searching around for inspiration while I was updating my Ubuntu 10.4 beta install. Near the end of the update I thought “Let’s just check to see the status of the Ubuntu One Music Store”. So I fired up Rhythmbox and, to my surprise, there it was…all ready for me to start shopping!
So…with that said, in this article I am going to introduce you to the Ubuntu One Music Store and how it works. It’s time for the real fun to begin.
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6WINDGate, set up by tier one networking and telecom OEMs around the globe, is the commercial multicore packet processing software’s gold standard. The product enables OEMS to create multicore-based produced that attain the industry’s best integration, energy efficiency and cost-performance by offering a complete Linux networking software solution that brings a 7-10px packet processing performance improvement weighed against the standard Linux networking stacks.
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According to company president Tsutomu Sawada, eSOL for Android consists of eSOL Adaptor for Android(TM), which enables Android to run on non-Linux OSes, and eSOL Professional Services for Android(TM), which offers technical services for Android-based software development. As a result, he said, eSOL for Android is expected to bring Android to a much wider market beyond mobile phones.
eT-Kernel Adaptor for Android, the first in a series of eSOL Adaptor for Android products, permits replacement of a Linux kernel with the eSOL eT-Kernel OS, a high-performance, highly reliable POSIX- and TRON-conformant OS.
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Phones
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Linux is taking on the big boys of mobile technology, with most of the leading vendors using its systems.
US software firm Adobe and three other firms joined the wireless Linux group LiMo, underlining the growing role of the Linux computer operating system in cellphones.
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Nokia/Intel
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Nokia and Intel have demoed their upcoming MeeGo platform co-venture at the Intel Developer Forum 2010 in Beijing, showing not only how the platform is being developed for netbooks, TVs and smartphones, but how the system will be able to cooperate from device to device. In the demo video (below) an Intel spokesperson plays a video streaming to a netbook on a TV and a smartphone at the same time.
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MeeGo is a joint venture with Nokia and is built on their Moblin and Maemo mobile OSes. Unlike rival operating systems, MeeGo is intended to “support multiple hardware architectures across the broadest range of device segments, including pocketable mobile computers, netbooks, tablets, mediaphones, connected TVs and in-vehicle infotainment systems.”
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The open-source offspring of Intel’s Moblin and Nokia’s Maemo gets its first public outing running an an Atom netbook, as well as a smartphone and a TV set…
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MeeGo is a Linux-based operating system for portable devices. It’s the product of a partnership between Nokia and Intel which brings together Nokia’s Maemo and Intel’s Moblin environment. This operating system could power your smart phone and your netbook as well as other devices you might not consider like a vehicle or an embedded system.
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The news that Intel has got the Android mobile software stack from Google running on Atom-based smartphone designs as well as being important in its own right, could also be a sign of a break in the log-jam over Big Windows and ARM processors.
Maybe Intel has wrong-footed Microsoft with the move, or maybe Intel is responding to a Microsoft move that has not yet gone public. But what does Intel and Google Android have to do with Microsoft’s full Windows operating system and ARM, I hear you ask?
Well some observers have assumed that there was tacit understanding between Intel and Microsoft to the effect that Intel wouldn’t support the Microsoft-threatening Android software as long as Microsoft wouldn’t expand its support of the Intel-threatening ARM.
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The Nokia N900 is a powerful smartphone running the Linux based Maemo OS. Featuring a vivid 3.5 inch WVGA touchscreen display, the N900 also features a slide out QWERTY keyboard which aids messaging and web browsing.
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Opportunities for the open source Linux operating system in the mobile device market was a prominent theme of the keynote presentations at the Linux Collaboration Summit on Wednesday.
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Android
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I’ve read it’s down to something to do with android being Linux based, with application piracy also to blame. This aint the case for the HTC devices running windows mobile as they can save to external memory cards.
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Managers are quickly realizing the benefit that community-based development can have on their businesses. The real-time communication and transparency their developers are discovering in open source communities are exactly what internal development teams need in order to create in a more agile way and meet the increasing business demand for delivering higher-quality software with reduced development cycles.
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The open source movement has changed the course of modern software development. Certainly, Linux has been the most prominent example so far, but there is far more to come. Open source continues to infiltrate mainstream development at an ever faster pace. As that happens, the rules change too.
Open source Eclipse tools overturned the IDE business. Open source frameworks helped drive Ajax. Open source unit testers are now par for the course. In the form of Hibernate and Spring, open source has challenged the conventional application server stack. Open source has penetrated the mysterious world of BPM in the form of BPEL and various rules engines. Open source software is on the evaluation list for more and more messaging and enterprise service bus projects.
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It also is a tool now available to anyone, thanks to the new free, open source release of the software package — called HUBzero — underlying nanoHUB.org. The open source package became available Wednesday (April 14, 2010) on the HUBzero web site at http://hubzero.org/getstarted.
Developed at Purdue, HUBzero is the YouTube of simulation tools — sort of a Swiss Army Knife for deploying and accessing computational research codes, and visualizing and analyzing results, all through a familiar Web browser interface. Built-in social networking features akin to Facebook create communities of researchers and educators in science, engineering, medicine, almost any field or subject matter and facilitate online collaboration, distribution of research results, training and education.
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The Open Biometrics Initiative (OBI) is an open source project and forum managed by ImageWare Systems, but available for inclusion by anyone participating in the open source community.
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International
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Another new development is arriving by way of Brazil’s “Telecentro” program. Telecentros are public computer labs that use open source software and provide free Internet access.
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Open source software is playing a key role in the Telecentros. Ryan Bagueros, the owner and founder of NorthxSouth, a software development company that describes itself as a “network of open source developers from all over the Americas,” said Brazil and other Latin American governments are unenthusiastic about the high cost and security leaks of U.S.-made proprietary software. (Bagueros joined me on a panel at the annual meeting of Roots of Hope.) He noted that these Latin American countries are investing heavily in developing open source alternatives, and expanded via email about the value of open source software:
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Free Open Source Software (Foss) has reached appropriate levels of maturity in terms of quality and reach; Foss is also being adopted as a mainstream solution and also an alternative to proprietary solutions. The Malta Information Technology Agency (Mita) seeks to adopt cost-effective and non-disruptive OSS within government and is therefore seeking open participation, collaboration and transparency through the creation of a Government of Malta Open Source End User Group to become a major driving force behind the evolution of Open Source initiatives.
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Events
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Some of the nation’s leading software developers and entrepreneurs will be in Columbia today through Saturday for the Open Source Software Conference at the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center.
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SaaS
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A startup called Datameer is offering a simpler way for business analysts to use Hadoop, the open-source framework for large-scale data processing on clusters of commodity hardware.
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Databases
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Gear6, a provider of enhanced Memcached solutions, has announced enhancements to the Memcached distributed memory caching system to scale both SQL and NoSQL applications.
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Built on mostly open source software and commodity hardware, Digg is currently dropping its open source MySQL database in favor of Cassandra, a non-relational, “NoSQL” database that was developed by Facebook and handed over to the Apache Software Foundation. John Quinn, Digg VP of engineering, said the company is moving to Cassandra with a service layer on top built mostly in Python. The company also uses PHP and RabbitMQ.
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Oracle
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When it comes to Sun Microsystems’ technology, Oracle’s top partner priority is to promote Sun servers and storage. But if you listen closely to Oracle Channel Chief Judson Althoff, you’ll discover that he’s already contemplating channel partner strategies for Sun’s MySQL, Java and OpenOffice offerings.
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Although my feelings haven’t changed, based on the information currently available, questions regarding OpenSolaris are starting to generate notable discussion.
[...]
Said differently, “The source is available, so be warned, Oracle.”
OpenSolaris community member Ben Rockwood wrote a measured response:
Here is where I want to be careful. Asking for autonomy at this juncture would be very foolish I think. If they grant it, they will essentially expect us to fork and re-establish the community without Sun/Oracle resources. That means the website goes, communication is severed, employees are instructed not to putback to the autonomous codebase, etc. I think it would go very very badly and we’d essentially help kill the community.
The size of the community at present is pretty small and relatively inactive. Support for Nexenta, Belenix, etc, is orders of magnitude less so. These projects are productive and active, but the numbers are tiny compared to the official community. Add it all up and I think we have little reason to think that an autonomous community would really have any real support unless we get a sudden and massive influx of contributing developers. So it is, imho, a non-starter.
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Business
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SunGard Higher Education and its customers have launched a Community Source Initiative — a vendor-supported community source forum dedicated to higher education Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems.
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Government
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“As part of the review, we will seek to identify additional savings which can be used to pay down the deficit further, including better government IT procurement, investigating the potential of different approaches, such as cloud computing and open-source software,” Nick Clegg, Liberal Democrats leader, wrote in the manifesto.
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Large ICT projects would be opened to smaller suppliers by breaking them up into smaller components. All government tender documents worth more than £10,000 would appear on the Supply2Gov website, a far lower level than that currently used by the Official Journal of the European Union, and a “level playing field” would be created for open source ICT in government procurement.
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Digital Britain minister Stephen Timms has said in an interview with V3.co.uk that smaller firms should be given more opportunities to compete for public sector contracts, but he was vague when discussing the government’s open-source commitments.
We asked Timms how Labour’s strategy compares with statements made in the Tory manifesto, which promises to open up the £200bn government procurement market to small and open-source companies, partly by breaking up large ICT projects into smaller components.
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Applications
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Open Source Video Conferencing software are pretty new. Except the grand father Ekiga (former GnomeMeeting), the most promising Open Source Video Conferencing solutions have less than 2 years on the
market.DimDim and Vmukti are the gorilla of the field, with aggressive features list.Open Source Video Conferencing software are pretty new. Except the grand father Openmeetings (former GnomeMeeting), the most promising Open Source Video Conferencing solutions have less than 2 years on the market.DimDim and Vmukti are the gorilla of the field, with aggressive features list.
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The developers of VLC are already working on the next iteration of the video player which could be beneficial in future comparisons as the developers plan to add gpu acceleration to the media player.
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For some people, the Internet is the killer app — literally. From newspapers and the yellow pages to personal privacy and personal contact, the Net has been accused of murdering, eviscerating, ruining, and obliterating more things than the Amazing Hulk. Some claims are more true than others, but the Net certainly has claimed its share of scalps.
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Finance
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Goldman let Mr. Paulson select mortgage bonds that he wanted to bet against — the ones he believed were most likely to lose value — and packaged those bonds into Abacus 2007-AC1, according to the S.E.C. complaint. Goldman then sold the Abacus deal to investors like foreign banks, pension funds, insurance companies and other hedge funds.
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The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged investment banking titan Goldman Sachs with civil fraud over a pre-packaged mortgage instrument they say was designed to fail.
Goldman Sachs created the derivative — called Abacus 2007-AC1 — in response to a request from a hedge fund manager who predicted that the housing market would collapse and wanted to bet against it. The trader, John Paulson, later earned $3.7 billion for his wager. Goldman’s practices cost investors $1 billion, according to the filing.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Downloading has become an election issue. Elsewhere in Europe ever stricter measures are being taken to protect copyright and security on the internet. Which way will digital freedom go in the Netherlands after the parliamentary elections on 9 June?
“Prepare yourselves in The Hague! The Pirates are about to enter.” This is the Twitter warning with which the Dutch Pirates Party presented itself. ‘Captain’ Salim Allioui hopes to win 14 seats in June. The phenomenon began in Sweden four years ago, where the Pirate Party has the third largest membership in the country.
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In January we filed a Freedom of Information Request with the Department of Justice asking for all documents dealing with internet blocking by ISPs. Last month the response came back – refusing access to almost every internal document!
Sometimes, however, it can be informative to know what is being concealed. When answering FOI requests, departments prepare a schedule of records listing each document they hold by data and title.
SourceCode Season 1: Episode 6 (2004)
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