• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Evolution of GNU/Linux system..must read for Linux newbies

Many Linux distributions based on the GNU/Linux system are currently available both as free copies and commercial distributions. Most of these distributors add up there own features, targeting specific areas like Enterprise, Desktop, Multimedia etc, to the existing GNU system, to cater diverse user sections. Some noted ones are RedHat, Fedora (an open project by RedHat), Debian, Suse from Novell, Mandriva, Ubuntu, Sabayon, PCLinuxOS, SimplyMEPIS, Knoppix, Gentoo etc. All these distributions intend to target different set of users. So you, now have the options of choosing the distribution based on your intended use, like suse, ubuntu, PCLinuxOS for user friendliness, debian, fedora for development, RedHat for Enterprise and so on. Least to say programming would be delightful on all of them.

The Realm: For Sale

My desire to help people and promote Linux was one of the key reasons that I built this site, and continued pressing forward, despite my heart calling elsewhere. I wanted to help you, to help others, to help those new to Linux, and even those who either didn’t know about it, or were even enemies of Linux at one time.

UrbanLabs OS: Not What You Think…

[Via Google Translate: Mission: To devise, develop, test, deploy and diffuse components of a city's new operating system, to improve communication processes, participation and consumption parameters under open, efficient and sustainable. Should be designed and / or reuse different types of interactions and networking technologies and people in urban space and display mechanisms, diffusion and improvement of each of the components of the system. UrbanLabs OS can be composed of several autonomous projects which respond to these objectives, encouraging the development of them in a cross.]

Try the Linux desktop of the future

For the tinkerers and testers, 2010 is shaping up to be a perfect year. Almost every desktop and application we can think of is going to have a major release, and while release dates and roadmaps always have to be taken with a pinch of salt, many of these projects have built technology and enhancements you can play with now. We’ve selected the few we think are worth keeping an eye on and that can be installed easily, but Linux is littered with applications that are evolving all the time, so we’ve also tried to guess what the next big things might be.

Take a trip with us on a voyage of discovery to find out exactly what’s happening and how the Linux desktop experience is likely to evolve over the next 12 months…

Illegal use of term – five yard penalty

Audio

• The Linux Link Tech Show #343 3/3/10

• Podcast Season 2 Episode 3

  In this episode: Version 2.6.33 of the Linux kernel is here and it includes a new 3D accelerated Nvidia graphics driver. Canonical’s online music store will only provide MP3 files, and Apple sues Android partner, HTC. We report back on our experiences with SUSE Studio and answer our critics in the Closed Ballot.

Desktop

• Linux Learning Centers Growing in Central Texas

  I will be meeting with Lynn Bender, the creator and force behind Linux Against Poverty this week. Once we get some things ironed out, I will publish the information here. We already have a greater number of volunteers to man the triage and repair tables than last year. Of course, our goal is 100 computers more than the 200 we put into service from Linux Against Poverty 2009.

Server

• Most Reliable Hosting Company Sites in February 2010

Kernel Space

• The Uniform Driver Interface—why wasn’t it adopted?

  Imagine, for example, if drivers for graphics cards, TV tuner cards, video and audio encoding/decoding cards, modems, storage chipsets, motherboard chipsets, USB chipsets, IEEE-1394 chipsets, graphics tablet devices, touch screens, debugging interfaces, network devices, and so forth were all written to a common specification, it would reduce the amount of code which needed testing. It would increase user choice in both hardware and operating systems—something which I still hold is quite likely the most valuable freedom we have. It would increase reliability, since the users of Windows, OS X, Linux, the various BSD systems, and other, not-so-mainstream operating systems would be able to run the same driver code and collectively supply debugging information and perform testing in a multitude of environments. It would increase security, because then common code that is well-known could be used on all platforms and not just the one it was written for. It would do for device drivers what POSIX has done for user-mode application software. I do not believe that I could be convinced that this would be anything other than a good thing.

Applications

• 6 of the Best Free Linux Food and Drink Software

  Richard Stallman, an American software freedom activist, has profound views on what freedoms should be provided in software. He strongly believes that free software should be regarded in the same way as free speech and not free beer. Rest assured, this article is not going to become embroiled in an ideological debate, but instead focuses on a subject which really is essential for life itself.

• Instructionals

  • How to add GUI for your applications?

  • Preview And Download The New Ubuntu 10.04 Wallpaper

  • Distributed Storage Across Four Storage Nodes With GlusterFS On Fedora 12

  • How to convert RPM software packages to Debian (.deb)

  • Run GlassFish V3 As a Non-Root Service on Gentoo Linux

  • How to view the contents of an initrd image

  • Remmina-free and open-source Remote Desktop Client written in GTK+

  • Beginner’s Guide to Nmap

  • How to create audio cd in Ubuntu using Brasero

  • How to configure Compiz in Elive

  • Using Restrictive Constructors in PHP 5

  • Subversion self tutorial

  • Formatting OpenOffice spreadsheet cells with DD/MM/YY

  • Klavaro – A very flexible touch typing tutor

  • Q-Tips: Speeding up Gentoo Compile Times

  • Download wineasio .deb packages

  • netfilter/iptables split access with multiple ISPs

  • Fully Utilizing Your X-Core CPU

  • How to: Set Up TrueCrypt Disk Encryption, Part 2

• Games

  • Do you know Ubuntu Games?

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

  • Camp KDE Videos Now Available, Get Them While They’re Hot!

    A little over a month ago, the KDE community had its yearly Americas event in San Diego. In the final article we promised you all the videos of the talks and now the KDE promo channel on Youtube features a series of Camp KDE talks. Check it out!

  • 10 things you might want to do in KDE SC 4.4

    With the release of KDE Software Compilation 4.4, many may feel tempted to give KDE Plasma Desktop (previously known as just “KDE”, see Repositioning the KDE Brand) a try. Plasma Desktop introduced in KDE SC 4 behaves quite differently from other popular desktop workspaces, and without doubt many new users will feel slightly lost and confused the first time.

    [...]

    The post is mainly aimed at those who are new to Plasma Desktop, but even experienced users might learn something new.

  • KDE SC 4.4 Available on Windows

    Why offer free software like the KDE applications on Windows? Users who become familiar with the KDE applications and grow to like them on Windows will presumably find it easier to move to an all-free desktop at some point. The more familiar Linux (or *BSD) is the first time a new user tries it, the more likely it is that they’ll be happy in the new environment and successful migrating to the new OS.

  • Software Compilation 4.4 now available for Windows

• GNOME Desktop

  • Magnatune sends check to GNOME Foundation thanks to Rhythmbox

    A long while ago, I pledged Magnatune to pay 10% of its sales due to Rhythmbox (a fantastic music player for Linux), back to the GNOME Foundation. Today, I wrote the check.

  • A 2D GTK Window Decorator

    Above is a screenshot of a GTK Window Decorator running in the non-compositing mode of compiz.

Distributions

• Choices Choices …

  Well I have been playing around with my NerdTop for a few weeks now, and it is terrific. I can do anything I want online without having to get onto my main machine, it simple and it’s clean. The only thing I have been fiddling with is trying to find a Linux distro I like. I have tried Ubuntu (with fiddly support for the drivers) with different desktop enviros, Mandriva, a bunch of smaller EeePC specific distros and none of them were really what I wanted. They were all good and owrked fine, but not perfect.

• Arch Linux Reviewed

  Altogether, Arch is an excellent flavor of Linux and can be thought of as a quickly deployable Gentoo. However, Arch is able to stand on its own and far surpasses Gentoo in some areas. Like Gentoo, though, Arch isn’t for the faint of heart, but with its top of the line documentation and intuitive package management, you should have a very enjoyable experience with Arch Linux.

• Would You Like To Help The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine?

  A magazine isn’t much of a magazine without articles to fill its pages. So, if you’d like to contribute to The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine, here are the ways you can contribute:

  * If you have an idea for an article for The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine, either forward that idea to the PCLinuxOS Magazine Chief Editor This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , or write the article yourself, and send it along to the PCLinuxOS Magazine Chief Editor This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . OpenOffice document format works well, as does a simple text file and picture/screen shots/graphics compressed into a .tar.gz file. Of course, the favorite way for the magazine staff to contribute articles is via Google Docs. Just share it with the members of the Google Group mailing list (below). (Please allow all magazine members the ability to edit your article).

• Which Linux distribution do you use most frequently?

  We’re collecting this data to run in an upcoming issue of Linux Journal. We encourage you to leave comments here letting us know why you use the Linux distribution you do. Let your voice be heard!

• Igelle DSV: A New Fast Lightweight Linux

  Building a Linux distribution with the novice user in mind has been tried many times over the years. If you had to pick one area where many new users struggle, it would have to be installing new applications. Missing dependencies or improperly configured repositories lead to frustration and, ultimately, abandonment of the entire platform.

• New Releases

  • Elive Stable 2.0 Topaz released

    The New Stable version of Elive has a huge list of improvements. Its ease of use makes it suitable for any kind of user along with a totally new Linux experience for those who have not tried Elive before.

    We offer an absolutely different way to use an operating system where the logic and the intuitiveness are first class.

  • PC/OS OpenWorkstation 10.1 GNOME Released

    The developers of PC/OS are excited to bring you this new installment in the PC/OS family. Users and customers have demanded it so we have now delivered it. This release is based on the GNOME desktop. We are targetting this release for a more high performance crowd. So as we keep working on this we need the great feedback our users generally provide including what you, as professional users, need and use. So lets get in here and go through whats included.

    GNOME 2.28
    Linux kernel 2.6.31
    Empathy replaces Pidgin
    OpenOffice.org 3.1

  • PLoP Linux 4.0.4 released

    update: kernel 2.6.33, e2fsprogs 1.41.10, partclone 0.2.0…

• Red Hat Family

  • Options Intelligence Report: Red Hat, Inc. (RHT) & United Technologies Corp. (UTX)

    Plain-vanilla bullish call buying activity dominated options trading on software company, Red Hat, Inc., today as shares of the underlying stock up 1.65% to $29.83. Near-term optimists picked up 3,000 calls at the March $30 strike and paid an average of $0.69 in premium per contract. Investors long the calls are positioned to profit should Red Hat’s shares trade above the effective breakeven price of $30.69 by expiration in approximately two weeks.

  • It’s Crazy Ass Rumor Thursday: Whispers On RHT, VG, NANO

    Also getting puffed up by rumors, TheFly reports, is Red Hat (RHT). There have been rumors of a deal for Red Hat repeatedly over the years, and I have to wonder if this time the talk was triggered by this week’s bid for Novell (NOVL), which owns a rival Linux implementation called Suse. Last May, Jefferies analyst Katherine Egbert wrote that, it is “inevitable that Red Hat will be subsumed into a larger entity, probably IBM (IBM).” Inevitable obviously does not necessarily mean imminent. RHT today is up 30 cents, or 1%, to $29.65.

• Ubuntu

  • Shiney new PHP for 10.04.

    Recently PHP was updated to use PHP 5.3.1 by default. The reason for this is that Lucid is a LTS and support for PHP 5.2 will eventually go away during the life time of Lucid on Ubuntu Server.

  • Little Things That Matter: Rhythmbox Indicator Applet

    The Rhythmbox indicator applet in Ubuntu 10.04 gained ‘now playing’ information in an update earlier today.

  • Theme

    • Is operating system beauty skin deep?

      Ubuntu has the opposite problem. It’s just an operating system. What it needs is a standard application bundle, shipped together or in conjunction with it, to make it useful. An operating system, a graphics program, a browser, and basic utilities people use every day.

      While Microsoft is anxious to create these bundles, seeing it as opportunity, however, Ubuntu seems to see this as a Hobson’s Choice. Since open source programs carry no price, there is little basis on which it can make these choices.

      It needs to make them.

      What I want in an operating system isn’t something that runs a computer. What I want is a computer that runs. I want it to be simple, I want it to be fast, I want it to be complete.

      That’s more than skin deep.

    • Light: the new look of Ubuntu

      Jono Bacon, Alan Pope, and many others have written, yesterday we published a new visual story and style for Ubuntu. The core design work was lead by Marcus Haslam, Otto Greenslade and Dominic Edmunds, who are the three visual artists leading our efforts in the Canonical Design team. Once we had the base ideas in place we invited some anchor members of the Ubuntu Art community to a design sprint, to test that the concept had the legs to work with the full range of forums, websites, derivatives and other pieces of this huge and wonderful project. And apparently, it does!

    • Ubuntu has new themes – but what is up with those window buttons?

      So what has been learned from this example. Sometimes something untraditional, especially in regard to interfaces can increase usability and make things generally easier. Of course other real world scenarios could discredit this reasoning. Please feel free to post any scenarios in which you feel this button arrangement is more of a hindrance than helpful.

  • Canonical CEO

    • Ubuntu: Canonical’s New CEO Discusses Top Priorities

      Canonical’s CEO crown officially transitioned from Mark Shuttleworth to Jane Silber on March 1. During a phone discussion with The VAR Guy yesterday, Silber shared her top priorities for Canonical and Ubuntu. She also disclosed plans to make another key executive hire at Canonical. And, Silber shared some views on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx), the cloud — and the potential sale of Linux rival Novell to a hedge fund. Here’s a recap of the discussion…

    • Canonical CEO Elucidates on Lucid Lynx Linux Server

      Silber added that Ubuntu to date has had a strong concentration on the cloud that will continue to ramp up over time as a key opportunity for its server release. For instance, with 10.04 in particular, the Ubuntu project has aimed to position itself as the best operating system for serving as both a guest on a public cloud as well a host to other guests.

    • Ubuntu’s Linux Retail Strategy Gears Up for 2010

      Part of that plan includes driving consumer appeal by including new consumer technology in Ubuntu. One of the new technologies set to be included in the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 “Lucid Lynx” release is the Ubuntu One Music Store, which will enable users to purchase music. Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx is currently scheduled for release at the end of April.

      “I think we’ll continue to see more acceptance of Ubuntu in the mass-market consumer space,” Silber said.

Devices/Embedded

• Electric Green School motorcycle shows its rebel nature by running Linux

  Electric motorcycles are getting more and more common, and while we don’t think they’ll ever quite capture the rush of an internal-combustion engine threatening to fly into bits as it screams toward red-line, they are starting to offer their own… unique charms. This model is a Norwegian prototype, based on a Honda chassis that had its tail chopped and motor stripped, replaced by stacks of Nickel-Metal batteries, then wrapped in some custom bodywork. The bike sports a touchscreen dash powered by Ubuntu that offers both stats about the bike (speed, temperature, etc.) as well as GPS navigation and, presumably, on the go games of Tux Racer. It’s a one-off built by Green School Motorcycles and Akershus University College, and there’s plenty more information about it in a video at the source link below — if you speak Norwegian.

• Rugged railroad computer runs Linux

  The Linux-compatible MicroSpace MPCX28R is suitable for passenger infotainment, security, and other railway applications, says Kontron. Built around the original 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z530 CPU and SCH US15W northbridge/southbridge, the MicroSpace MPCX28R supports up to 1GB of DDR2 RAM, the company says.

• Phones

  • Musings on Software Freedom for Mobile Devices

    I started using GNU/Linux and Free Software in 1992. In those days, while everything I needed for a working computer was generally available in software freedom, there were many components and applications that simply did not exist. For highly technical users who did not need many peripherals, the Free Software community had reached a state of complete software freedom. Yet, in 1992, everyone agreed there was still much work to be done. Even today, we still strive for a desktop and server operating system, with all relevant applications, that grants complete software freedom.

    Looked at broadly, mobile telephone systems are not all that different from 1992-era GNU/Linux systems. The basics are currently available as Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS). If you need only the bare minimum of functionality, you can, by picking the right phone hardware, run an almost completely FLOSS operating system and application set. Yet, we have so far to go. This post discusses the current penetration of FLOSS in mobile devices and offers a path forward for free software advocates.

  • MeeGo build for N900 & Atom by end of March 2010

    The team behind Nokia and Intel’s latest open-source endeavour, MeeGo, have revealed the first part of their release timeline, and it’s certainly ambitious. According to Valtteri Halla – half of the MeeGo Technical Steering Group (TSG) – the team plans to open the MeeGo repository by the end of March 2010, with a basic source and binary repository to build the platform on Intel Atom devices and the Nokia N900.

  • Android

    • PCs will be dead in three years

      Google’s vice president of global ad operations John Herlihy told Silicon Republic that he has been watching Japan as a future indicator. He said that in the Land of the Rising Sun, most research is done on smartphones rather than PCs.

    • Will Chrome OS deliver us the disposable PC?

      During a visit to Google’s London HQ we grabbed some time with Chris DiBona.

      He’s the Open Source Programs Manager for Google, overseeing everything the corporation does that’s open sourced and making sure it’s “correct and useful.”

    • Google: Desktops Will Be Irrelevant in Three Years’ Time

    • Company puts Android on laptop with China-backed chips

      A Chinese company is tweaking Google’s Android operating system to run on a laptop using homegrown Chinese microprocessors, which are backed by the government.

    • Tor on Android

      The Tor Project has been working very closely with Nathan Freitas and The Guardian Project to create an Android release. This is an early beta release and is not yet suitable for high security needs. The Android web browser is not protected by Torbutton and we have not yet developed an anonymous browser on the Android platform. Please be cautious with this release, it’s probably pretty fragile and it’s certainly not ready for serious use.

    • Google and the Tor Project

      When it comes to code, Google’s support has made a big difference to the Tor Project. Providing privacy and helping to circumvent censorship online is a challenge that keeps our software developers and volunteers very busy. The Google Summer of Code™ brings students and mentors in the open source community together to write code for three months every year. A lot of coding got done in a few months in 2009, and Tor was lucky to get a group of students who kept on working past the summer months to improve existing projects and support users. Tor also works on Libevent with Google.

    • Reasons for Root

      When new Android devices show up, one of the first questions raised is: “can we run our own firmware?” And, if that’s not first overall, then the first question is probably “how do I get root access?”. After all, those two are somewhat related — you sometimes need root to flash alternative firmware, and alternative firmware may well give you root access.

    • Leaked 2.1 Droid Eris Rom Ported to HTC Hero

      While this might not exactly constitute news to everyone, it is certainly something many people will be interested in. Apparently the leaked Android 2.1 Droid Eris Rom we told you about last night

• Sub-notebooks

  • Taking Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix out for a Spin

    Even though I typically don’t use GNOME, the way the desktop was presented in UNR 9.10 was actually pretty cool. Sure, it took some getting used to, and I probably have strange tastes, but I did enjoy using it, despite the little issues I mentioned above. UNR also seems like the best choice for any compatible Netbook, because I’ve tried using Windows on Netbooks and it’s not pretty at all.

  • Leeenux Review – Linux OS for Asus Eee 701

    There are countless Linux distros out there for the netbooks. Do we really need another one? Well, if you still use the first generation Eee PC or have it lying around as it is of no use to you, Leeenux OS can give a new life to it. It is tailor-made for those who are having trouble in getting all the newer Linux distros to work on it – Ubuntu, Ubuntu UNR, Kubuntu and so on. They run fine on the newer netbooks, but give myriad of problems on the Eee 700-series. Another problem is that the newer distros are not made with the old Eee 701 netbook in mind that have just 4GB of flash storage.

    [...]

    Just like Jolicloud, it comes with few Prism apps that mere shortcuts to particular URLs. I am personally against the idea of using Prism apps. Why not simply fire-up the web-browser and then go to the respective URL?

• Tablets

  • Top 5 Netbook Linux Distros: 2010 Edition (with Gallery)

    Easy Peasy

    Formerly Eeebuntu, EasyPeasy is Ubuntu respin tailored for Asus Eee PCs. But since it didn’t work on my EeePC, I’ll have to give it last place. The desktop environment is taken from UNR – the only difference is that the Easy-Peasy version isn’t ugly (where ugly means brown). You could call it the Linux Mint of the netbook operating system world, because the default install includes some proprietary software such as Skype, Adobe Flash and some common codecs to make your life less painful. The project documentation is not very professional. On the other hand, the guides are simple and very useful. I liek the fact that they chose Banshee to be the default music player. Those of you who do not like ext4 should skip this distro, though: as of v1.5, EasyPeasy uses ext4 by default. Due to the fact that the distro is basically Ubuntu, you can solve all your problems using Ubuntu documentation. Yet, aside from the nice theme and some very sound software choices there is no real reason to choose Easy Peasy instead of UNR. Try both and decide by yourself.

Free GIMP Button Brushes

The buttons are in greyscale so can be colored any way you like; they are without text to make it easier for you to customize them; and they are quicker to use than the scripts that originally created them. The ones shown in the image are only exemplary of the goodies given away in the download.

Xipwire Helps FOSS Projects Collect Donations for Free

Currently, Xipwire directs donations to the Apache Software Foundation, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Free Software Foundation,GNOME Foundation, KDE, and Linux Foundation. If you have a FOSS project near and dear to your heart, drop Xipwire a line and they’ll try to add it to the list.

5 open source and free software books that are worth your time

Against Intellectual Monopoly

It is common to argue that intellectual property in the form of copyright and patent is necessary for the innovation and creation of ideas and inventions such as machines, drugs, computer software, books, music, literature and movies. In fact intellectual property is a government grant of a costly and dangerous private monopoly over ideas. We show through theory and example that intellectual monopoly is not necessary for innovation and as a practical matter is damaging to growth, prosperity and liberty.

MAFIAA

• The OSI Categorically Rejects IIPA’s special pleadings against Open Source

  Moore’s Law, Disk Law, and Fiber Law have created an economic engine for growth, promising exponentially improving computing, storage, and networking performance for the foreseeable future. And yet according to a 2003 UNCTAD report, “there has been no Moore’s Law for software,” and indeed it is because of software that computer systems have become more expensive, more complex, and less reliable. The global economy spent $3.4T USD on Information and Communication Technologies in 2008, of which we estimate $1T USD was wasted on “bad software”. And reconfirming the 2003 report and our own numbers updated for 2010, others have estimated losses of at least $500B and as much as $6T USD (meaning that for every dollar spent on ICT, that dollar and almost one more went down the drain). Whether the annual loss number is $500B, $1T, or $6T, all represent an unsustainable cost and undeniable evidence that something in the dominant design of the proprietary software industry is deeply flawed. (See OSS-2010.pdf for complete references to all of the above.)

• Indonesia: the IIPA is “Watching” you.

  This is just one of many attacks that try to equate open source software with software piracy and an overall lack of respect for copyright law. And it’s rhetoric that we, as open source advocates, need to quash. Sometimes we even have to educate our own people. The chairwoman of the Indonesian Association of Open Source (AOSI), said in an interview a few months ago “[P]eople have two options: either to pay for licensed software or go open source.” I’m hoping she was misquoted.

Oracle

• 20 Reasons Why Oracle is the World’s Largest Open Source Company

  It’s true. Oracle is now, with its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, the world’s largest purveyor of open source software. Does that surprise you? It did me too, until I started digging and realized that Oracle has a history of supporting free and open source software. Their support didn’t start with their purchase of InnoDB, MySQL or Sun. It goes back into ancient times–Internetly speaking, of course.

  And, yes, I know that I’ve taken my share of shots at Oracle and the wonderful Larry Ellison but I also have to own up to the fact that they are good open source stewards and citizens (netizens?). It almost pains me to admit it but I do. Oracle has done much for the FOSS community and it appears that their commitment to it rivals that of IBM.

• Rebranding OpenOffice.org

  As you can see, the font, the colour sequence and even the shade of blue have changed. We will not stop there, and will also work on other visual elements, such as our icons. And here’s the great part: You can help too, by joining our Branding Initiative and participate on our dedicated mailing list. I hope you enjoy our new designs. Stay tuned!

Psion

• Psion Launches “Ingenuity Working,” an Online Open Community for Customers, Partners and Developers

• Psion Launches the New Workabout Pro 3 – the Fastest and Most Modular Device on the Market

  Psion (LSE: PON.L), a global provider of mobile computing solutions, today announced the new Workabout Pro 3. The new model has been developed incorporating some of the ideas revealed today as the company unveils a radical overhaul of its business model with a move to “Open Source Mobility” (OSM), an open innovation philosophy which means it can co-create solutions with its partners and customers. The new philosophy means that Psion will have the industry’s most modular product platform, sharing common components and tools with developers, resellers and clients. It will allow them to create highly tailored modules for mobile devices built on Psion’s versatile product platform.

Women

• SCALE 8x: Moving the needle

  There are lots of ongoing efforts to increase the number of women participating in free software, but reports on how those efforts have fared are few and far between. Sarah Mei spoke at the Women in Open Source (WIOS) conference, which preceded SCALE 8x, to report on what she and other members of the San Francisco Ruby community have been doing to bring more women into that community. Her talk, Moving the Needle: How the San Francisco Ruby Community got to 18%, looked at the goals that were set, the methods that were used, and the results.

• PHPWomen Pairs with FOSS Projects to Encourage Diversity

  Naramore says she got the idea while talking with Ed Finkler, lead developer of open source microblogging platform Spaz. “I help Ed with organizing his support team. We were discussing how to get more people involved in the project, and how great it would be to involve women (as I think the last statistic I saw showed that only 3% of open source contributors are female). From there, it branched into an idea that would help not only involve women in more projects, but it would identify the projects that have open and welcoming communities for all newcomers (male and female alike), and it would help bring them the help they desperately need. Everybody benefits, and it just made sense.”

Web Browsers

• Chrome Is Rapidly Approaching Firefox In Extension Numbers

  It was only December when Google officially launched extensions for its Chrome browser. Almost immediately, there were 500 extensions in the gallery as many developers had been working on them for a while. Today, Google is saying that number is now past 3,000. And that’s significant because it’s already pretty close to the browser known for its extensions (which it calls “add-ons”), Firefox.

• Mozilla

  • MDN Logo Update

    The other day I posted some work-in-progress versions of the potential new Mozilla Developer Network logo. As part of that, I asked for feedback from the community and got a *ton* of great input (142 comments at the last count). Thanks to everyone who took the time to share their thoughts.

  • Hear that Mozilla Drumbeat? No, Me Neither

    A few months ago, I wrote about Mozilla’s new Drumbeat campaign, “a global community of people and projects using technology to help internet users understand, participate and take control of their online lives.”

  • Drumbeat/calendar

  • The road back to par: Radical reconstructive surgery planned for Firefox 4.0

    Mozilla not only saw this trend coming, but frankly drove this trend in this direction some years ago, with the move to add just-in-time (JIT) compilation to its Firefox JavaScript interpreter. The JavaScript engine Mozilla introduced in version 3.5, dubbed TraceMonkey, borrows a concept from these language frameworks by tracing the direction of JS instructions ahead of time, catabolizing those instructions into loops, and generating a kind of intermediate code that can be very simply recompiled into machine code (assembly) at run time.

  • Schools for Scandal – the UK’s

    Obviously, it’s scandalous that schools not only don’t have the option to install Firefox in the first place – since it’s much safer than Internet Explorer – but that they must *pay* to install it afterwards. As the article rightly notes, this means they also pay in another way, through lock-in to old software because they can’t afford to do so.

• Opera (Proprietary)

  • Unite Media Player, A Widget for Opera

    There is now a Media Player widget available for Opera Browser, its Unite Media Player. The applications aims to provide a lot of simplicity to the user. You can directly browser yours or your friend’s music and play it right from their devices. No need of uploads/downloads or third party stuff, the music will be streamed from anywhere for you.

  • What a Difference Marketing Makes: Opera Triples Downloads with Browser Ballot

Events

• Registration for Google I/O Conference Closed; Event Sold Out

  Registration for this year’s Google I/O Conference has scarcely been open two months and it’s already sold out. Google announced today that it is formally closing registration for the event, slated to be held on May 19-20 at Moscone West in San Francisco.

CeBIT

• Linux New Media Awards 2010 Presented at CeBIT

  Markus Feilner, Klaus Knopper, and Jim Zemlin helped present the 2010 Linux New Media Awards at CeBIT. Winners accepted their awards on stage while the ceremony streamed live over the Internet.

• CeBIT 2010: Linux Successes, Challenges

  At the Open Source Forum of CeBIT 2010, the Linux Foundation’s Jim Zemlin named three reasons for Linux’s success. He also identified three possible challenges for the free platform.

• Linux New Media Awards 2010 Presented at CeBIT

  Markus Feilner, Klaus Knopper, and Jim Zemlin helped present the 2010 Linux New Media Awards at CeBIT. Winners accepted their awards on stage while the ceremony streamed live over the Internet.

  [...]

  Klaus Knopper announced the winner for Best Open Source Contribution for Mobile Devices and presented the award to Google Android.

BSD

• CeBIT 2010: BIND 10 is coming

  At this year’s CeBIT IT trade show in Hannover, The H spoke with BIND 10 Programme Manager Shane Kerr about the next version of BIND, the most widely used Domain Name System (DNS) server on the Internet. Like BIND 9, BIND 10 is a complete re-design and re-write of the previous version. Development on the BIND 10 project officially began on the 1st of April, 2009.

Releases

• Transifex v0.8 “Magneto” has been released

  Transifex is a localization platform that gives translators a simple yet featureful web interface to manage translations for multiple remotely-hosted projects. Files to be translated can be translated straight from the user’s browser or retrieved for offline translation, and various translation statistics can be read at a glance. Popular projects using Transifex include the Fedora Project, Moblin, XFCE and LXDE.

• Google releases “Living Stories” code

  You are reading a standard-form news article, and when new information comes to light, the piece you’re reading might just be referenced in a follow-up — but it won’t be displayed in context or be easy to navigate. However, if Google’s Living Stories experiment takes off following the release of its code, that won’t always be the case.

• Best Buy Releases Idea-Gathering App Under Open Source Licence

  Best Buy announced this week that the company is releasing its idea-gathering software, BBYIDX, under the GNU General Public License.

Government

• The Bottom-Up View of Free Software

  Here’s a case in point, a post discussing the view that “the government has an obligation to make its decision based on the characteristics of the software, without discriminating based on licensing or business models.” This is the “level-playing field” argument that I discussed recently, and pointed out that there were historical reasons to do with vendor lock-in why such “playing fields” actually favoured incumbents.

Licensing

• LA Funds Important Legal Research on Free Software Compliance

  Over the past twelve months or so I’ve noticed an upswing in enquiries about free software compliance. For example, someone might be seeking access to source code for embedded devices with Linux and/or Busybox on them. One of the key problems for pursuing compliance is the legal concept of “standing”. That is, does the court think you have a right to press the claim in question? So for example, if you see someone (A) breach a contract with someone else (B), a court will probably not let you sue A, basically because that is B’s business [1]. B might not be concerned about the breach, or B might have a relationship with A (or someone else) that might be jeopardised by suing A, so it should be up to B to make the decision about whether to proceed with a suit. Moreover, A has not infringed a right that you have, so why should you be able to sue? You’ve not suffered damage, so why should you be able to sue? In short, a court seeks to limit the people bringing actions to only those people whose rights have been infringed. So, if you, not holding copyright, see someone breaching the GPL, you can’t sue them in copyright to enforce compliance.

Health

• Public comment letter below, please personalize and post

  Open Source Community, below is a letter that you can personalize and post on the public comment website. It is very important that you do this, the policy and the press is on fire and our duty is to educate our policy makers.

• Public Comment? Let’s get it ON!

• A Healthy Move for Open Source

  What’s interesting here is how different projects from around the world are being brought together to be applied to a new problem. This kind of re-purposing is one of the great advantages of free software, since it’s not necessary to ask permission or to negotiate impossibly complex licensing agreements to do so, as would be the case with traditional software. Let’s hope we see many more such applications.

Openness

• Welcome to the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, issue #143

• As Grants Run Out, Universities Pony Up Cash for OpenCourseWare

  First, a Brigham Young University study found that offering free online access to distance-education course materials doesn’t hurt paid enrollment, giving a boost to those who think the best business model for publishing free content is one that dangles it as bait to draw in students for paid courses.

  Now many leaders in the world of open education — a movement whose original projects were largely financed by foundation grants — are ponying up their own cash to keep free courses thriving.

• Knol: The State of Play

  Less than six months later, Google proudly announced that the 100,000th knol had been published. The announcement was met with cries of “So What?”. The media has a short attention span, and those who remembered the launch of Knol didn’t think much of where it hand ended up. Slate magazine hadn’t even waited that long before writing off Knol.

• Swedish Museum Historiska Museet Adopts CC Licenses

  Earlier this week Swedish museum Historiska Museet announced the adoption of CC licenses for their digital catalog (Google translation here). Roughly 63,500 item photographs, 1200 illustrations, and 264,500 scanned catalog cards are now released, depending upon the medium, under our Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works license or Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license.

• Open Source Earth

  One of the main impulses behind this blog is looking at the ways the ideas behind free software are being applied in other areas. Another major focus is that of the commons in all its forms – all the way up to the ultimate commons, the environment.

• Popular Science Puts Entire Scanned Archive Online, Free

  Gadget nerds: Prepare to lose the rest of your day to awesomeness. PopSci, the web-wing of Popular Science magazine, has scanned its entire 137-year archive and put it online for you to read, absolutely free. The archive, made available in partnership with Google Books, even has the original period advertisements.

• Free ebooks correlated with increased print-book sales

  A new study from two academics at BYU tracking the sales of printed books following free ebook releases found that generally, a free ebook release is correlated with increased sales. Interestingly, the exception is for a group of ebooks that were released for a week and then withdrawn — part of Tor.com’s launch strategy, and a success in getting large number of people signed up to the site. Very nice to see some crunchy data in the mix.

• Moodle: open source, closed doors.

  The Moodle community should be taking steps to open the content now; on current sites, with current versions with the content available. A library of available (and organized) content, ready to view, ready to download and use would be a boon to educators world wide. To students it would open an encyclopedia of learning materials and possibilities to engage content otherwise unavailable. The availability of tools to share easily will certainly be great for versions of Moodle in the future, but in the meantime, there’s work to be done.

• Social production as a new source of economic value creation

  Before the cost of communication dropped precipitously, Benlker suggests that it was too expensive to have a decentralized social production exchange system. Today however, citing open source projects such as SETI@home and Apache, he makes the claim that social sharing and exchange is emerging as a significant and sustained factor of production.

Standards/Consortia

• POSIX IO Must Die!

  POSIX IO is becoming a serious impediment to IO performance and scaling. POSIX is one of the standards that enabled portable programs and POSIX IO is the portion of the standard surrounding IO. But as the world of storage evolves with greatly increasing capacities and greatly increasing performance, it is time for POSIX IO to evolve or die.

• HTML5 WG Working Drafts published

  All six of the HTML5 Working Drafts have been published by the W3C HTML Working Group. The working drafts are the latest step forward in creating the future HTML5 standards. The core document is the HTML5 specification draft, which is accompanied by drafts of HTML5 differences from HTML4 and HTML: The Markup Language.

  Also published are the working drafts for the recently contentious HTML+RDFa, HTML Microdata and HTML Canvas 2D Context specifications which cover embedded attribute data, embedded semantic metadata and 2D drawing and animation within HTML5. These elements of the proposed HTML5 standard were separated into their own documents to make the standard more modular.

• Virgin America Ditches Adobe Flash for New Site

  As the battle between HTML5 and Adobe Flash continues to heat up, Virgin America has chosen a side: its brand new web site design ditches Flash in favor of HTML.

Senate Leader Blasts Tech Industry, Plans Net Freedom Law

A top Senate Democrat on Tuesday criticized the technology industry for its unwillingness to stand up to foreign governments that restrict access to online content, pledging to introduce legislation that would impose penalties on Internet companies that facilitate human rights violations in repressive regimes.

“The bottom line is this: with a few notable exceptions, the technology industry seems unwilling to regulate itself and unwilling to even engage in a dialogue with Congress about the serious human rights challenges the industry faces,” Dick Durbin, the chairman of the Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law and assistant Senate majority leader, said at a hearing on Internet freedom.

Science

• After 5 Years, Free Systems Biology Markup Language Has Proven Popular

  A scientific paper that describes a file format used by scientists to represent models of biological processes has exceeded 500 citations in the ISI Web of Knowledge, an online academic database that documents the impact of scientific publications. The Systems Biology Markup Language (SBML) is designed to enable the exchange of quantitative models of biochemical networks between different computer software packages, allowing the models to be shared and published in a form other researchers can use in various software environments.

• Research Calls Forensic DNA Technique Into Question

  Fine-grained analysis of DNA found in cell structures called mitochondria suggests that it can vary widely between tissues, making samples tricky to compare.

Security

• RSA authentication weakness discovered

  The most common digital security technique used to protect both media copyright and Internet communications has a major weakness, University of Michigan computer scientists have discovered.

• Scrap stop and search law says terror watchdog

  The future of controversial powers which allow police to stop and search people without suspicion was in renewed doubt today after the Government’s terrorism watchdog called for them to be scrapped.

  Lord Carlile of Berriew said the use of Section 44 powers was having a “disproportionately bad effect on community relations” and had become “counter-productive” in the fight against terrorism.

• Evaluating statistical attacks on personal knowledge questions

  What is your mother’s maiden name? How about your pet’s name? Questions like these were a dark corner of security systems for quite some time. Most security researchers instinctively think they aren’t very secure. But they still have gained widespread deployment as a backup to password-based authentication when email-based identification isn’t available. Free webmail providers, for example, may have no other choice. Unfortunately, because most websites rely on email when passwords fail, and email providers rely on personal knowledge questions, most web authentication is no more secure than personal knowledge questions. This risk has gotten more attention recently, with high profile compromises of Paris Hilton’s phone, Sarah Palin’s email, and Twitter’s corporate Google Documents occurring due to guessed personal knowledge questions.

Environment

• Cost of food-borne illnesses is deemed much higher than earlier estimates

  A report sponsored by the Produce Safety Project at Georgetown University puts the health-related price tag at $152 billion a year. That’s more than four times an earlier USDA estimate.

• How overconsumption might save the planet

  Simple mathematics suggests that everybody in the world can’t live like Americans or Western Europeans currently do without creating impossible strains on the planet’s resources.

• Darwin Foes Add Warming to Targets

  Critics of the teaching of evolution in the nation’s classrooms are gaining ground in some states by linking the issue to global warming, arguing that dissenting views on both scientific subjects should be taught in public schools.

Finance

• Systemic Denial

  Everyone recognizes that our nation is in a financial mess. Too few see that this mess is not simply the ordinary downs of a regular business cycle. The American financial system walked the American economy off a cliff. Large players took catastrophic risk. They were allowed to take this risk because of a series of fundamental regulatory mistakes; they were encouraged to take it by the implicit, sometimes explicit promise, that failure would be bailed out. The gamble was obvious and it worked. The suckers were us. They got the upside. We got the bill.

  So in coming to this meeting of some of the very best in the field — from Elizabeth Warren to George Soros — I was keen to hear just what the strategy was to restore us to some sort of financial sanity. How could we avoid it again? Yet through the course of the morning, I was struck by two very different and very depressing points.

• White House Offers Bill to Restrict Big Banks’ Actions

  The Obama administration put forward legislation on Wednesday to rein in the size and scope of the nation’s largest banks. But the proposal faces strong resistance in Congress, where lawmakers have shown little appetite for adding to the prolonged debate on overhauling financial regulations, Sewell Chan reports in The New York Times.

• Banking on Big Fees From the A.I.G. Deal

  Seven investment banks advised the buyer and seller in the sale of the business, American International Assurance, and all told they may end up splitting a combined $660 million in fees, Bloomberg News reported, citing the research firm Freeman & Company.

• Wall Street Had ‘No Idea’ What Subprime CDSs Were, Lewis Writes

  March 3 (Bloomberg) — Michael Burry, the California hedge-fund manager who figured out how to bet against the subprime bubble, prodded seven Wall Street banks in early 2005 to create credit-default swaps for subprime-mortgage bonds, Michael Lewis writes in his book, “The Big Short.”

• FDIC’s Bair blasts Wall Street’s values on pay

  An outspoken U.S. bank regulator on Tuesday rebuked Wall Street for only paring huge bonuses after public outcry and expressed doubt over how long the restraint will last.

• Heads, Wall Street wins; tails, Wall Street wins

  If you want to know why folks on Wall Street got a 17 percent hike in bonuses this year while the rest of the country is sucking wind, it’s in part because they’re shameless. Every move they make is dictated by the needs of money, with little regard for other considerations.

• Dick Bove Bashes Goldman Sachs For Getting Scared Out Of Market By Greek Debt Crisis

  Dick Bove cut his estimates for Goldman Sachs yesterday, explaining that trading activity had dried up as the Greek debt crisis unfolded.

• Goldman Sachs Defies Calls Against Compensation (GS)

  Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. (NYSE: GS) is going to get hear more criticism over the notion that it creates so many millionaires. Compensation has been an issue since about half way through the recession, particularly after it came to light about bonuses and record payments to employees. This morning came Goldman’s 10-K, or its annual report, and as with most brokerage firms, investment banking firms, and financial institutions, the “Legal Proceedings” are lengthy. Goldman Sachs seems to be extra-lengthy, but what is interesting is that the company is fighting shareholders pressing for changes to its compensation structure.

• Man Utd’s Glazers complain to Goldman Sachs boss about Jim O’Neill

  A senior member of the Glazer family has complained personally to Lloyd Blankfein, chief executive of Goldman Sachs, about the conduct of the bank’s chief economist Jim O’Neill.

• Glazers May Cut Ties With Goldman Sachs Over Red Knights

• Jim O’Neill faces red card from Goldman Sachs

• Goldman Sachs won’t investigate executive pay

  Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said Monday it has rejected demands by shareholders to investigate the Wall Street bank’s compensation practices.

• Goldman Sachs concedes it could be damaged by public outrage over pay

• Goldman Sachs needs to admit it made mistakes

  But outsiders are much more critical — a fact that Goldman ignores at its peril. Even Ben Bernanke, the generally pro-Wall Street Federal Reserve chairman, has raised questions about Goldman’s role in the Greek pastichio.

• Goldman Sachs Flatly Rejects Requests For Pay Investigation

  Goldman Sachs says it has received several demands from shareholders that it investigate its compensation practices and recoup alleged overcompensation of its executives.

• Goldman Discloses a New Risk: Bad Publicity

  It’s no secret that it’s been a tough year for Goldman Sachs, perhaps not in terms of their financials — the company reported very strong earnings for 2009 back in January — but clearly in the court of public opinion. Goldman has been pummeled over excessive compensation and its role in the global economic crisis, including the current crisis in Greece, and the firm has had to issue clarifications on statements made by its chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein, and to even hire a public relations firm headed by former President George W. Bush’s director of communications.

• Will Bad Press Affect Goldman Sachs’s Fortunes?

  Widely seen as having a hand in fiascoes ranging from the subprime crisis to shenanigans surrounding Greece’s debt, the intensely private Goldman has found the unwanted public scrutiny to be a growing annoyance. But now the high-profile tarring — the bank has been memorably compared to vampire squid, in case you missed it — that was initially a mere headache is developing into a business risk.

• Goldman Sachs: The Reputation You Deserve

  The fact that Goldman believes they need to highlight this adverse reputation risk in its annual report strikes me as just further evidence of an arrogant firm.

  Lloyd and team need to take a hard look in the mirror.

  Now that Goldman is flea infested is not an indictment of those highlighting their condition, it is an indictment of where and with whom Goldman is sleeping.

• How Goldman Sachs Bagged Clients (via McClatchy)

  I keep finding these gems I missed while out for the holiday week. Here’s another fascinating reads — its a nice takedown of Goldman Sachs via McClatchy.

• Greek Mess, Global Mess

  The Greek government is accused of cheating and allowing Greeks to live beyond their means. The European Union is accused of having created an impossible structure for the euro. Goldman Sachs is accused of having enabled the Greek government to falsify its accounts when it sought to join the euro monetary system. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany calls Goldman Sachs’ actions in 2002 “scandalous” and Christine Lagarde, France’s finance minister, calls for greater regulation of credit-default swaps.

• Goldman Sachs- 40 trillion in derivatives

• Goldman and the Winner Take All Society

  Yves Smith noted that it was as dangerous for anyone to get in the way of a Goldman employee and a profit making opportunity as it was to get between a predatory animal and its kill. Goldman has managed to get itself between a very worried Obama Administration and a very angry public. How ironic if the Goldman predatory lion becomes the Administration sacrificial lamb.

• Fed Cover-up Surrounds Goldman/AIG Scandal

  To add to this scandal, new information publicly released today indicates that the Federal Reserve was heavily involved in a cover-up – where it appears that the Fed also knew that Goldman Sachs was ripping-off AIG with those CDS contracts. More specifically, it was then-president of the New York Fed, Timothy Geithner, who a) ordered AIG to pay-out 100 cents on the dollar on these scams; and then b) ordered AIG to cover-up how much it had paid out on those contracts as well as all information on the recipients of those windfall-billions.

• Goldman Sachs Will No Longer Entertain the Harebrained Whims of Its Shareholders

• At Brown, Spotlight on the President’s Role at a Bank

  Across this quiet quadrangle, behind the wrought iron gates and beyond University Hall, lurks a bogeyman of Wall Street.

  It has come to this: Goldman Sachs, whose place at the center of so many concentric circles of power has thrust it into the grassy knoll realm of conspiracy theories, is the talk of Brown University.

  To be precise, it is Goldman’s ties to Ruth J. Simmons, Brown’s beloved president, that has some students and alumni buzzing, Graham Bowley writes in The New York Times.

• Does being a Goldman Sachs director warrant applause or catcalls?

  I’ve been disgusted by the reaction at Brown University to the sudden realization that Ruth J. Simmons, its president, has for a decade been a well-paid member of Goldman Sachs’ board, and was one of the people who decided on Lloyd Blankfein’s $9 million paycheck.

• Near-Universal Hatred of Goldman Sachs May Cost Them Money

  Of course, if Goldman had chosen to identify the potential public relations risks of its business practices, like helping a country hide the true value of its sovereign debt, then the risk of those transactions coming to light and hurting the company could have been ameliorated from the beginning.

• Lucas van Praag: Goldman Sachs’s cult PR man

  The man charged with defending Goldman Sachs’s battered public image, British-born chief spokesman Lucas van Praag, has become a cult figure on Wall Street with a reputation for firing cerebral, elegantly worded nuggets of scorn at anybody who dares to attack the financial institution.

• Wall Street’s financial aftershocks

  It’s not as though these kinds of transactions hadn’t already wreaked havoc with the world economy. It was AIG’s inability to make good on such deals (many of them with Goldman and its ilk) and Lehman Brothers’ accumulation of dubious derivatives that kicked off the Great Recession through which we will be stumbling for years to come.

• Fed probing Goldman trades with Greece

  The Federal Reserve is looking into what role Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms may have played in Greece’s debt problems, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said Thursday.

• EU parliament to stage hearing on Greek statistics

  The European Commission has said in a report earlier this year that Greek statistics were unreliable and prone to political influence after a new government in Athens revealed that the country’s budget deficit would be 12.7 percent in 2009 – double the initially forecast amount.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• FBI paid racist shock jock Hal Turner ‘in excess of $100,000′

  Turning informant on your fans can be lucrative, if you’re a shock jock by the name of Hal Turner.

  Amid a trial where Turner faces criminal charges for making threats of violence against public servants, he disclosed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation paid him “in excess of $100,000″ over a five-year period.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Conservatives and Lib Dems push web blocking

  Now, in an even more dangerous amendment, Lib Dems and Conservatives push for web blocking. This would open the door to a massive imbalance of power in favour of large copyright holding companies. Individuals and small businesses would be open to massive ‘copyright attacks’ that could shut them down, just by the threat of action.

• 25 Lib Dem PPCs sign letter asking Lib Dem Parliamentarians to think again on Digital Economy Bill

  In the last day or so there has been particular focus on an amendment put forward in the Lords by Tim Clement-Jones and Tim Razzall, the reasoning for which Tim Clement-Jones explained in a post here but which journalist and author (and Lib Dem member) Cory Doctorow disagreed with.

• Urgent: Please Help Head Off Website Blocking in UK

  We have only a few hours to stop something bad happening in the House of Lords *this afternoon*:

  Lib Dem peers are seeking to amend the Digital Economy Bill to allow site blocking for copyright infringement. This could lead to unwanted blocking of sites accused of copyright infringement, including sites like Youtube, and a massive chilling effect as any site with user generated content could easily fall foul of provisions like this.

  If you have five minutes spare, please write to the two Lords behind this: Lord Razzall and Clement Jones. The links given take you to WriteToThem, so all you need to do is supply a few words.

• (More) Trouble At T’Bill

  The Lib Dems, in an apparent good-faith attempt to avoid supporting the Government’s proposed unlimited power to change any law on IP, any time, any where, without proper scrutiny, in clause 17 of the Digital Economy Bill, came up with an alternative which almost everyone BUT the LibDems and the Tories thinks is probably even worse. It’s a remarkable day indeed in the DEB saltmines when you see the government minister and the fabulous Earl of Errol agreeing on anything. But also a rather disturbing one.

• How UK Chiropractors’ Attempt To Silence One Critic Created The Backlash That May Change Chiropractics In The UK

  One day someone will write a big case study (or perhaps a book) about what happened here. An attempt to silence a critic may end up resulting in massive changes to not just the British Chiropractic Association (the article notes that many chiropractors are horrified and want to leave the organization), but also how people view chiropractors and how chiropractic services are marketed.

• New amendment gives copyright owners a blank cheque for web censorship

  Imagine that, in the Summer of last year, you had been following the MP’s expenses scandal and heard that The Telegraph was publishing a rather less redacted version that MP’s were prepared to give us. Interested, you navigated your way to www.telegraph.co.uk only to find it was not responding. After some searching around and asking friends you discover that the website has been blocked by most major UK ISP’s. It seems a junior official in Parliament had asked them to block The Telegraph for copyright violation.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Ubisoft’s Uber DRM Cracked Within a Day

  Last month the gaming giant Ubisoft announced their new über-DRM which requires customers to be continuously online in order to play purchased games. Of course, this DRM was circumvented in a few hours and while downplaying this blunder, Ubisoft fails to see that they’ve only increased piracy.

• Unintended Consequences: Twelve Years Under the DMCA

  San Francisco – Twelve years after the passage of the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the law continues to stymie fair use, free speech, scientific research, and legitimate competition. A new report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) collects reported examples of abuses of the DMCA and the ongoing harm the law continues to inflict on consumers, scientists, and small businesses.

  The U.S. Copyright Office is currently mulling proposed exemptions to the DMCA’s ban on “circumventing” digital rights management (DRM) and “other technical protection measures” used to restrict access to copyrighted works. The Copyright Office is empowered to grant exemptions to the law every three years to mitigate the harms that DRM otherwise would impose on legitimate, non-infringing uses of copyrighted materials.

• The UK’s DMCA; Clause 17 falls, but at what cost?

  During another intense session in the House of Lords this afternoon a vote was finally held on the controversial Clause 17 of the UK’s Digital Economy Bill. This clause would have allowed the Secretary of State to amend the UK’s copyright law with a lot less oversight from parliament than usual. The government did not hide the fact that this provision would be used to clamp down on unlicensed file-sharers in various ways as the industry demanded. However, there was a bright side; the clause would have permitted Lord Mandelson (or more likely his successor) to do as he promised back in October and relax the UK’s copyright law by bringing in the ‘fair use’ exemptions it so desperately needs.

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• After iiNet Victory, Where Now For Anti-Piracy Down Under?

  After failing to bring ISP iiNet into line with some extremely lengthy and expensive legal action, Hollywood has been left short on options in Australia. Of course, AFACT won’t give in. It is appealing the case and has resorted to sending out messages to scare Internet file-sharers. But does another organization have a different approach up its sleeve?

• Law firm investigated over claims that it bullied alleged filesharers

  A leading law firm is being investigated over claims that it bullied and harassed hundreds of people wrongly accused of illegal filesharing.

  The Solicitors Regulation Authority, an industry watchdog, said it is investigating a complaint brought against Davenport Lyons, the London-based solicitors’ firm that has led a number of prosecutions against illegal filesharers.

  The consumer group Which? first made an official complaint in 2008, after a number of people contacted it to say that they had received letters from Davenport Lyons demanding payment for illegal downloads that were nothing to do with them.

• Five questions about the future of music with David Pakman

  I think the barrier to entry to write or make music has always been pretty low. Provided you can learn how to play an instrument, you can write songs. The encroachment of technology into every facet of music making has lowered this barrier even further. An entire album can be recorded at great quality in a basement with a Mac and some bundled software. DJ equipment isn’t even needed anymore — you can do it all on your Mac.

• Libraries cost book industry billions

  Apologies for the sensationalist title, but that is precisely what came to mind when I read an article about how the book industry has lost billions of dollars because of book downloading. Attributor is a company that produces anti-piracy solutions, and they have conducted a study that claims illegal downloading of books has cost American publishers $3 billion USD. I will resist the temptation to comment on the fact that one should not take seriously a report undertaken by a company that has a commercial interest on the result of said study making the case for their products.

• Charles Nesson, scourge of the labels, now must pay them

  Joel Tenenbaum, the second P2P defendant to take his case to trial in the US, may never pay the $675,000 judgment currently filed against him—but someone on his legal team will soon be paying something. Judge Nancy Gertner has ruled that both Tenenbaum and his lawyer, Harvard Law’s Charles Nesson, are “jointly and severally liable” for some fees incurred by the RIAA during the trial. The ruling comes after the defense team inexplicably posted the very songs at issue in the case to the Internet, and Nesson posted a public link on his blog for anyone to download them.

• The Statute of Anne (was actually kinda revolutinary)

  Last night, in two different instances I read the claim that the England’s first copyright act, the statute of Anne passed in 1710 was never intended to protect authors but to protect the reproducers like printing houses and presses investing in authors implying that printing houses loved the act.

• When traditional media want copyright for themselves, but violate others’ copyright

  UPDATE MARCH 4TH, 2010, 20.30 GMT+1: the unauthorized copy mentioned below has been removed by the staff of the Bellunopress website, shortly after I asked them to comply with the terms of use of this website. I am happy to see such a confirmation that this incident was just a temporary slip, without (as I had said since the beginning, cfr below) any intention at all to harm anybody: This page remains online, of course, as useful resource for whoever should have the same problem in the future with other websites.

  [...]

  I am convinced that there was no intention at all to harm in this case, just carelessness and lack of professionalism. Still, it’s about time that every player in the information and communication space (not just the smallest ones or those who started last) begin to seriously behave as if the Web really were this great opportunity for everybody to communicate and work in a leveled field, respecting each other.

• ACTA

  • NZ Doing Good in ACTA Negotiation

    The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is an agreement between countries around IP rights and enforcement. The negotiations have been happening in secret, with every country saying “well, we’d love to reveal what we’re talking about but those other countries just won’t let us”. Fortunately there have been leaks, and the latest is a fascinating glimpse at how these things are put together and where the parties stand.

    It seems bizarre at first, but the draft is laid out like a spreadsheet: one article per row and with three columns, one each for the US/Japan version, the EU version, and comments. Inside each sentence square brackets mark the attributed proposed alternatives for language.

  • German Justice Minister: ACTA Transparency And No Three Strikes

    German Justice Minister Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger tells Spiegel Online that Germany would like to see the full draft ACTA texts released now and that the country will not accept inclusion of a three strikes system nor adopt such a system domestically.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

New York Linux Users Group

For a little over a year now I’ve been attending events and gatherings of the New York Linux Users Group (NYLUG). It’s been an interesting experience, and I’d like to share briefly a little about it.

Desktop

• Oh Linux, how shall I count thy installs?

  So the question here is. If marketing and research companies want accurate statistics (assuming they do) then how can they count the real number of Linux installations? Quite simply they can’t. This means that 93.4% of the statistics recorded only show less than 9.8% of the true number of Linux installations (where did those numbers come from I wonder :).

• The Zero Dollar Laptop

  The Zero Dollar Laptop is a recycled computer, running Free Open Source Software (FOSS) that is fast and effective- now and long into the future.

  Clients of St Mungo’s charity for homeless people are recycling hardware, breaking Windows and installing FOSS to build fully customised media laptops and to create music, graphics and video for distribution over the Internet.

Kernel Space

• 2.6.32.9 Release notes

  Stable kernel update announcements posted on LWN have a certain tendency to be followed by complaints about the amount of information which is made available. It seems that there is a desire for a description of the changes which is more accessible than the patches themselves, and for attention to be drawn to the security-relevant fixes. As an exercise in determining what kind of effort is being asked of the kernel maintainers, your editor decided to make a pass through the proposed 2.6.32.9 update and attempt to describe the impact of each of the changes – all 93 of them. The results can be found below.

• Graphics Stack

  • New Open-Source ATI Driver Releases

    With the Linux 2.6.33 kernel having been released last week where the ATI kernel mode-setting (KMS) DRM code left the kernel’s staging area, we knew a new ATI X.Org driver release was imminent. Over the night a new stable DDX driver update has been pushed out for xf86-video-ati as well as a new pre-release for the KMS-supportive 6.13 version that also carries other changes.

  • Luc Creates X.Org Board of Director Summaries

    As another step, Luc has now published X.Org Board of Director meeting summaries going back to last year.

  • X.Org & CoreBoot FOSDEM Recordings Available

Applications

• 17 Featured Applications in Ubuntu 10.04 Software Center – But are they wise Choices?

  A few days ago we asked you which applications you would choose to be “featured” application on the shelves of the Ubuntu 10.04 Software Center. Since then the list has swelled from a meagre 4 choices a few days ago to a massive 17 selections now!

• QuickShot – from a sketch to an application in 3 weeks.

  There’s an old saying “Use the right tool for the job” — common-sense advice that applies to pretty much any situation – especially in Software. But what happens when the ‘right tools for the job’ don’t actually exist?

• Clementine: The Player I’ve Been Looking For

  Clementine is a half port half rewrite of Amarok 1.4, with its kdelibs dependencies stripped and all the code updated to use Qt4. Only in its 0.1 version, it works incredibly well. I’ve been looking for something like this since Juk became crusty and Amarok became too much and Exaile seemed slow and gtkish. Clementine is my new default player.

• Nanny- A control parental for gnome | Ubuntu

• CrossOver 9 – revamped, reinvented and a must have

  For those unfamiliar, CrossOver is a proprietary version of Wine that is used for running Windows applications on Mac OS X and Linux. While there are other products that offer similar functionality such as Transgamings’ Cedega, CodeWeavers is the only one that immediately sends patches they create back to the Wine project to further enhance it’s functionality, making it.. in our opinion, the better choice of the two.

• Getting Loopy: Performance Loopers For Linux Musicians

  A loop in music is a section of the music that repeats itself continuously until receiving a signal to either stop or move on to the next section. A loop can be assigned to a single instrument or to a group of instruments. Compositionally, loops are used for a variety of purposes. For example, they may function as formal bass patterns over which a composition is built, or they may suppy a long but consistently repeating series of chords used to define the harmony for independently composed bass and melody lines. For many computer-based music-makers the loop’s most popular implementation is the drum loop, a rhythmic pattern of one or more measures of percussion sounds that can be repeated unchanged for simple lines or mixed & matched with other loops for more life-like variation.

• Instructionals

  • Bash Scripting Introduction Tutorial with 5 Practical Examples

  • Linux Gazette – March 2010 (#172)

  • Vim Plugins You Should Know About, Part VII: ragtag.vim (formerly allml.vim)

  • How to: Set Up TrueCrypt Disk Encryption, Part 2

  • Bash Scripting Introduction Tutorial with 5 Practical Examples

  • MyPaint – A fast and easy graphics application for digital painters

  • Getting Started With SMPlayer on Ubuntu (to Play Movies Better)

  • Convert your Ubuntu (Lucid Lynx) box into a media center with Boxee.

  • Creating Flowcharts with Dia

  • Network Based Ubuntu Installations

  • Project: Building An All-Text Linux Workstation – Part 12

  • Ubuntuzilla – An APT repository to get the latest updates for Firefox, SeaMonkey and Thunderbird

  • portage-2.1.8 has new –rebuilt-binaries option

  • Completely functional virsh (Libvirt 0.1.7-15) & GRUB2 Support at Xen 3.4.3 (pvops 2.6.32.9) on top of F12

  • Ubuntuzilla – An APT repository to get the latest updates for Firefox, SeaMonkey and Thunderbird

• Games

  • Explore open source games Glest and FreeCol

    Mention the phrase open source and, odds are, the thing that pops into most peoples’ minds is usually Linux or possibly OpenOffice; or, a developer might think of the Mono project or an artistic type will think of GIMP. While all of those are good examples of open source, there is more to life than work; occasionally, you need to capture a city or throw a fireball or two just to relax.

    For the last several months, I have been wasting a vast amount of time (although I told my wife it’s research) on two games that I found on SourceForge: Glest and FreeCol.

K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

• My search for the best KDE Linux distribution

  As some of you already know, I am a big fan of the KDE desktop environment (or KDE Workspaces or whatever they’re calling it these days). In my search to reach Linux KDE perfection I have tested out a number of different distributions. First there was Fedora, which I happily ran throughout the length of the experiment. Once that was finished I attempted to install and try both Kubuntu and openSUSE. Unfortunately I was unable to do so after openSUSE decided not to play nice. However my search did not stop there, and once the community edition was ready I jumped over to Linux Mint KDE CE. Finally I decided to once again try openSUSE, this time installing from a USB drive. This somehow resolved all of my installation issues.

• KDE 4.4.1

  Just updated my laptop at work to kde 4.4.1… and I have to say, that was refreshingly painless.

• KDE in North Korea

  I just saw an article about North Korean Linux distro, named “붉은별” from Russian blog. Although I don’t know anything about distro’s base, who developed and translated, who packaged, etc. The interesting part is that this distribution is using KDE, release 3.x. Also it is translated in “North” Korean standard, which is different from “South” Korean standard, especially in technological terms. North uses loanwords from Russian language, while South uses them from English. North try to keep pure Korean terms, South widely adopted foreign loanwords. As of linguistic and real world, maybe also political difference(south and north can’t communicate), we can’t mix and match the translation.

• Report: North Korea Develops Own Linux Distribution

  North Korea has reportedly developed its own version of the Linux operating with a graphical user interface that closely resembles Microsoft Windows.

  A copy of the North Korean Linux distribution, called Red Star, was purchased in Pyongyang for US$5 by a Russian student named Mikhail, who then posted a brief review of it on his blog using the Russian embassy’s Internet connection, according to the English-language Web site of Russia Today, a Russian television news channel.

• N. Korea develops own OS

  North Korea’s self-developed software operating system named the “Red Star” was brought to light for the first time by a Russian satellite broadcaster yesterday.

Distributions

• The Three Giants of Linux

  The Linux ecosystem is a complex entity. On one hand everyone gets along and benefits from work done by others, while on the other there’s often animosity and conflict between distributions and their communities (remember when Ubuntu came along?).

  People often complain that there is simply too much choice in the Linux world and that we’d all be better off if there was just one, or two. However, nothing could be further from the truth.

• The perfect linux distribution(for the desktop)

  I recently read a slashdot entry about Why Linux is not yet ready(there has been tons of those i know) and reading the comments i saw a lot of people arguing about different stuff, for example guys comparing the desktop and the server as if they were the same OS, in practicality is not, there are Linux distros for the server and power users and there are distros aimed at the Desktop.

• Red Hat Family

  • RHCS: an Introduction

    RHCS offers a well thought out framework for managing a cluster, especially when it comes to service failover. Using RHCS makes securing your mission-critical systems easy, and makes them highly available with standard hardware.

    The R in RHCS implies that this method only runs on RHEL machines – but this is not the case, as we will demonstrate in one of our upcoming articles.

  • Red Hat announces 2010 innovation awards

    Red Hat Linux has announced that its annual innovations awards will be presented at the company’s 2010 summit and JBoss World conference which will be jointly held in Boston from June 22 to 25.

• Ubuntu

  • Ubuntu 10.04: Canonical Makes ISV Push

    And so it begins. As Canonical puts the finishing touches on Ubuntu 10.04 — a long term support (LTS) release — the company also is reaching out to potential Linux server and desktop software partners. In fact, Canonical says there are at least 10 reasons why ISVs should embrace Ubuntu Desktop Edition, and nine reasons why developers should embrace Ubuntu Server Edition. Will partners embrace Canonical’s Ubuntu pitch? Here are some thoughts.

    First, a little background. Canonical views Ubuntu 10.04 (code named Lucid Lynx) a prime opportunity for application developers to build long-term business and customer relationships on Ubuntu Linux.

  • Ubuntu One Music Store vs Amazon

    I have to say I have been very under excited by the news of the Ubuntu One Music store – Im not convinced we need another music store unless they are going to give us something that other stores dont – like flac support or something.

    Ive just been reading Popeys blog about how to use the Ubuntu One Music Store and I have to say, unless Im missing something – what a massive FAF!

  • Canonical betas Ubuntu music store

    According to an Ubuntu wiki FAQ, the Ubuntu One Music Store will offer DRM-free and watermark-free MP3s provided by the London-based online music outfit 7digital. The store will integrate with the existing Ubuntu RhythmBox music player, and at some point, it will also be available as a plug-in for Banshee, Amarok, and “a few other” third-party applications.

  • Ubuntu Desktop in the Cloud

    For the past few releases, Canonical has put quite a bit of energy into making Ubuntu a first-class OS for use in the cloud. Ubuntu now has cloud support for Amazon’s EC2 and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (a “private cloud” system based on Eucalyptus). This means that it’s easy to spin up Ubuntu instances on EC2 or to make your own private cloud with Ubuntu … where you can spin up more instances of Ubuntu … there’s a lot of “cloud” going on here!

  • Getting Ready for Ubuntu One Music Store Beta

  • Bye Bye Brown

    The new style of Ubuntu is driven by the theme “Light”. We’ve developed a comprehensive set of visual guidelines and treatments that reflect that style, and are updating key assets like the logo accordingly. The new theme takes effect in 10.04 LTS and will define our look and feel for several years.

  • Refreshing The Ubuntu Brand

    The new style of Ubuntu is driven by the theme “Light”. We’ve developed a comprehensive set of visual guidelines and treatments that reflect that style, and are updating key assets like the logo accordingly. The new theme takes effect in 10.04 LTS and will define our look and feel for several years.

    Ubuntu has seen a tremendous amount of growth and change since it was conceived in 2004. Back then it was a small project with strong ambitions and a handful of developers passionate about delivering a world class Linux Operating System that can compete on every level with Microsoft and Apple. We adopted a style based on the tagline “Linux for Human Beings”, and called it “Human”. Six years on we have made incredible progress. Ubuntu is a global phenomenon: we have carved out a pervasive culture of quality and design, thoughtful usability and great technology all fused together in a project that maintains the same commitment to community and collaborative development that we embraced back in 2004.

  • New Ubuntu Theme(s), Boot Splash, Logo Revealed (And More!)

  • Ubuntu Gets a New Look: What a Mess

  • Ubuntu’s New Look, a Pale Imitation of Mac OS X?

  • The Ubuntu One Music Store is Over-Engineered and Will Fail

  • Variants

    • Lubuntu Gets a New Look

      Finally, the Lubuntu developers have created a special interface for netbooks. I haven’t had much time to explore it yet, but hope to do so soon. Briefly, though, here’s what it looks like:

    • My New Linux Laptop

      Then, Linux Mint caught my eye. Linux Mint 8 KDE Community Edition, to be precise. Just released, with a 2.6.31 kernel, and KDE 4.3.4. I downloaded the iso, and gave it a spin. It recognized all my hardware, including the Atheros wifi card. A very nice implementation of KDE 4.3.4. I played with it for a couple of hours, and decided to take the plunge.

      Installation was as smooth and easy as it should be. Select the entire windows partition, wipe it clean, and divide it up for Linux. Answer a few simple questions, and very shortly thereafter, it was telling me to remove the DVD and reboot. I spent a little time putting up the plasma widgets I like, and in little over half an hour I had my desktop installed and looking like I wanted. Mint KDE is a very usable system, easy to use (if you like KDE4, like I do), and beautiful to look at. I turned on a bunch of eye candy I don’t usually, just because I could, and the system hardly noticed.

Devices/Embedded

• Freescale chip built to power sub-$99 e-readers

  Feeding the e-book craze, a new hardware controller chip from Freescale aims to lower the cost of e-readers below the magic $98 price point while extending battery life to weeks.

• ARM9-based Android tablets to sell for under $200

  Archos announced two low-cost, WiFi-enabled tablets that run Android on a 600MHz ARM9 processor. The Archos 7 Home Tablet offers a seven-inch touchscreen and is designed for mobile use, while the eight-inch Archos 8 Home Tablet is designed for fixed kitchen-computer and digital picture frame (DPF) duties, says the company.

• Linux-ready ARM SoCs target diverse markets

  STMicroelectronics says it is now shipping four Linux-ready SoCs (system on chips), based on similar ARM926EJ-S cores but targeting different market segments. The SPEAr300, 310, 320, and 600 have single or dual cores, run at up to 400MHz, and sell for as little as $7 in production quantities, the company says.

• Android comes to landline phones

  At CeBIT this week, Motorola demonstrated an Android-based “HS1001″ cordless IP phone manufactured by Binatone and built around the DSP Group’s DECT-compatible XpandR chipset. Meanwhile, DSP Group showed its own Android-based IP phone reference design based on the XpandR II chipset.

  For much of the last decade, Linux-based landline-based IP phones made regular appearances on LinuxDevices, but with the rise of mobile phones, such announcements have become fewer and farther between. The few IP phones we’ve covered recently are typically multimedia tablet/kitchen-computer designs, such as the already defunct, Linux-based Verizon Hub, built by OpenPeak, OpenPeak’s Linux-based OpenFrame IP phone, or the Android-based Glass reference platform from Cloud Telecomputers. Typically, in these designs, IP telephony is just one feature among many other multimedia and Web browsing capabilities.

• Android

  • Of Android and the Fear of Fragmentation

    Glyn Moody takes a look at the state of Android, at the worries that the platform is fragmenting and why it isn’t a bad thing.

  • viaForensics Announces Release of Open Source Android Forensics Application

    viaForensics, a computer and mobile forensics firm, has released a beta version of its Open Source Android Forensics application, which allows forensics examiners to export data from an Android device for use by law enforcement and forensic investigators.

  • Nexus One event was never intended for China says Google

  • An Android Tablet Drama: The Haleron iLet Mini HAL

    Android’s beauty as an open-source operating system is that it allows any random manufacturer to develop a product and slap Android on top of it. This does, however, allow for some issues in terms of legitimacy of manufacturers. Case and point: The Haleron iLet Mini HAL.

  • Google’s Nexus One is worth sending a colleague to prison for

Disney Offers Ptex on New Open-Source Site

“Ptex from Disney Animation is one of those premiere technologies that can only reach its full potential by releasing it as open source,” said Andy Hendrickson, chief technology officer. “It is a revolutionary idea, and though some would characterize it as a Disney competitive advantage, it has more value to the corporation as an industry standard in solving the time-consuming computer graphics problem of assigning textures to geometry. Setting a new standard is best accomplished by giving technology away for free.”

Open source, priceless resource

I was told once about someone called a “cyber hippie.” They dual boot with Linux and Mac OSX or Windows. They use open source browsers, instant messengers and office suites. They write their own code. They essentially live on Slashdot in lieu of professional news sites. The sinking realization that this idea may be true brought a certain horror to my thoughts, as I have a generally low opinion of anyone who claims to be a “hippie,” probably from too much South Park during my formative years.

It created an interesting dichotomy in my mind: Are the users of open source software the hippies of the Internet underworld and the users of closed-source software (MacOS, Windows) the conservatives?

[...]

We’ve ended up with a lot of great things from open source development in forms of freeware clones: Pidgin Instant Messenger, Cinelerra (video editing software), the Ogg Vorbis media format for audio and video, OpenOffice.org and, of course, Mozilla Firefox.

Get started with Blender

You can’t learn Blender overnight, unfortunately, even if you only need to use a sub-set of its tools, such as producing static 3-D images. But that’s because, for most people, thinking in three dimensions is hard, and drawing in three dimensions (on a two-dimensional screen) is even harder. All of the techniques Blender offers to build 3-D models — meshes, skins, NURBs, extrusion — are just shortcuts to help you get from the design you can picture in your head to a concrete, well-defined model inside the computer. They take some getting used to, and more than that, they take practice. But there’s no reason to feel intimidated by them.

Five Open Source Feed Readers to Keep You Organized

If you’re like most Internet-connected people these days, the amount of information you take in from your favorite news sites, tech blogs, and the like is just staggering. The only way to stay on top of everything is with a solid feed reader to help aggregate everything you want to read. Of course, many folks rely on Google Reader to get the job done but if you’re looking for an open source option, here are five of our favorites.

Murphy’s Law: This Too Shall Not Pass

Open source might not be about the money, but the financial interests (and stubbornness) of prevailing content providers have led to the creation of a draconian system for content distribution. This shouldn’t be news to you. What is baffling, however, is that companies are simply unwilling to see the tangible benefits of community-driven development for their assets–a concept that has proven out time and time again in open systems of all kinds. And if they aren’t busy sticking it to themselves, the system too greatly rewards their ill attempts at poisoning others’ livelihoods with their copyright-preservation anxieties.

NICTA offers free elefant

The research organisation has built the system under the Mozilla Public License and hopes some of the 3700 downloads will result in feedback about the software.

OSQA.net – Every Question About Open Source Answered

OSQA is a specialized questions and answers website. It deals with Open Source and its every ramification. The site is absolutely free to join, and it can be entirely used at no cost too.

View From The Top: Rivet Logic

Over the past few years, enterprise-grade, commercially-supported open source content management and portal software has seen an increase in adoption by major enterprises worldwide. As these open source platforms have matured over the years, organizations are beginning to realize the benefits that can be gained, and the demand continues to grow as more organizations are working to achieve an Enterprise 2.0 environment in a cost effective manner.

Open source network monitoring tools

As virtualized infrastructure and cloud computing force businesses to reevaluate the broader issue of acceptable network service levels, open source network monitoring tools are attracting heightened interest.

Both network administrators and open source advocates say the flexibility these tools promise at a relatively reasonable cost has made them a viable alternative to software offered by some of the largest enterprise technology companies.

NexentaStor Adds Primary Deduplication

Nexenta Systems is updating its NexentaStor open-source storage software with in-line deduplication, which increases the amount of data that can be stored on a server by storing it more efficiently, and support for three popular hypervisors.

Technology spending can be saved by ‘open source data integration software’

Mr Mero said: “Open source data integration software allows you to integrate a company’s legacy system with other applications, enabling businesses coming out of the recession to benefit from efficient and cost effective upgrades as well as greater flexibility to develop data management techniques.”

Disaster

• Developers for Development: Using Open Source Technologies in Disaster Response and Beyond

• Technology can help overcome Mother Nature’s wrath.

  Within hours of the earthquake, teams from the open-source and technology communities, as well as businesses large and small, began assembling exceptional civilian knowledge management capabilities through global networks of volunteers. This gave the U.S. government and the international disaster relief community unprecedented access to integrated and timely information about the disaster, some of which they used.

Events

• OSBC 2010

• FOSS4G 2010 Workshops ready for inscriptions

  The Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) is a conference for Open Source Geospatial Software. It will be presented at Barcelona (Spain), from 6th to 9th September 2010 and is an opportunity to unite behind the many successful geospatial products, standards and protocols.

• CeBIT

  • CeBIT 2010 Prevue: Sparks, Smouldering

    Open Source has an enormous following in the EU, and there’s not only an Open Source Pavilion, but it’s not just a gathering of 10×10 booths with geek-speakers– far more interesting than that.

  • CeBIT 2010: IPFire open source firewall

    The H spoke with IPFire’s Project Leader and Developer Michael Tremer at this year’s CeBIT IT trade show in Hannover, Germany about his open source firewall. IPFire is a Linux distribution that can be booted from a CD or USB drive, or installed to a computer’s hard disk drive.

  • CeBIT 2010: German police to use open source Navit navigation

    According to Martin Schaller, the Navit Project Leader, the German district of Brandenburg is trialling the Navit car navigation system for its Police System. Schaller spoke to The H at CeBIT 2010 about the trial. Navit is an open source, cross-platform car navigation suite that includes a built-in routing engine. Schaller says that, while the system is still considered to be in development, the district will be testing Navit this month with at least three of its cars.

Asia

• First open-source company starts operation

  The Vietnam Open Source Development Joint Stock Company (VINADES., JSC), the first firm operating in the field of open source in the country, made its debut on February 25.

• Facebook becoming more active for Open Source

  Future of Web Apps (FOWA) event saw major companies like Facebook participating. But what was surprising to see was that Facebook focused a lot on open source this year. Facebook recently hired David Recordon to be more active at the open source side of the business. Recordon, who spearheaded the launch of the Open Web Foundation, is Facebook’s first really prominent open-source guru, and when it comes to Facebook’s marketing pitches, the open-source guys have taken a little more coaxing than the iPhone developers or widget-builders, reports Caroline McCarthy of CNET.

Web Browsers

• Web Browser Grand Prix: The Top Five, Tested And Ranked

• ‘Select your browser’ – which browser to choose in Microsoft’s browser ballot?

• Tech Weekly: Opera on the browser ballot, and open source offices

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla issues new Firefox test release

    The software is based on version 1.9.3 of the Gecko browser engine that underlies Firefox. The current Firefox 3.6, and an update called Lorentz, are based on 1.9.2.

    The headline feature of the new preview release is the same for Lorentz, though: out-of-process plug-ins, which means that Adobe Systems Flash Player and the like run in a separate memory compartment to protect the browser overall when they crash. Mozilla hopes people will see how well it works on an OOPP testing page.

  • Researchers Develop 3D Graphics Capability for Firefox

    A group of researchers plans to release a version of the Firefox browser that includes the built-in ability to view 3D graphics, a capability that could open the door for more interactive Web pages from developers.

    Some gaming companies have created plug-ins that allow 3D graphics to be viewed, but the latest method does not require one, which potentially would allow the capability to be used by more people, said Philipp Slusallek, a professor at Saarland University, at the Cebit trade show on Wednesday.

  • Chris Blizzard: Life in the Browser

    Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier, speaks with Chris Blizzard, director of Developer Relations at Mozilla.

  • UK Government Gives Green Light To Use Of Firefox Across Public Sector

    In the light of the recent phishing attack that compromised Twitter accounts of several prominent politicians, the UK government has announced that all its departments will have the freedom to opt for other web browsers as there is no rule about only using the Internet Explorer (IE) web browser.

  • Government departments allowed to use Firefox

    The government has said its departments are free to consider any browser, and should consider open-source software including Firefox.

    According to a parliamentary written answer from Cabinet Office minister Angela Smith, there is no rule that says government departments must use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, even though it is the browser most widely used within Whitehall.

  • A Public Funded “Microsoft Shop?”

    “I work at a public hospital in the computer / technical department and (amongst others) was recently outraged by an email that was sent around our department: ‘(XXXX) District Health Board — Information Services is strategically a Microsoft shop and when talking to staff / customers we are to support this strategy. I no longer want to see comments promoting other Operating Systems.’ We have also been told to remove Firefox found on anyone’s computer unless they have specific authorisation from management to have it installed under special circumstances. Now, I could somewhat understand this if I was working in a company that sold and promoted the use of Microsoft software for financial gain, but I work in the publicly / government funded health system. Several of the IT big-wigs at the DHB are seemingly blindly pro-Microsoft and seem all too quick to shrug off other, perhaps more efficient alternatives. As a taxpayer, I want nothing more than to see our health systems improve and run more efficiently. I am not foolish enough to say all our problems would be solved overnight by changing away from Microsoft’s infrastructure, but I am convinced that if we took less than half the money we spend on licensing Microsoft’s software alone and invested that in training users for an open source system, we would be far better off in the long run. I would very much like to hear Slashdot’s ideas / opinions on this ‘Strategic Direction’ and the silencing of our technical opinions.”

  • Mozilla orders Jäger shot for Firefox engine

Documents

• A Brand Refresh for OpenOffice.org

  During the last 10 years OpenOffice.org™ has evolved to a quite large project in the FLOSS world and a successful product in the office productivity suite market. Together with our product the OpenOffice.org brand spread over the world. This brand has a tradition of quality and it remains faithful to its origins. Instead of a complete new design we started a refresh. It points out the key components and improves the overall impression to gain even more strength and confidence.

• Supporting Document Freedom Day

  The details for Document Freedom Day 2010 have been announced – it’s on March 31st and there will be events all over the world. This should be a year of celebration as well as campaigning, as we have made enormous strides in promoting liberty.

• Working with Graphics Text in OpenOffice.org

Health

• Harris Corporation Delivers Release of CONNECT 2.3, Built Under Contract with the Federal Health

  The open source CONNECT is being widely embraced as a health information exchange solution for NHIN connectivity, with many health enterprises abandoning proprietary solutions and opting instead for the CONNECT open source platform.

• Health IT takes the first step down the open source road

  The CDC access to data is designed to run on NHIN-Connect, a nationwide data sharing network built under a government contract to Harris Corp. using open source tools.

Databases

• PostgreSQL Agenda 2010

  2010 will see PostgreSQL release its first major new version for a long time: version 9.0. The release of version 9.0 is an important milestone in the evolution of PostgreSQL. Integral to this release are new features such as the operation of standby servers in read-only mode (hot standby) and an integrated replication solution.

• What now for MySQL?

  Some of the biggest names on the web use MySQL, including Wikipedia, Facebook, Google and Twitter as well as other technology giants such as Dell and Cisco. Steve Shine from Ingres was also keen to play up the company’s influence in the banking sector and other mission critical applications. “We have major banks in our installed customer base and about 25% of all financial transactions go through an open source platform. One customer uses Ingres for flight and maintenance scheduling,” he says.

CMS/ECM

• Open source ECM platforms bring mobility to market

  Zia Consulting extends and supports ECM applications and has frequently used Alfresco, an open source ECM product, for client applications. The company keeps its own content in an Alfresco repository as well, and wanted to be able to connect to it via smartphones. “We use an Alfresco solution that’s in the cloud, which is very convenient,” says Mike Mahon, president of Zia Consulting, “but we did not want to rely solely on laptops for connectivity when we were on the road. In addition, we wanted to give something back to the Alfresco community. So we decided to develop an app, Fresh Docs for Alfresco, for mobile platforms so that users could access content in Alfresco repositories.”

• Alfresco and VDEL GmbH Partner to Deliver Open Source ECM Solutions to Eastern Europe, Russia, and CIS

  Alfresco is the leading open source alternative for ECM.

• Drupal Founder Critical of SaaS and its Proprietary Nature

  Drupal’s founder is calling for open source in the enterprise and in the cloud. This should be no surprise, coming from someone like Dries Buytaert. But it is still interesting, considering the source and the point he makes about the actual lack of open source in cloud computing.

  [...]

  Dries:

  “….they might allow you to export your data, but they usually don’t allow you to export their underlying code. While a lot of these services might be built on Open Source components, they have a lot more in common with proprietary software vendors than Open Source projects or companies.”

  It’s in Dries view that this model can be disrupted by open source. For example, he says, the Drupal Gardens community improves the overall platform by contributing to it. The goal, as Dries says, is for people to export their Drupal Garden site in their entirety ” the code, the theme and data — and move the platform to any Drupal hosting environment.”

• Is SaaS a friend or foe of open source?

  Even where SaaS companies let customers take back their data, they often don’t let them take the code underlying it, he wrote in a blog post. Data without software is useless.

• Cloud and open source delivers the goods for publishing services provider

  A Melbourne-based publishing services company is using open source and honest-to-goodness cloud computing for a custom, core business application.

Business

• Calling All SMEs Who Need Help Understanding Their Business Assets

  Open source software is now much more widely available than ever before, and many of the tools are robust and reliable. Names such as Apache, Protégé and Linux are well known and respected in the industry. There are, however, a couple of points to be aware of before going down the open source route.

  Firstly, open source does not necessarily mean free of charge. Open source means that you are free to use the software and change and redistribute the source code under certain license conditions. So, to coin a phrase often used by the open source community, open source software is free as in speech, not as in beer! However, many open source software packages are also free of charge, but it is worth checking this as some require a fee and some only provide a basic version free of charge, with useful add-ons requiring a fee.

• The perfect open-source task scheduler

  This last point is where you see the real problem with a cron-based solution. Cron and Task Scheduler were only designed to run regular housekeeping tasks on a single machine, but when you’re providing a service from a collection of machines then every single machine is a single point of failure.

• Intel and Yahoo! spawn open-source ‘Tashi’ cluster

  Backed by Yahoo!, HP, and Intel, the computer science mavens at Carnegie Mellon University have added a new compute cluster to the worldwide Open Cirrus test bed, a collection of clusters designed to explorer the frontiers of interwebs-scale distributed computing.

BSD

• BSD Magazine (2010-03) available: BSD as a desktop (free)

  Experienced users or administrators responsible for several machines or environments, know the difficult demands and challenges of maintaining such an infrastructure. The article outlines the steps involved in creating an internal FreeBSD Update Server.

• BSD Mag

Licensing

• A Big, Linuxy ‘Thank You’ to Matthew Katzer
  

  Matthew Katzer probably didn’t realize that he’d be doing FOSS a favor when he appropriated Robert Jacobsen’s model railroad interface code without attribution. After years of litigation, Katzer agreed to pay $100,000 to settle the case, establishing that free software has actual monetary value.

Openness

• Open-source hardware takes baby steps toward the gadget mainstream

  While there are numerous open-source computer and electronics components available today, only a handful of complete tech gadgets are being developed under an open-source philosophy. However, what exactly defines a hardware project as being open source remains … well, open.

• Open Source Energy Savings

  Now, following the path of so many other open source projects, companies including Red Hat and Cycle Computing are transforming Condor into a product. Condor allows large numbers of computers, whether servers, desktops or engineering workstations, to be used as a massive high-performance or high-throughput computing facility.

  “Condor enables open and cost-effective high throughput computing to environments scaling up to 30,000 processors,” says Jason Stowe, CEO of Cycle Computing, which offers support and management tools for Condor.

Security

• Terror Begins at Home

  Fearmongering politicians are scoring cheap political points at the expense of the American people.

Environment

• Number of bugs in Britain’s soil rises by nearly 50% in 10 years

  Unnoticed by the people of Britain, a transformation has been happening beneath our feet. In the first study of its kind, scientists have analysed the soil the country depends on.

  In just the top 8cm (3in) of dirt, soil scientists estimate there are 12.8 quadrillion (12,800 million million) living organisms, weighing 10m tonnes, and, incredibly, that the number of these invertebrates – some just a hair’s breadth across – which in effect make the soil has increased by nearly 50% in a decade. At the same time, however, the diversity of life in the earth appears to have reduced.

• Yemen threatens to chew itself to death over thirst for narcotic qat plant

  Most experts predict Sana’a, the fastest-growing capital in the world at 7% a year, will run out of economically viable water supplies by 2017. That is the same year the World Bank says Yemen will cease earning income from its oil, which currently accounts for three-quarters of the state’s revenues.

Finance

• Citi Warns of Withdrawal Gate

  Seen on a recent Citibank (C) statement: “Effective April 1, 2010, we reserve the right to require (7) days advance notice before permitting a withdrawal from all checking accounts. While we do not currently exercise this right and have not exercised it in the past, we are required by law to notify you of this change.”

• JPMorgan (NYSE:JPM) Says Buy Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC)

  Basing their recommendation on government support being removed from some types of deposits, JPMorgan (NYSE:JPM) says investors should look at Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC) options because they should do better than their weaker competitors as a result.

• Opinion: Former JPMorgan Chase (NYSE:JPM) Partner Malcom Calvert Battling Insider Trading Charges

  The battle by Malcolm Calvert over charges he was involved with insider trading at the Cazenove unit of JPMorgan Chase (NYSE:JPM) continues in London, as his lawyer communicated to a jury in London that there wasn’t any evidence concerning Calvert partaking in insider trading.

• JPMorgan continues to bite the hand that feeds it

  For the biggest banks, 2009 was a year of humility. In the U.S., top executives and millionaire traders were denounced by the Obama administration, Congress and the media for refusing to give up their bonuses.

• Striking Greeks fight back against austerity plan

  Tens of thousands of striking Greek workers took to the streets today, some throwing stones at police, in a defiant show of protest against austerity measures aimed at averting the debt-plagued country’s economic collapse.

  Riot police responded with teargas when, in sporadic bursts, masked youths charged them in Athens city centre. The violence coincided with a general strike that shut down public services and closed off Greece to the outside world.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• DMCA Amendment Proposed For UK

  “During today’s debate in the UK’s House of Lords on the much-criticized Digital Economy Bill, the unpopular Clause 17 (which would have allowed the government to alter copyright law much more easily than it currently can) was voted out in favor of a DMCA-style take-down system for websites and ISPs. The new amendment known as 120A sets up a system whereby a copyright owner could force an ISP to block certain websites who allegedly host or link to infringing material or face being taken before the High Court and made to pay the copyright owner’s legal fees. This amendment was tabled by the Liberal Democrat party, which had so far been seen as the defenders of the internet and with the Conservative party supporting them. The UK’s Pirate Party and Open Rights Group have both strongly criticized this new amendment.”

• Audiobook DRM versus the patrons of the Cleveland Library

  This installment of the Brads webcomic shows the 22 steps a reader has to take in order to borrow a DRM-crippled audiobook from the public library. A compelling argument for libraries to boycott this stuff.

• The Brads – Why DRM Doesn’t Work

• Confirmed: Lib Dems and Conservatives force web blocking into the Digital Economy Bill

  Despite firm warnings from ourselves, Consumer Focus and others, Liberal Democrat and Tory peers Lord Clement Jones and Howard pushed through an amendment allowing the courts to order web blocking for ‘substantially infringing’ websites.

• The UK’s DMCA; Clause 17 falls, but at what cost?

  During another intense session in the House of Lords this afternoon a vote was finally held on the controversial Clause 17 of the UK’s Digital Economy Bill. This clause would have allowed the Secretary of State to amend the UK’s copyright law with a lot less oversight from parliament than usual. The government did not hide the fact that this provision would be used to clamp down on unlicensed file-sharers in various ways as the industry demanded. However, there was a bright side; the clause would have permitted Lord Mandelson (or more likely his successor) to do as he promised back in October and relax the UK’s copyright law by bringing in the ‘fair use’ exemptions it so desperately needs.

• Brits: tell the LibDem Peers not to bring web-censorship to Britain!

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• JASRAC wants to charge YOU for tweeting song lyrics!

  In a completely boneheaded move, the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC) announced that they want to set up a system to charge people who tweet any part of song lyric.

  As reported (in the Japanese language) on J-cast news, they haven’t decided on the details yet, but JASRAC insists it’s the law and everyone has to obey with their decree.

• Movie rental kiosks hit with legal threats

  A Southern Indiana prosecutor has threatened criminal charges unless stores with DVD rental kiosks remove R-rated movies and other material considered harmful to children.

• Dear Macmillan, You Don’t Embrace The New By Trying To Protect The Old

  One of the reasons why economic forces work the way that they do, and the reason why infinite goods with zero marginal cost get pushed in price towards zero, is that buyers implicitly understand the difference between scarce goods and abundant goods. They implicitly recognize the marginal cost of making another good, and they mentally price products accordingly. Pretending that consumers don’t do that is assuming that consumers are stupid. And that’s an even bigger mistake than looking backwards instead of forward.

• RealNetworks Agrees To Pay $4.5 Million In Legal Fees To Hollywood Over RealDVD; Gives Up

  So what did Hollywood accomplish here? It shut down a software product that allows people to backup the DVDs they legally own — not to distribute them. In the meantime, of course, there are a bunch of DVD ripping programs out there that have no such restrictions. In other words, Hollywood’s brilliant legal strategists just pushed anyone who wants to back up their movies to use solutions that make it easier for them to share those movies with others.

• ACTA

  • Danish Politicians Questioning Why Denmark Is So Against ACTA Transparency

    One of the really amazing things in witnessing the reactions among various politicians to the ACTA negotiations is realizing how out of the loop they are as well. They’re often just as angry that things are being done in the name of their country that they have no visibility into. Of course, this adds to the impression that this whole process is not about figuring out what’s best for the people of each country, but an end run around the democratic lawmaking process, pushed mainly by big industries (led by the entertainment and pharmaceutical industries).

  • The ACTA Transparency Scorecard

  • By Its Fruit

    When the time comes, the apologists for ACTA will then be able to claim that it is not a wave of new legislation designed to shore up the business models of 20th century corporations at the expense of 21st century innovation and third-world needs. Instead they will claim ACTA merely “harmonises existing law globally”.