10.20.12
Posted in News Roundup at 9:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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This could be the best PC on the planet for some people:
* It’s highly mobile and, folded, protects its screen,
* It will last 6h on a small battery, 2 cells,
* keyboard, 2gB RAM, 16gB SSD, Wifi, and HDMI out
* It has a dual-core Xynos ARM CPU clocked at 1.7gHz
* It’s Chrome OS, not that other OS, and
* If you do everything on the web, it works for you.
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Google has announced the launch of a new Chromebook laptop running Chrome OS, the company’s minimalist Linux-based operating system built around the Chrome web browser. Unlike previous Chromebooks, which were all powered by x86 Intel Atom or Celeron CPUs, the new laptop uses an ARM-based processor, specifically the dual-core Samsung Exynos 5250 system-on-a-chip (SoC) running at 1.7GHz.
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Server
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Notice that the rate of growth of GNU/Linux is nearly double that of that other OS and at that rate,
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Ben Skeggs of Red Hat pushed a number of new DRM commits into the Nouveau driver development repository today, including new support for Z compression.
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The Unigine Engine has been revised with a number of new features and impressive capabilities. One of several new features is “real-time global illumination with spherical harmonics”, which may be a mouthful but is for delivering even more beautiful graphics.
About the real-time global illumination with spherical harmonics, Unigine Corp says, “A new, real-time global illumination based on precomputed spherical harmonics allows to render high-detail diffuse lighting with interreflections and angle-dependent specular highlights. It is fully interactive: soft environment light illuminates both static geometry in the scene and dynamic objects moving around it…The stunning lightmap-like quality is achieved by using automatically generated LightProb…Global illumination is available across all APIs and is well scalable performance-wise… As you can see, GI makes a huge difference: it brings a truly photorealistic visual quality to a scene.”
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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The YellowDog (Yum) package manager for Fedora will soon have an successor marked as the next Generation Yum using hawkey/libsolv (maintain by SUSE) for backend.
DNF a Yum fork, promises better performance, easier bindings to other languages other than Python (Yum) and a clear package manager API. This will benefit PackageKit and therefore Gnome Software, at least in a Fedora installation.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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Linux Mint team has released a bug fix of Cinnamon desktop and Nemo file browser. This is a maintenance release, which means no new features have been added, but a variety of bigs have been fixed which will make the desktop experience even smoother. Some of the major bugs that have been fixed are:
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Ubuntu GNOME Remix, a Linux distribution which aims to become an official Ubuntu flavour, uses GNOME Shell as the default “shell” and tries to provide a “mostly pure GNOME desktop experience built from the Ubuntu repositories”.
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If you are a longtime Windows user, then switching to Linux is quite a challenging task. Not that Linux is difficult or something, it’s just that many users get perplexed as to which distribution to choose. This is actually where the problem begins for most users. They go to various sites and forums, ask for questions and different people recommend various distributions.
That said, it’s quite obvious that most of the time new users go for Ubuntu, the most popular Linux distribution at the moment. They choose it either because one of their friends recommended it to them or they heard something good about it from news, blogs, or forums. In both cases, it’s evident that Ubuntu has been, and will be the first choice for most of the new users.
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Ubuntu’s latest release and controversies have dominated the news this week, but it wasn’t the only distribution making announcements. Fedora 18 is running behind schedule, but developers are already looking ahead. The Mandriva foundation has a name and Mageia has officially changed its schedule.
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New Releases
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Leave it to Ubuntu/Canonical’s Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator for Life Mark Shuttleworth to completely ruin a perfectly good release day for Ubuntu 12.10 and its arguably superior derivatives like Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu and Edubuntu.
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No matter how you got this news, what I want to announce is the same: I want to stop the development and maintenance of Ubuntu Tweak. This means you will not be able to use “Apps” (Since it is a web service), I will not response for the bug report, the last commit of the code will be: Add cache support for Apps, only available in Ubuntu 12.10, so sad…
You may ask why I made this decision to stop the development of Ubuntu Tweak, I may write 10,000 words to describe how I start this project, how I feel happy from this project, how I feel bad from this project…But I just want to say: If making free software is not free any more, why still doing this?
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For those wondering about the performance of Ubuntu Linux 12.10 versus Microsoft Windows 7 when using the same system and the Catalyst graphics driver, here are new Phoronix benchmarks of an AMD Radeon HD 6870 graphics card when running a variety of OpenGL workloads from Ubuntu 12.10, Kubuntu 12.10 (the KDE desktop version of Ubuntu 12.10 to avoid the Unity desktop overhead), and Microsoft Windows 7 Professional x64.
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Canonical released Ubuntu Linux 12.10 yesterday, which brought tighter integration with Amazon in system search results, a move that has raised some criticism from the community. According to Canonical, Amazon integration in Dash is something users expect and the firm will integrate other online services in future Ubuntu releases.
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Ubuntu Linux 12.10 includes innovations such as document search capabilities that allow users to easily find documents whether they are stored on their computers or in the cloud.
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While the larger Ubuntu community was busy downloading, installing and enjoying the latest edition of Ubuntu yesterday, a post by Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth ruffled some feathers.
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Popular Ubuntu configuration utility Ubuntu Tweak has officially ended support for its long-running project today. Ubuntu Tweak has been a mainstay application on newbie machines since the days of Dapper Drake, and between then and now has gain a lot of respect within the community regardless of being merely a front-end for already trivial tasks.
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In the wake of the release of Ubuntu 12.10, Mark Shuttleworth has announced a new style of development for Ubuntu 13.04, the next major version of the Linux distribution. Referring to “a few items with high ‘tada!’ value that would be great candidates for folk who want to work on something that will get attention when unveiled,” Shuttleworth said that there will be a new process where the new features will not be talked about “until we think they are ready to celebrate”. Before that time the company says it will only engage with “contributing community members that have established credibility”.
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The Ubuntu Manual Team has announced that the Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal version of the Ubuntu Manual, “Getting Started with Ubuntu 12.10″PDF has been published. The 143 page manual provides an introduction to Ubuntu covering topics such as how to try out a LiveCD, how to install the distribution, using the Ubuntu desktop, working with Ubuntu, managing hardware and peripherals, managing software and updates, and offering pointers for further research and reading.
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In announcing Ubuntu 13.04 is the Raring Ringtail, Mark Shuttleworth encouraged attendees going to the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Copenhagen to bring along their Nexuis 7 tablet. At that point it could be deduced they would be bringing Ubuntu Linux to this popular Google tablet, but now it’s confirmed.
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You’re listening to your tunes or watching a video on your Android phone and you’re not too happy with the tinny, low audio. So you wander over to your new Ubuntu Boombero Speaker and place your device on top and suddenly Mr Bombastic is filling the room with big base vibes. Well now it’s a reality.
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Flavours and Variants
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Yesterday marked the release of Ubuntu 12.10, the latest version of the most popular Linux distribution. What’s interesting now is that GNOME and Ubuntu are back together after 18 months.
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The first stable release of Ubuntu Gnome Remix has arrived with a lot of promises for long-time Gnome users. Ever since Ubuntu switched to Unity, it became harder for Gnome users to get the pure Gnome 3.x experience on top of their preferred operating system. Quite a lot of users moved to other distributions and we saw the rise of derivatives like Linux Mint which seems to have become the favorite distro of seasoned GNU/Linux journalists like Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols.
As a long time Gnome+Ubuntu user, I was personally excited about this release. However, before I picked this review, I reminded myself that ‘this is the first release of Ubuntu Gnome Remix’ so treat it as the first release. At time tend to start judging things in their beta or alpha stages, which is simply unfair. So, before we bring UGR under the microscope keep in mind that this is the very first release and Gnome 3.x is still going through heavy development so my criticism of this release should be taken too seriously.
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The first generation all-in-one Internet TV, Boxee tried to do everything you could do with TV and the Internet…and it wasn’t very good at doing anything. Oh sure, if you put in the sweat equity you could do great things with it. At day’s end, though, the Boxee was a device for hardcore Internet TV geeks. The new Boxee, which will be available in some U.S. markets on November 1st for $99 and a monthly $14.99 service fee, also tries to do a lot, but it’s meant for Joe TV-Watcher instead of Joe Techie.
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The differentiator for the Raspberry Pi mini computer is price. It’s not the most powerful single-board computer around but it’s not trying to be. The platform-makers’ big idea was to make a device that kids could learn to code on — meaning it needed to be powerful enough to do cool stuff like play BlueRay-quality video, but cheap enough that kids wouldn’t have to share it with the rest of the family. And at $35 for the current model B — and $25 for the forthcoming model A (which has less memory, fewer USB ports and no Ethernet) — it’s already got a disruptive price-tag.
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Phones
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Android
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Sony has been generously providing ICS updates to its Xperia line up of phones, even the low range and older ones. To make things merrier for Xperia owners, Sony has shared some details regarding upgrade plans for Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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With the Amazon Kindle Fire HD and Google Nexus already firmly entrenched, and Apple potentially lining up to lay waste to all competitors, it’s certainly a curious time to be launching the Iconia Tab A110. Acer can point out that unlike the Kindle Fire HD and also Barnes & Noble’s Nook HD, the A110 will run Jelly Bean, the latest version of Android. It also comes with an Nvidia Tegra 3 processor and a microSD card slot, which you might need because the A110 only includes 8GB of on-board storage.
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Like other Linux distributions, we take a range of upstream components and assemble them together into an integrated system. Throughout this integration work our community actively participates in a range of different areas – development, testing, bug-fixing, translations, documentation, and more.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has been steadily moving forward with its Boot to Gecko, Firefox OS and smartphone initiatives, and now the company’s long awaited app store is available in a preview edition for Android developers. A Mozilla blog post on The Future of Firefox includes instructions for how Android users can get the preview edition of Firefox Marketplace through Mozilla’s Aurora channel. This app store will play a key role in Mozilla’s serious efforts to become entrenched in the world of smartphones and open mobile operating systems, even though it is Android-focused for the moment.
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Today, a powerful new Popcorn Maker demo makes its debut on TED.com, showcasing Popcorn’s potential to change the way the world tells stories on the web.
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SaaS
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It never fails: stand by the computer service desk in any retail store and the stories you overhear make the repair desk the technology equivalent of the local tavern.
If something’s gone wrong with someone else’s computer, you’re bound to hear about it. And, oftentimes, you’ll hear how supposedly protective measures to help safeguard your computing life have been circumvented or defeated.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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At the LibreOffice Conference, currently taking place in Berlin, The Document Foundation has released version 3.5.7 of its open source LibreOffice productivity suite, fixing more than 50 bugs. The seventh maintenance update to the 3.5.x branch corrects problems that caused the application to crash, including one that occurred when pasting data into more than one sheet in the Calc spreadsheet program. A number of bugs related to RTF and SmartArt import, ODF and DOC export, and program crashes when using tables were also fixed.
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Healthcare
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The nonprofit Open Source Electronic Health Record Agent (OSEHRA) organization recently held its first annual Open Source EHR Summit & Workshop. Seong K. Mun, PhD, President and CEO of OSEHRA, talked about goals for the workshop and OSEHRA in general before it began. This was first time that the OSEHRA community to meet and develop their skills with open source health IT training and educational workshops.
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Business
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Open source services provider Sirius Corporation has provided a combination of OpenSource and proprietary software for Ysgol Maesydderwen school, near Swansea.
Funded by Powys County Council, the Welsh school received installation of a new infrastructure, new desktops and laptops for both pupils and staff and 100 iPads for class activities and projects.
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Funding
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Quadcopters are all the rage right now for amateur drone projects and hobby flying, and it’s no wonder; a quadcopter has outstanding speed, maneuverability, and payload capacity. They are as fun to fly as they are useful, but unfortunately they tend to be something else: prohibitively expensive.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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As those who have read my previous entries know, I quit my job of three years as senior software engineer at Creative Commons to pursue the free software project I’ve been running, MediaGoblin. I’d explain a bit further what MediaGoblin is but actually there’s no reason to: we’re in the middle of running a fundraising campaign, and we put a video together that explains everything wonderfully already. So what you really ought to do is click through to:
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Public Services/Government
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It’s another of controversial tenders tracked down by Foundation of Free and Open Source Software experts in the scope of “Monitoring of public procurement for software and hardware in units of government and local administration and intervention in case of detecting irregularities”. This time their attention was brought by tender for “Equipment for Regional Centre for Transferring Modern Technologies in Mielec” issued by District Starosty. Announcement has been issued in Official Journal of the European Union – TED: 292946-2012. Estimated value of the tender is over 200 thousand €. Time limit for receipt of tenders is due on 22.10.2012. Documentation of this tender is available here: District Starosty in Mielec.
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Openness/Sharing
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Nevermind Apple’s maps misfire, the free, volunteer-made OpenStreetMap, may end up reigning supreme anyway, as companies increasingly choose it for map data over Google. But as the project grows, it’s becoming harder and harder for its members to agree on what direction to go in next. Part 1 in a 3-part series.
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Programming
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GitHub, a leading repository of open-source code, has been hit by two days of denial-of-service attacks.
The attacks, which shut the service down temporarily on Thursday, and which slowed it down today before things returned to normal, were an odd turn of events for a site that’s a favorite among coders, and an increasingly popular place to find programming talent.
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Health/Nutrition
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Copyrights
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The French seem to have an appetite for regulating the Internet, and for going after Google in particular. A new proposed law would force Google to make payments when French media show up in news searches; but Google has responded, in a letter to French ministers, that it “cannot accept” such a solution and would simply remove French media sites from its searches.
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10.19.12
Posted in News Roundup at 7:39 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Google is releasing it’s latest Chromebook next Monday for the savoury price of $249.
This time round it has an ARM chip instead of Intel (lower cost?) is powered by a Samsung Exynos 5 Dual Processor (making it the very first device to use ARM’s new Cortex-A15 architecture) and is filled to the brim with everything Google.
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Chromebooks are not for everybody, it’s important to make that clear. Folks who need certain programs may find being constrained to web apps in Chrome to be a liability. I work online in Chrome on every system I use so the Chromebook is tailored for my work routine.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Earlier this week I posted new Reiser4 file-system benchmarks that compared the non-mainline file-system against EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and ReiserFS. Continuing in the Linux file-system performance theme, in this article are more Btrfs benchmarks from that same system but when using the early Linux 3.7 development kernel and trying out different Btrfs mount/tuning options.
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Graphics Stack
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NVIDIA has issued a stable Linux graphics driver update in the 304.xx series to address outstanding bugs.
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Intel admits that it botched the early Haswell Linux support, which has been worked on publicly since March although the actual Haswell hardware won’t begin shipping until H1’2013. Intel has had the support now within their DDX driver, Mesa, and Intel DRM driver, but the DRM driver is still being problematic.
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The X.Org Foundation has finally updated their Wiki page to reflect that they aren’t only about the X Window System.
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Two patches from Intel’s Ian Romanick for their open-source Mesa DRI driver will now enable S3TC extensions always plus floating-point textures. These two features previously were not enabled by default out of patent fears.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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In Basque (the primary language of Bilbao), the letter K is used to change verb case and also to make plurals of some words. For the hard C sound, Basque uses the letter K.
Lots of Basque words include K: Kaixo (hello), teKnologiaK (technologies), Kalitatea (quality), BerriKuntza (innovation), asKatasuna (freedom), Kultura (culture), Kidetasuna (fellowship), Komunitatea (community), esKuluze (generous), etorKizuna (future), eusKera (Basque language). The letter K is at home in Euskal Herria (Basque Country).
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New Releases
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Last month, during my experiments with Linux distros, I mentioned that on Snowlinux 3 Crystal, touchpad doesn’t work. Even I couldn’t get the touchpad settings on my Asus Eee-PC 1101HA. Possibly, the developers too noted the same and last week, the updated Snowlinux 3.1 with touchpad support got released. I did a live-boot on my Asus K54C laptop with 2.2 GHz Intel 2nd Gen Ci3 processor and 2 GB DDR3 RAM and later installed on the same.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat will equip students of Singapore Management University with skills and certification through the Red Hat Academy programme.
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Red Hat will equip students of Singapore Management University with skills and certification through the Red Hat Academy programme.
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Red Hat has released the third beta of its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 platform, expected to be generally available later this year.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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There’s much to admire in Canonical’s Quantal Quetzal, which continues to refine and improve the Unity desktop, but you’d be forgiven if you missed the positives thanks to the late injection of a little Bezos since Ubuntu 12.04.
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The big day has arrived — in the Ubuntu world, at least. The latest version of the operating system, 12.10, has officially hit the virtual shelves. In case you missed, here’s what you can look forward to — or plan to complain about, as the case may be — in the new release.
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The dash to Copenhagen combined with a dash across the Atlantic has me righteously ramfeezled, but the roisterous reception we got at the OpenStack summit (congrats, stackers, on a respectable razzmatazz of rugible cloud enthusiasm) made it worthwhile. A quick shout out to the team behind the Juju gooooey, that puts a whole new face on cloud agility – rousing stuff.
Nevertheless, it’s way past time to root our next rhythmic release in some appropriate adjective.
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In a twist that is sure to raise eyebrows and cause no end of neckbeard scratching, Canonical founder and Ubuntu’s de facto spiritual leader, Mark Shuttleworth, has announced that key parts of Ubuntu 13.04 will be developed in secret.
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Ubuntu 12.04 and Unity interface has been criticized for poor gaming performance as many users were finding higher frame rate in 3D games while using other desktop environments like Gnome Shell, Unity2D and Classic Gnome.
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Ubuntu 12.10 has arrived; the first major version of Ubuntu since the release of the well-received Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. At the start of the release cycle, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth defined quality as the watchword for Ubuntu 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal”. Fabian Scherschel looks at the new desktop release to see how well his definition stood up to six months of development.
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The move, which he writes about on his blog, will sure to create a firestorm in the Ubuntu community, which has in the past rained criticism on Unity, the interface Canonical developed for Ubuntu two years ago. You can read the full story about Unity here. Ubuntu is built on the Debian Linux distribution.
The news comes on the day that Canonical introduced Ubuntu 12.10, with a number of cool enhancements that were all developed in the open.
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First up, Google unveiled a $250 chromebook running Arm, rather than the X86 that most of them have been so far. The 11.6″ device will have 6.5 hours of battery life, weigh 2.5 lbs, have a 100Gb hard drive plug Google Drive integration, and an HDMI port. What more could you want from a $250 device?
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Canonical has released both the server and desktop editions of 12.10 Ubuntu, which offers a glimpse of how this Linux distribution will evolve in the next few years.
Ubuntu 12.10 “effectively sets out the future direction of how Ubuntu will develop over the next two years,” said Steve George, who is Canonical’s vice president for communications and products. “The Internet has become an intrinsic part of user’s experience so we’ve been focusing on integrating online and offline services.”
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Canonical is bowed but undaunted after the bashing it took from Penguins over its recent integration of Amazon searches with its Linux desktop.
The company has promised further integration between web and desktop as it today released Ubuntu 12.10.
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Dear Softpedians and Ubuntu fanatics all over the world, we are proud to announce (yes, we are the first again) today, October 18th, that the final and stable release of Ubuntu 12.10 is here, available on mirrors worldwide (see the download links at the end of the article).
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Canonical has just released the new version of Ubuntu 12.10, also known as Quantal Quetzal. If you decide to download the new version from Ubuntu’s official webpage, you will notice a rather provocative message. Above the download button, a slogan appears urging the users to install Ubuntu 12.10 instead of Microsoft Windows 8, not because of Ubuntu’s superiority but just to avoid the drama of Metro UI. In a matter of fact, it says “Avoid the pain of Windows 8. The all-new Ubuntu 12.10 is out now“.
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After yesterday publishing the first extensive benchmark results for the Calxeda EnergyCore ECX-1000 ARM Servers in the form of the 1.1GHz and 1.4GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 nodes running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and Ubuntu 12.10, here are more benchmarks to share today from the “5-Watt ARM Server” on Linux.
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I am not going to talk about whether that message was OK or not as Mark Shuttleworth clarified “That banner was totally un-Ubuntu and was changed as soon as someone senior saw it. Apologies.”
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Some features of Ubuntu 13.04 won’t be openly developed by the Ubuntu Linux community but rather in a more covert approach by Canonical and select Ubuntu developers. Mark Shuttleworth calls these new features “some sexy 13.04 surprises” but he was sure to reinforce that the overall Ubuntu Linux development approach isn’t changing.
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Flavours and Variants
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Xubuntu, the Xfce Ubuntu flavor, has been released today along with the other Ubuntu flavours. It’s a great alternative for those who do not want to use GNOME Shell or Unity and prefer a more traditional layout.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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Then what about the Kyocera Rise, priced at $149 and a service plan from Public Mobile starting at $35 per month with unlimited talk, text, data and Siren Music. (It allows users to download music without per-song costs or limits on data usage and is available on the go with no computers, no syncing or extra devices required.)
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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We’ve known it was coming for months, but the Acer Iconia Tab A110 finally has a due date and a pricetag. It’s going on sale October 30th, and it’ll only cost you $230. That puts it squarely in Nexus 7 territory.
But what does that extra $30 get you? Well, more. And less.
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Nagging questions shadow the impending launch of Windows 8, threatening to scuttle Microsoft’s plans to reinvent itself for the age of mobility. Will desktop users graciously accept the redesigned Modern interface? Will the Windows Store have enough apps to entice would-be Surface RT buyers? Can Windows 8 breathe life into sagging PC sales?
Microsoft’s future success depends on its ability to make serious, quantifiable, no-nonsense headway in the mobile market, but it’s not the only company with a massive stake in the ultimate fate of Windows 8. The new operating system will also have a major impact on Google. Just look at the list of Microsoft’s Windows 8 tablet and hybrid partners—Samsung, Asus, Toshiba, and the rest. They all make Android tablets, too.
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(Unfortunately the video I recorded on the day was too dark and difficult to hear, so I figured there was no point in uploading it. Sorry about that!)
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The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced that Apache Open Office has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the Project’s community and products have been well-governed under the ASF’s meritocratic process and principles.
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The Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA), which was officially launched in June, has signed an agreementPDF with the Open Source Initiative (OSI) to settle a dispute over its Open Source Hardware (OSHW) logo. Following concerns that the logo OSHWA was using to denote the open hardware nature of devices was too similar to the OSI’s trademark, both organisations worked out an agreement that clarifies the difference between the logos and the areas they are applied in.
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In the past, we’ve had people pull code right out of our master branch. There were a few problems with this technique for deployment; pulling out of the active branch of development meant that a podmin had no idea as to how stable the latest code for a pod could be. Secondly, we think that setting up a pod should be easier, as people shouldn’t have to mess around with a terminal and lots of config files to enjoy the benefits of a decentralized social web.
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Events
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SaaS
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Databases
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10gen, the company set up by the creators of the open source NoSQL database MongoDB, has been on a roll recently, creating business partnerships with numerous companies, making it a hot commercial proposition without creating any apparent friction with its open source community. So what has brought MongoDB to the fore?
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Today the Apache Software Foundation announced that Apache OpenOffice ™ is a top level project, and I really wish to congratulate with the Apache OpenOffice Community to have achieved this important milestone.
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What’s a conference without a release announcement? The Document Foundation didn’t find out today because it announced the release of LibreOffice 3.5.7. 3.5.7 is “the seventh and possibly last version of the free office suite’s 3.5 family, which solves additional bugs and regressions, and offers stability improvements over LibreOffice 3.5.6.”
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Oracle chief operating officer Mark Hurd says the company really is enthusiastic about open source, big Data and the cloud
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Oracle customers are facing a big data problem, and Hadoop is the answer – reluctant as Oracle is to admit it.
Speaking at the Oracle product and strategy update in London yesterday, Oracle president Mark Hurd said that the company’s customers are growing their data up to 40% a year, putting tremendous pressure on IT budgets.
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There was a time when OpenOffice was where I spent a good chunk of my work day. Those days are now in the past, as I’ve moved on and so has every single major Linux distribution. We’ve all moved to a faster more agile open source office suite. We have moved to LibreOffice.
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Education
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While Thomas Edison is often lauded as the most prolific American inventor, his mother, Nancy Edison, and how she fostered an open education and an open mind in her son is often overlooked. When a headmaster labelled Edison as being ‘addled,’ slow, and unteachable, his mother disagreed and decided to withdraw her son from school and teach him at home. She knew her son was a bright, curious, creative child who thought divergently yet was often disorganized, disruptive, and hyperactive; today he would most likely be diagnosed as having ADHD.
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Healthcare
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Business
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I’ve been updating the computational analytics platform on my Wintel notebook the last few days. I’d fallen behind several versions on each of the main tools and decided to get them all back in synch at once. The good news for hackers like me is that there are so many freely-available, open source analytics products to choose from. The bad news is that it takes a focused effort to stay up to date on the latest largesse.
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Funding
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International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (Icfoss) at Technopark will now support pre-incubation programmes.
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BSD
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The developers at the NetBSD Project have released version 6.0 of NetBSD, a major update to their BSD-based operating system that includes a wide range of upgrades and enhancements. Among the notable changes are scalability improvements on multi-core systems, support for thread-local storage (TLS) and a new Logical Volume Manager (LVM).
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Developers from ARM Holdings have published their initial ARMv8 patch for the GNU Compiler Collection for the 32-bit “AArch32″ compiler port.
ARM developers had already been working on their 64-bit ARM / AArch64 compiler port, which was officially approved just days ago. The latest ARM open-source compiler patch is ARMv8 in the AArch32 port with basic functionality.
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Project Releases
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Version 2.0.4 of the VLC Media Player has been released by the VideoLAN project. While the minor version number change may not reflect it, the new release is described as a major update by its developers as it fixes numerous regressions and introduces support for the IETF’s Opus lossy audio compression format. It also brings several other improvements and platform-specific changes.
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Public Services/Government
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France’s Ministry for Economy and Finance recently awarded a support contract for open source, worth between 15 to 19 million euro. The four-year contract was won by a consortium comprising 25 companies, including many small and medium sized enterprises. “It is the biggest such contract so far”, announces the company heading the consortium, French open source IT service provider, Linagora.
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The United Kingdom’s government unveiled its new central services and information website, GOV.UK, this week Tuesday. The site is completely built on open source, saving the government some 70 million GBP (about 86 million euro) compared to the previous site, according to Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office. He expects the site to achieve further savings “as more departments and agencies move to on the platform”.
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Programming
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I recently sat down with Chris DiBona to talk about the 15th anniversary of Slashdot. In addition to discussing the joys of heading an email campaign against spamming politicians, and the perils of throwing a co-worker’s phone into a bucket, even if you think that bucket is empty, we talked about the growth of Google Summer of Code. Below you’ll find his story of how a conversation about trying to get kids to be more active with computers in the summer has led to the release of 55 million lines of code.
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Steve Jobs? Steve Jobs didn’t do jack. If you want to know who is responsible for the modern world you have to look at the people working at Bell Labs in the 1970s and 1980s. The people who created UNIX. It was from that invention that we have the modern world. UNIX led to Linux which led to Android. UNIX led to the BSD family of operating systems which led to Apple OSX. UNIX led to the C programming language in which most system-level software today is written. Ever wonder why URLs use forward slashes? It’s because UNIX was instrumental in the creation of the Internet.
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Security
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Finance
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On Monday morning, Grand Central Publishing will release Why I Left Goldman Sachs: A Wall Street Story, a memoir penned by former Goldman employee Greg Smith, based on his op-ed for the New York Times entitled, “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs.” When Smith’s piece came out last March, few if any senior executives inside the bank were pleased, in part because it came as a total shock. No one at Goldman had known Smith was planning to have his resignation letter printed in the paper. No one had known he had issues with the firm’s supposedly new and singular focus on making money at all costs. No one, at least at the top, even knew who Greg was. Obviously all this left the bank at a competitive disadvantage in terms of fighting back and for the time being, Smith appeared to be handing Goldman its ass. Getting cocky, even. Perhaps thinking to himself, “When all of this is over, I could be named the new CEO of Goldman Sachs.” As anyone who has ever won a bronze medal in ping-pong at the Maccabiah Games will tell you, however, winners are determined by best of threes. And that anyone going to to the table with Goldman Sachs should be prepared for things to get ugly.
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In a new lawsuit against the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), big energy extractors are pushing for carte blanche in their interactions with foreign governments, making it harder to track whether their deals are padding the coffers of dictators, warlords, or crony capitalists. The United States Chamber of Commerce, American Petroleum Institute, the Independent Petroleum Association of America, and the National Foreign Trade Council filed a lawsuit on October 10, 2012 against a new SEC rule, which requires U.S. oil, mining and gas companies to formally disclose payments made to foreign governments as part of their annual SEC reporting.
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Censorship
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One of the great things about online news sites is that they are so easy to set up: you don’t need a printing press or huge numbers of journalists — you just start posting interesting stories to the Web and you are away.
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Privacy
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Lately, Mike Janke has been getting what he calls the “hairy eyeball” from international government agencies. The 44-year-old former Navy SEAL commando, together with two of the world’s most renowned cryptographers, was always bound to ruffle some high-level feathers with his new project—a surveillance-resistant communications platform that makes complex encryption so simple your grandma can use it.
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Copyrights
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Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom (shown above in his Twitter image) is out of jail and ready to start his next venture—but from the looks of things it’s not much different than his last.
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The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a copyright case later this month that could have serious unintended consequences for the nation’s art museums: If a decision by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals is upheld, every museum in the U.S. that exhibits modern art created overseas could potentially be infringing copyright.
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Posted in Microsoft, Vista 8, Windows at 5:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Hard winter for the monopolist
Summary: At Microsoft, revenue is down 33% for the client operating system and no encouraging change over the horizon
Some wonder where Microsoft is heading, but financial reality bites hard and the company is unable to keep hiding the losses as a 24% slump gets reported company-wide.
Prices are being raised, but inflation too leaves Windows devalued and unwanted:
Even if they counted the deferred revenue for filling the supply-chain with “8″ they would still be off 10% so they are doing worse than the unit shipments of PCs, expected because their share is falling. Retailers are really hoping they can sell “8″… There was no back-to-school bump. The whole operation was off 8%.
Apologists of course would scream, “but Windows 8!!” Well, no… it won’t do the trick. It gets negative reviews already and it’s not even out yet, so the
AstroTurf is clearly not working.
Now is the time for UEFI to kick in and for Microsoft boosters like Kurt Mackie to promote it. They need to discourage Android or GNU/Linux installs. Microsoft is lying about its tablets in a desperate attempt to get pre-orders, but buyers don’t want it; neither home users nor corporations. As Murdoch’s press put it:
Microsoft Corp. has made big changes to its familiar Windows operating system to stay relevant amid booming sales of mobile devices such as Apple Inc.’s iPad. But some corporate customers worry Microsoft has made its workplace workhorse too unfamiliar.
They basically end their inertia with application incompatibility and unfamiliar GUIs. It is easy to see why developers — not just users — drift away from Windows:
Being more like Apple isn’t always a good thing. That’s apparent in the growing developer resistance to the new “Windows Store” in Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8 operating system.
Increasingly, developers and users move to Linux. Game makers bring Steam to GNU/Linux, Android has become the best selling operating system, and the list goes on. This week marks the huge public decline of Windows. █
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Posted in Apple, Europe, GNU/Linux, Google, Patents at 5:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Apple does not find favourable rulings outside the United States and moreover it must apologise at its own expense for libel against Android devices
THE USPTO has been getting docile support from Obama and from the US Congress because the Establishment is there to defend the interests of plutocrats, pushing their competition out of the market, especially foreign competition. Here is fear of doing something which may upset those plutocrats:
Three out of four panelists at an Oct. 16 Congressional briefing agreed that the smartphone patent wars show that “the patent system is broken,” but none was optimistic that Congress can or will do anything to fix it.
For a Congress that entertained patent system constituencies’ battles for many years before passing the America Invents Act, there was little appetite, it seemed, for continuing the fight–especially considering the AIA has not even been fully implemented–on the highly controversial question of whether software patents should be banned.
So, despite sweeping public consent for an overhaul, nothing is being done, still. The problem is political in nature, in the sense that “institutional corruption,” as Professor Lessig calls it, prevents progress. Large corporations always get their way. In the courtroom, however, it’s not always so, especially for US corporations in other countries (that too is political). There are exceptions of course, even from hypocrites like Bezos who pushed for software patents in Europe and now wants change. To quote the original report about his latest realisation:
Government action could be needed to bring an end to a litany of patent lawsuits in the consumer technology market, such as those between Apple and Samsung, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has told Metro.
Another exception to the rule (US companies winning cases in the US) is Apple, but as more evidence comes to the surface we often find that politics, nationalism and trial misconduct cannot outweigh the truth. “UK Appellate Court Confirms Pan-European Win for Samsung on iPad Community Design Charges,” say the lawyers as Apple loses in the UK again [1, 2, 3]. Apple wants secrecy around its claims because these are so darn ridiculous. “In post-trial battles with Samsung, Apple fights to keep documents sealed,” says Ars Technica. Here is a noteworthy quote:
Apple has lost is appeal in a UK court against Samsung’s Galaxy Tab. The court of appeals has upheld its previous judgment that Samsung did not infringe on any Apple design. The judge had said that ‘Samsung products were not as cool as Apple’.
The previous decision had come in July. Colin Birss (sitting as a Judge of the High Court, UK) had said that Galaxy Tab does not infringe upon the design of Apple’s iPad. The judge said that Galaxy Tab is not identical to the iPad even if there are some similarities but that doesn’t account to design infringement. The judge actually criticized Samsung’s design by stating that they “do not have the same understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design.”
In other words, Android has more features. The MSBBC covered this as well. Apple will need to apologise to the public, to apologise to Samsung, and adding insult to injury, Apple will need to pay for it. It’s like a public walk of shame after military surrender. Jobs’ troops will hang their big heads in shame. █
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Posted in GPL, Patents, Red Hat at 4:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The company which bullies Red Hat using software patents makes itself an enemy of GNU, too
The case of Twin Peaks was covered in several legal sites before. Groklaw says that GPL has become central in this case, and one might say in a very familiar way. To quote Webbink, writing about his former employer: “In the following paragraph (33) Twin Peaks accepts the Court’s observation about open source software, but Twin Peaks then denies any of the remaining allegations of paragraph 33 of the counterclaims. Effectively, Twin Peaks thus denies that in Jacobsen the Federal Circuit held open source licenses enforceable under copyright law. Really?
“In paragraph 38 et. seq. Twin Peaks denies sufficient information to admit that the GPLv2 places restrictions on distribution. Twin Peaks denies sufficient information to admit the very provisions of the GPLv2 that Red Hat cites. In paragraph 45 Twin Peaks denies that the program in question (util-linux and the “mount” program) are licensed under GPLv2.
“The bottom line is that Twin Peaks is going to attempt what others have attempted, i.e., to prove the GPL is either inapplicable or unenforceable. The problem Twin Peaks will face is the fact that not one, but two, separate Courts of Appeal, one of which is the Federal Circuit, have already addressed this issue as well as the issue of injunctive relief.”
Cases that challenge the GPL are important for all sorts of reasons (we covered them before). They strike at the core of copyleft. So far, the GPL has always won. █
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Posted in Patents at 4:25 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Microsoft, for example, uses Nokia to feed patent trolls with Android-hostile software patents
Summary: An international crackdown on patent trolling overlooks the correlations which can address the problem more easily
A little while back we saw an effort by a couple of American politicians to stop patent trolls [1, 2], but trolls remain a big challenge because they too find loopholes, such as splitting loads and summoning proxies. Intellectual Ventures uses over one thousand such proxies and one legal site says:
This holding clarifies that two subsidiaries wholly owned by the same parent do not count as “commonly owned” for terminal disclaimer purposes. The decision underscores the importance of looking to the assignment history of the asserted patents and the relationships among the assignees in a patent family that are subject to terminal disclaimers when preparing a patent litigation defense.
In some cases, trolls are controlled or used by practising companies, e.g. MOSAID as utilised by Microsoft. Australia seems so concerned about the trolls epidemic that new laws are being considered these days.
“Most of the time — some estimated empirically — patent trolls file lawsuits with software patents.”In other news, the EFF welcomes a move that can help stop a troll’s favourite weapon: software patents. It writes about the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, noting that: “In a welcome move, the full Federal Circuit has agreed to revisit a troubling ruling in a case called CLS Bank v. Alice Corp. This case, along with the Ultramercial case, presents an important opportunity for the courts to insert some long-overdue sanity into the debate over what can and cannot be patented. In light of the Supreme Court’s ruling earlier this year in Mayo, we think the Federal Circuit has little choice but to throw out the dangerous patents in both CLS Bank and Ultramercial and make clear once and for all that ideas that are otherwise abstract cannot be patented simply because they are executed on the Internet or in a computer system.”
One way to impede patent trolling is to end software patents. Patent trolls are rare in Europe for a reason. Most of the time — some estimated empirically — patent trolls file lawsuits with software patents. █
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10.18.12
Posted in News Roundup at 7:13 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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A while back I sent a pack of spies into China but they were so distracted by touristy things that they forgot/neglected to report back on GNU/Linux on retail shelves in China.
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I don’t read Chinese but the pictures seem consistent with reports of stores selling GNU/Linux in China. I don’t believe the stories that these machines are intended for illegal copies of XP. That may have been the case a few years ago but there’s a whole new generation of users getting PCs now that have never used XP and for whom smart phones and tablets are OK.
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It seems safe to say that most FOSS fans are sick to death of hearing about both of them, of course, but recently the always-insightful team over at TuxRadar posed yet another interesting question. Specifically, “What can Linux really steal from Apple?” was the title of the latest Open Ballot poll posted on the thought-provoking site, and there’s no doubt it’s provoked a lot of thinking.
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Server
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For all the political discord over climate change, one thing everyone can probably agree on is that when you’re throwing computational resources at modeling weather, the more the merrier.
Think of the new computer that just came online at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center in Cheyenne, Wyoming as a kind of dream come true from a meteorological standpoint, then, because it represents a mammoth increase in raw crunch-prowess, dedicated to studying everything from hurricanes and tornadoes to geomagnetic storms, tsunamis, wildfires, air pollution and the location of water beneath the earth’s surface.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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The native of Pune, India, encountered Linux for the first time as an engineering student, running it as an occasional alternative to Windows. But he didn’t fully embrace it as an operating system until he began teaching microprocessors and operating systems as a graduate student and assistant professor at the Sandip Institute of Technology & Research Centre in Nashik, India.
Going straight into the educational sector after graduating from college meant Kute didn’t gain the real-world experience that comes from working in the industry, he said. Converting to Linux has helped him get hands on with research and development and greatly increased his understanding of computer systems.
“I got inspired by various Linux & Open source developers & users. As it follows my ideology that, `Windows of knowledge are wide and open!” said Kute, via email. “I am passionate about programming and especially, C Programming! Linux has given me everything that I wanted in programming. As Linux is (an) open source operating system, I can study everything about a computer that I want to know.”
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VMware developers continue to work on mainlining more of their Linux kernel code to support their virtualization platform in the name of improving the “out of the box” experience for Linux VM guests. The latest work has been on pushing forward VMCI and VSOCK for the mainline Linux kernel.
While the work hasn’t hit the Linux 3.7 kernel and is still undergoing review, VMware has been pushing VMCI, the Virtual Machine Communication Interface, and VSOCK, VMCI Sockets, as being worthy of mainline for Linux.
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While Intel is quick to work on enabling future hardware within their open-source graphics driver stack for Linux, the early support is often buggy and problematic on the early code before the hardware is released. Intel now intends to conceal this early hardware support — for Valley View and Haswell right now — behind a run-time variable for toggling the support.
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Graphics Stack
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With the NVIDIA 310.14 Beta driver introduced at the beginning of this week there are some OpenGL performance improvements in general plus an experimental threaded OpenGL implementation that can be easily enabled. In this article are benchmarks from the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 with this new Linux driver release.
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For those curious about the size of the X11 API in relation to Wayland, it’s about fifteen times bigger.
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Applications
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Conky is a free, light-weight system monitor for X, that displays any information on your desktop. There are many nice themes available for conky that can display clock, CPU usage, ram usage, swap, disk, net and more, Infinity is one of these themes built using lua and provide a great look to your desktop.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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FlightGear is one of the most amazing and most important open source projects in existence. With a huge community around it, and a group of talented aviation lovers to develop it, FlightGear is the greatest and most open way to travel our world!
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Last weekend from friday 12th till sunday 15th i attended the KDE PIM meeting in Berlin. I never had attended to any KDE meeting yet and i never went to a place that far away. I went there with a main focus on learning a lot about Akonadi, how it works and what it’s goal actually is. Obviously also to meet the people behind akonadi and just to socialize a bit with people that share a common interest: KDE.
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GNOME Desktop
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The more I think about it, GNOME’s renaming of applications with clear words describing their function is a good thing to do.
The file manager Nautilus is now called Files.
The web browser Epiphany is now called Web.
I believe that Totem will eventually be Movies (or something like that).
Sure it makes it hard to manage these applications when you don’t have them installed.
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New Releases
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Since the announcement that he has secured some major corporate sponsors for taking up the development of Slax again Tomas M has been hard at work. You can read about the ongoing updates on his blog if you want to follow how the next Slax is taking shape.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat are hosting a “Developer Day” at London South Bank University on the 1st of November. The day’s sessions cover various aspects of development using Red Hat supported technologies including developing to target multiple RHEL versions, using KVM for application virtualisation, and the OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).
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Fedora
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Aside from generally releasing late another de facto tradition for the Fedora Project has been unique codenames for each release. It looks like the Fedora 19 codename will continue in this manner.
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While Fedora 18 is still more than one month away and we don’t even know the Fedora 19 codename yet, one F19 feature is being talked about already. Fedora 19 might replace rsyslog with systemd’s journald as the default process for system logging.
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The Fedora Project have pushed back the Fedora 18 Beta by a week, which will carry over to the release date of the RC and Final version
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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As is true of Cisco, RedHat, Rackspace and many other companies, Canonical has been steadily marrying its cloud strategy to the open source OpenStack platform. In February of last year, we discussed how Canonical was deepening its relationship with OpenStack, and it has kept doing so. Recently, Canonical released the Cloud Archive for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Server, an online software repository from which administrators can download the latest versions of OpenStack, for use with the latest long-term support (LTS) release of Ubuntu. And now, at this week’s OpenStack Summit, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth announced the arrival of Ubuntu 12.10 with Folsom–the latest version of OpenStack.
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Unity is expanding everyday with its new sets of lenses. These lenses allow you to do everything and anything. One of the latest lenses in entertainment category is the Unity movie lens.
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On October 18th, Ubuntu 12.10, the latest and greatest version of this popular Linux distribution arrives. On the eve of its arrival, it’s looking pretty good, but it’s far from flawless.
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There’s an independently maintained “low-jitter” version of the Linux kernel targeting Ubuntu, which claims to be faster, but is that really the case?
In response to the recent Linux 3.7 + Mesa 9.1-devel Running On Ubuntu 12.10 article, a Phoronix reader was quick to promote his specially-configured kernel for Ubuntu.
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With Unity 2D having been dropped from Ubuntu 12.10, another consequence of this controversial decision is that the Ubuntu TV work must be ported to Unity (3D).
The early Ubuntu TV work was using Unity 2D as the basis for its interface, but now it must be ported to the standard Unity code-base with Compiz. While hopefully the performance won’t be too bad for Unity on Ubuntu TV, it’s a large undertaking.
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Canonical has released both the server and desktop editions of 12.10 Ubuntu, which offers a glimpse of how this Linux distribution will evolve in the next few years.
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Mark Shuttleworth, father of the popular Ubuntu operating system, proudly announced a few minutes ago, October 17th, the name and the goals for the next version of Ubuntu OS.
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The Ubuntu Manual team is proud to announce a new edition of the comprehensive Ubuntu Manual, this time for the Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) operating system.
Just in time for the Ubuntu 12.10 release on October 18th, the Ubuntu Manual is now ready and available for download right now, right here (see the download link at the end of the article).
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Ubuntu 12.10 contains more controversial changes than expected. If you can live with or work around those changes, it remains a powerful and useful desktop Linux operating system.
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After running with other alliterative codenames such as Oneiric Ocelot, Precise Pangolin and Quantal Quetzal, Canonical has announced the latest in its line of fauna-inspired Ubuntu releases — Raring Ringtail. With version 13.04 CEO Mark Shuttleworth plans to start seriously laying the groundwork for phone, tablet and TV interfaces, which he hopes to have in place for the next LTS release in April of 2014 (14.04).
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In releasing updates to its client and server Ubuntu Linux distributions today, Canonical will enable users to turn off a search option in its client product that has raised some eyebrows over privacy issues. A whistleblower, however, remains unimpressed with Canonical’s handling of the situation.
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Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has introduced a new web interface for the company’s software deployment tool Juju at the OpenStack Developer Summit in San Diego. In a blog post, Ubuntu Cloud Community Liaison Jorge Castro has pointed to a test installation of the tool, which can be used to get a feel for the new interface.
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Flavours and Variants
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The Kubuntu community is proud to announce the release of 12.10, the Quantal Quetzal. This is the first release to burst free from the limits of CD sizes giving us some more space for goodies on the image.
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Phones
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Enthusiasm for HP’s (Palm) webOS remains quite high, even if the industry heavyweight is no longer actively promoting the open source OS.
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Android
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Chad Versace of Intel released Waffle 1.1.0 on Monday, which is a cross-platform library for deferring selection of the OpenGL API and windowing system until run-time. Waffle makes it easy to switch between X11 with GLX or EGL, Wayland with OpenGL ES 2.0, and other windowing / GL API options.
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Google is to be credited for improving its Android operating system by leaps and bounds over the past four years. You know who also deserves loads of credit? Independent developers who care a lot about their phone experience, and yours, too. They’ve quietly filled in missing features and fixed annoyances in Android while nobody was looking—but now’s the time to look at what their fixes can do for you.
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One of the best things about Android Jelly Bean is how clean the interface is. It’s polished, it’s pretty, and it looks good on phones and tablets. Flickr user Knight Hawk2 wanted that same experience on his desktop, and now you can have the same look and feel on your desktop too.
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In recent months, we’ve seen a surge of Android media players ranging from basic, sub-$100 mini-PCs and HDMI sticks from China to a smaller number of more advanced, primarily Google TV devices. Building upon a foundation established by Google TV, Apple TV, media-savvy game consoles such as Microsoft’s Xbox, as well as numerous Linux-based players like Roku, the media players let users stream and download video and other multimedia from the Internet for playback on TV. Some offer built-in support for online video services such as Netflix, while most simply project Android onto a TV screen, letting users browse the web, run apps and sign up for services via specialized remotes.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is on the verge of releasing a major new operating system. Uncertain what prospects the new platform holds for them, hardware vendors are exhibiting renewed interest in shipping alternative operating systems, such as Linux, on their machines. Is it early 2007 again? Not quite, but it kind of seems that way in light of Asus’s introduction of a new Ubuntu netbook. Here’s the scoop.
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The company’s slate will come with a single-core processor, but won’t be developed with help from Asus, according to Digitimes.
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Many ordinary people have little idea how software is created let alone how FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) is created. Martin Owens has a good explanation in terms that anyone should understand, complete with pictures…
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Following discussions about the Open Source and Open Source Hardware logos, OSI and the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) have worked together to compose a co-existence agreement on behalf of their representative communities. We are pleased to announce that this document (PDF) has been approved and signed by both parties!
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Events
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With a background on negotiation theory, David brings a fresh and interesting perspective on the behavioral norms of open source communities.
In this talk, David emphasizes the importance of “soft skills” when managing communities. Soft skills relate to the human, sociological, and psychological aspects of fostering particular types of behaviors in an environment where contributors are volunteers, and therefore follow the motivation of the gift economy: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Such motivations are in opposition to the stick-and-carrot motivators of mechanistic behavior that is commonly found in the barter economy.
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Web Browsers
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SaaS
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Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water, the thought police are back. For years, the open source community was torn apart by fractious debates over what “open” meant and who was open enough. As we’ve moved beyond name calling to focus on getting work done, the same old debate has shifted to cloud computing, with a new crop of pundits and evangelists wrangling over who is the cloudiest of them all.
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The Apache Hadoop developers have voted on and released the second alpha of Apache Hadoop 2.0, which goes by the version number 2.0.2. The distributed computing and storage framework’s latest developments include significant improvements to the high availability variant of HDFS and a more stable version of YARN, which has already been tested against a 2000 node cluster. The release notes offer a high level of detail about all the changes made.
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Databases
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Most applications in the cloud rely on a database. While the cloud is all about the ability to elastically scale and resize compute capacity, scaling and resizing databases in the cloud hasn’t always been that simple.
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10gen, the company set up by the creators of the open source NoSQL database MongoDB, has been on a roll recently, creating business partnerships with numerous companies, making it a hot commercial proposition without creating any apparent friction with its open source community. So what has brought MongoDB to the fore?
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Over 2 million downloads in September, over 540 developers, a community of over 3,000 volunteers from the five continents, over 100 languages (representing 95% of the world population) LibreOffice Conference, Berlin, October 17, 2012 – The Document Foundation announces that the German city of Munich is migrating to LibreOffice, following a growing trend of migrations and adoptions worldwide. “After a careful risk-assessment, Munich city council has decided to migrate to LibreOffice. In favour of that decision, among others, was the greater flexibility of the project regarding consumption of open source licenses. In addition, Munich wants to rely on a large and vibrant community for any Open Source product it employs,” says Kirsten Böge, head of public relations.
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The city of Munich, which has long been a big user for Linux and open source software, has shifted its migration-to-OpenOffice plans and is now starting to deploy LibreOffice instead.
That’s the news from The Document Foundation’s Italo Vignoli, who touted the announcement as part of a cheerleading roundup on the Foundation’s mailing list today.
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Healthcare
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The Linux 3.7 kernel introduces support for 64-bit ARM, a.k.a. AArch64. In further enabling 64-bit ARM support under Linux, the GCC Steering Committee has now officially accepted the AArch64 port of the GNU Compiler Collection. 64-bit ARM now has a compiler!
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GCC 4.8 is set to support more of the C++11 ISO standard and it also starts working on very early support for “C++1y”, the next C++ standard that is still years away.
Besides supporting new hardware optimizations, potential Unified Parallel C support, a conversion to C++, and many other changes, GCC 4.8 improves its support for the C++11 ISO standard.
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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Export control regulations shouldn’t necessarily be an obstacle to the release of unclassified government open source code, said David Wheeler, a research staff member of the Institute for Defense Analyses. He spoke Oct. 15 during the Mil-OSS WG4 conference in Arlington, Va.
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Licensing
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Digia recently acquired the full Qt business from Nokia, Juhapekka Niemi, director, Digia, Qt, talks to Electronics Weekly about how the mobile software business will develop and grow in a market where open source has growing popularity.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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Open Access/Content
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In an effort to move forward in online education, Calif. Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law a proposal to create an open-source website allowing students of 2013 to download popular and expensive textbooks for free.
It’s about time a government takes a step in the right direction. In these times, students need all the help they can get when it comes to paying for college. Universities today continue to hike up the price of tuition to cope with a continuing lack of government funding.
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Programming
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Security
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Questioning in the closed sessions has suggested a scenario under which a network CSP (i.e. ISP, such as BT) would be requested to store encrypted data-streams between their customers and third-party CSPs (such as Google). The implication that, under RIPA or equivalent, third-party CSPs would be requested to retrospectively decrypt this captured data.
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Security concerns typically provide the chief source of rain for the cloud parade, as worries about data leakage and other cyber maladies have caused federal IT managers to think twice about cloud computing. Indeed, more than 50 percent of respondents to an 1105 Government Information Group survey declared that cloud solutions lack sufficient security.
The government is looking for ways to assuage that anxiety and spark cloud adoption because federal data center consolidation efforts — not to mention the Obama administration’s cloud-first policy — rely on the technology. Therefore, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) brings together officials from the General Services Administration, Department of Homeland Security and Defense Department, among others, to provide a standardized approach for determining the security of cloud-based services.
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Security firm ReVuln has analysed the browser protocol that Steam servers use to execute commands via users’ browsers. During the analysis, the company’s researchers discovered security issues that could potentially allow attackers to infect PCs with malicious code such as spyware.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The U.S. Senate race in Massachusetts is currently among the closest in the country, with the most recent polls showing a razor-thin lead by Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren, who hopes to unseat Republican incumbent Senator Scott Brown this November. The Massachusetts race is unique among national Senate races, as outside money is playing a significantly diminished role thanks to a pledge signed by both candidates that has helped keep outside spending on television, radio, and Internet ads in check.
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Censorship
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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When the world’s governments convene for the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), they will debate whether to expand the mandate of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to include aspects of internet policy. Specifically, WCIT delegates will approve changes to the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs), an international treaty traditionally concerned with telecommunications interoperability, and these negotiations have the potential to affect the internet’s openness and the exercise of human rights online.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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It’s been five years since Stephanie Lenz, angry that a video of her son dancing to a Prince song was taken down from YouTube, reached out to the lawyers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Ultimately, Lenz worked with EFF lawyers to sue Universal Music, the company that initiated the takedown.
Arguing against the takedown of a 29-second home video portraying a toddler dancing might have been a slam dunk from a PR perspective; legally speaking, it’s been anything but. EFF was looking for a case that was so obviously an example of “fair use” that the content owner who initiated the takedown could actually be forced to pay damages, under a little-used section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, section 512(f). But the bar is very high to get that type of relief. That became crystal clear at the most important hearing in the case thus far, held today in San Jose.
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Posted in Patents at 12:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
No longer physical inventions
Summary: The resistance to software patents gets a boost from the clear problems phone developers are suffering from
According to Project Disco, “One in Six Active U.S. Patents Pertain to the Smartphone”, meaning perhaps that software patents — not just hardware design patents — spread rapidly wherever computing goes. Lucrative markets are getting clogged up ever so needlessly. One FOSS advocate says that it “[w]ould take 2m patent lawyers working full-time to compare every software product with every software patent issued in a given year” (hence the futility of this wasteful system), “which proves that the only ones to benefit are lawyers,” responds Bruno Girin.
Bruce Perens says that “both Apple and Google spent more last year on litigation than on all research and development” (commonly known fact by now). Apple continue to patent software for smartphones and Amazon, which sells Android devices, is complaining these days. To quote the latest from Bezos: “The Amazon chief executive says that governments might need to intervene to ensure that the onslaught of patent lawsuits doesn’t hurt consumers.”
IDG quotes experts [1, 2, 3] as saying that innovation is harmed by these patent wars:
Patents on software and on business methods are fueling a huge war in the mobile industry and holding back innovation, a group of patent experts said Tuesday.
Patent holders — many that don’t make products — are using software and business method patents to hold back small companies making innovative products, said some panelists speaking at an event sponsored by the Advisory Committee to the Congressional Internet Caucus.
Over at Groklaw, the lawsuit which started much of this massive debate is shown to be illegitimate. Jones writes:
Samsung pointed out that the judge had told the parties to limit their briefs on two kinds of motions — for judgment as a matter of law and on motions asking for an injunction — to 30 pages. Also there was a rule not to use declarations or other exhibits attached to motions to bring up matters not in the main brief. Portions of Apple’s declarations attached to Apple’s injunction motion [PDF], in Samsung’s view, violated those rules.
Here is more:
While appeals based upon a legally erroneous claim interpretation are not uncommon in the Federal Circuit, this case offers the added twist of a district court that applied a proper claim interpretation at the preliminary injunction stage and then abandoned that claim interpretation in issuing its Final Jury Instructions, without explanation. Hopefully, this issue will be raised on appeal and addressed by the Federal Circuit.
This case has been important for several different reasons, so we shall keep an eye open. █
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