06.07.11
Posted in News Roundup at 6:48 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Richard Stallman is the ultimate nerdish power geek.
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Server
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Kernel Space
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Unlike ten years ago, college graduates today are finishing school equipped with some Linux knowledge and preference.
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Linux Foundation will award five scholarships and host a student-focused day at LinuxCon designed to help train the developers who will shape the next 20 years of computing
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Applications
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Android as a mobile platform is gaining more and more popularity day by day. However, Google is still yet to design a program that allows its users to synchronize their media across their phone and computers.
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Proprietary
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Just under a year ago I wrote about how Adobe had abandoned 64-bit Linux, at least temporarily. Linux users who chose to run a 64-bit OS were left with a range of unsatisfactory choices: use an outdated beta with known security vulnerabilities; run an FOSS alternative, most likely gnash, despite limits in functionality and compatibility; or run a 32-bit browser in a 64-bit operating system. At the time the move was surprising since reviews of the 64-bit beta, like this one by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of Computer World, were quite favorable.
Three months later on September 15, 2010, Adobe announced a preview of Flash Player “Square”, development code for an upcoming release of a native 64-bit version of Flash Player 10.2. Unfortunately Preview 3, released on November 10, 2010, was the last Square release. Flash Player 10.3 was released for 32-bit platforms only.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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The Wine development release 1.3.21 is now available.
What’s new in this release:
* Support for installation rollbacks in MSI.
* 8- and 16-bit bitmap formats in the DIB engine.
* Fixes in the XInput2 mouse support.
* Better support for text shaping in Uniscribe.
* Improvements to the Item common dialog.
* More MSVC runtime functions.
* Various bug fixes.
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Games
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E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, is officially kicking off today in Los Angeles and will be running through Thursday. This, along with the Game Developers Conference, is one of the key times of the year for the electronic gaming industry. A number of game studios will be announcing new titles and other great announcements, but will there be anything Linux related?
Only time will tell if there are any Linux-related announcements to be found this week. If we know of any, it’s of course under NDAs (Non-Disclosure Agreements) at the moment. But here’s a few random notes for what can be said at this tim..
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- Linux Game Publishing is still working on something, but they won’t be at E3 and this next port of theirs with almost 100% certainty isn’t a triple-A title.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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I’m at the Platform 11 sprint at Randa. We are here to discuss and shape the future of the KDE platform. It’s the first meeting of this kind since Trysil five years ago. Four people who were at Trysil also made it to Randa, including a respectable dinosaur, but it’s great to also have new and very new faces around.
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Many scientists use the LaTeX typesetting system as the preferred way to write publications. Among the various widely used add-ons, one special mention is the TikZ language, a powerful extension which is used to create publication-quality figures. Of course, like LaTeX, it takes its time to learn. The good news is that, like with LaTeX there is KDE software to fill in this gap: KTikZ, a graphical front-end to TikZ.
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GNOME Desktop
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Like many of you, I split my time between two excellent browsers: Firefox and Chrome. Neither feels really all so native in GNOME3 — although Firefox, as it mimics GTK+2 by default, fits in just a little better. Every time I started Chrome, however, I felt a bit frustrated with how much of a sore thumb it stuck out and decided to do something about it.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Verdict:
Version 15 of Red Hat’s community project Linux distribution Fedora showed great stability, and it was simple to add applications onto the platform. We had no problem with hardware drivers and the new GNOME 3 GUI was easy to use, even though initially we did seem to be blundering about. Fedora would suit corporate road warriors who would like a combined Fedora-Windows dual-boot system (in case of OS failure), or anybody interested enough to see how far Linux has advanced compared to Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. Support for each Fedora version is limited to 13 months, so corporates would not roll Fedora out except to expert users. In any case, there’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) available, which eventually gets to use features that have cut their teeth in Fedora.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu corporate sponsor Canonical is developing a new Ubuntu Friendly hardware validation program for desktops, netbooks and laptops. The program will allow users to test hardware and the results of those tests will then be used to validate systems as “Ubuntu Friendly”. The program will be developed in parallel with the development of Ubuntu 11.10, Oneiric Ocelot, and should be in place by the time Oneiric Ocelot is released in October.
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The man behind the distribution Mark Shuttleworth already had a few ideas to earn money with the project. Ubuntu includes a Music Store, a Cloud Service for data storage and synchronization and commercial apps in the Software Center (which is quite similar to Apple’s App Store).
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I guess the biggest enhancement for me is not so much related to Ubuntu. It’s that I completely deleted my Windows partition, with everything in it, i.e., everything I had before is now gone.
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Used responsibly, instant messaging (IM) offers the benefit of instant communication and collaboration on the corporate intranet. However, many companies, fearing IM’s adverse affect on productivity, tweak their corporate firewalls to block all ports ferrying IM traffic. A better approach is to control the IM server by bringing it in-house. The Java-based cross-platform Openfire application makes it easy to host your own instant messaging server.
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Events
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Hacking, learning, talking, walking and dining – The Linux Bier Wanderung (Linux Beer Hike) is all this and much more. Each summer around 50 Linux enthusiasts meet up for a week’s holiday. This year the 13th annual event takes the penguin-friends to Austria, specifically to the small village of Lanersbach in the Tux valley [1].
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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With the advancement of web technologies, it is not surprising that the web and web applications are increasingly playing an important part of our experience on the computer. In the coming week, Google is releasing its first Chromebooks – netbooks which are based completely on a cloud OS and in which the traditional desktop has been replaced by the web browser. Mozilla too has released the first concept of something along that line.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Michael Meeks published some interesting statistics on the completeness of the OpenOffice source code contributed to the Apache Software Foundation. His numbers actually came from a post from Christian Lohmaier to The Document Foundation discussion mailing list.
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Oracle’s donation of the OpenOffice.org to the Apache Software Foundation does no favours for the users or developers of open office suites, says Richard Hillesley…
Speaking at the time of Sun’s decision to release Java under the GNU General Public License (GPL), Marc Fleury, the founder of JBoss, claimed that “IBM reacted negatively” to the Sun announcement because “IBM’s approach to open source is what we call ‘strip mining’, which is to let the open source community do things – then IBM comes and packages them, adds proprietary code, and markets the result,” and concluded that “they have this dual strategy of proprietary products and low-end open source.”
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CMS
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His solution is a proposal to pull together a crack team of journalists, designers and technologists to devise some open source software that would combine the best elements of the Huffington Post, WordPress and I Can Haz Cheezburger.
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Education
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I have long saved money in education by using GNU/Linux on PCs and on thin clients with zero licensing costs. I always chuckle when I read the anguish of some people trying to eke out similar savings with that other OS. Yes you can save money by using thin clients with that other OS because thin clients are cheaper and CALs are cheaper than full licences (just barely) but the maths is really simple with GNU/Linux. $0 beats all other licensing regimes of that other OS. No need to agonize over four plans each with negotiated prices to work things out. Install GNU/Linux and go.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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This is where GNU Free Call most clearly differs from most others who are looking to replace Skype. As GFC is already designed for use with any SIP capable client, we have no interest in re-inventing protocols or even how VOIP clients work. This is not the problems we are looking to solve. Rather than focusing on having people join or connect through yet another specific service provider to mediate their communications (whether iptel.org, ekiga.net, etc), we are interested in enabling anyone to discover and communicate with each other directly without the need for a mediating service at all. It is how users are empowered to discover each other which is hence most important in GFC’s design. This is best illustrated by the GFC client, which is in reality contact focused rather than communication driven. This I think becomes more clear from the GFC GUI design (and experimental client), as illustrated here.
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Project Releases
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VideoLAN and the VLC development team present VLC 1.1.10, a minor release of the 1.1 branch. This release brings a rewritten pulseaudio output, an important number of small Mac OS X fixes, the removal of the font-cache building for the freetype module on Windows and updates of codecs.
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Though it doesn’t typically come with EVERY Linux distro (it really should..), vlc is one of the most popular, and powerful open source media playing programs around.
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Public Services/Government
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Systems integrator (SI) Computacenter has taken fire in a growing bust-up over open source software at Bristol City Council, which MPs have been told proves the government’s open source ICT strategy is unworkable, writes Mark Ballard.
In a letter to MPs sitting on the Public Administration Select Committee, open source supplier Sirius Corporation said Bristol City Council had ditched its latest effort on the advice of its supplier Computacenter.
Mark Taylor, CEO at Sirius, accused Computacenter of skewing an open source proof-of-concept pilot in favour of vendor partner Microsoft.
Taylor told MPs this showed how the UK’s “oligopoly” of systems integrators ensured Cabinet Office open source policy “cannot and will not work”.
Computacenter and Sirius bid for the Bristol deal after the Council Cabinet voted to adopt an open source computing infrastructure last September, said the letter.
However Sirius claims it was thrown off the project after the two disagreed over its viabililty.
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Money is now much tighter in the public sector, so we’re wondering how the council is going to pay for the Office 2010 licence, particularly as council tax has been capped. Will public services and/or staff be cut to pay for the Counts Louse’s largesse to Microsoft? Perhaps someone – councillor or officer – from BCC would like to comment below.
Finally, another indirect effect of BCC’s return to the closed source fold is that this will have a negative effect on efforts to have Open Document Format (ODF) adopted as the standard means of exchange for public documents – something that is a reality in some of the UK’s EU partners.
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More SMEs testified in secret to the PASC inquiry in May. They were fearful their complaints about the systems integrators’ oligopoly – said to control 80% of the UK’s £19bn-a-year public sector ICT – would lead to their exclusion from government contracts.
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Taylor’s letter to MPs alleged Bristol City Council had, in September 2010, asked its supplier at the time, Capgemini, to complete a pilot of the open source software stack by November. Capgemini simply ignored the request, said Taylor’s statement.
Capgemini was unavailable for comment.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Hardware
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Robotics wizard and two-time Battlebots champion Christian Carlberg first achieved notoriety shredding competitors’ robots with Minion’s 14-inch saw blade on one of TV’s first reality shows. Now he’s all fired up to begin shipping what may prove to be the “world’s first open source flashlight.”
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Programming
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Developers building atop platforms like iOS and Twitter should go in with eyes wide open, said Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson, who reminded entrepreneurs about the dangers of relying on someone else’s APIs. In a talk last night before an audience of entrepreneurs, Wilson said developers need to plan for the day when platform owners work against their interests.
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By ManuSporny On June 3, 2011 In RDFa, Semantic Web With 41 Comments Permanent Link to The False Choice of Schema.orgPermalink
Full disclosure: I am the current Chair of the group at the World Wide Web Consortium that created RDFa. That said, all of this is my personal opinion – I am not speaking on behalf of the W3C or my company, Digital Bazaar. I am biased, but also have been around long enough to know when freedom of choice on the Web is being threatened.
Some of you may have heard that Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have just released a new uber-vocabulary for the Web. As the site explains, if you use schema.org, you will get a better looking search listing on all of the search listings for Bing, Google and Yahoo. While this may sound good on the surface, it is very bad news for choice on the Web. There are few points that I’d like to make in this post:
1. RDFa and Microdata markup are similar for the schema.org use cases – they should both be supported.
2. Microdata doesn’t scale as easily as RDFa – early successes will be followed by stagnation and vocabulary lock-in.
3. All of us have the power to change this as the Web community – let’s do that. We will release a plan shortly.
The schema.org site makes it appear as if you must pick sides and use Microdata if you want preferential treatment. This is a false choice!
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Security
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Finance
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Two burly Collier County sheriff’s deputies and a homeowner’s attorney strode into the Bank of America branch on Davis Boulevard in Naples with a court order and an ultimatum for Manager Erich Fahrner.
Fahrner’s choice: Write out a check for $2,534 in attorney’s fees for the couple wrongfully slapped with a foreclosure lawsuit by the bank, or a William C. Hoff Storage moving crew waiting outside would start hauling out furniture to be sold at public auction.
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It’s telling that the first salvo is being leaked through Wall Street’s favorite reporter. Now it’s possible the firm was using Sorkin as a one-man focus group to test and refine their messaging and have him all prepped to go. Sorkin says he’s been in communication with Goldman officials “for the past several weeks”. But this may also indicate that the firm intends to make its case to the press and then let the press persuade the public.
I see that as a sign of serious weakness. The Levin committee provides a great deal of documentation to the public as well as a detailed summary of its findings. By contrast, Wall Street firms make an art form of cherry picking numbers and presenting them in isolation. And journalists don’t have enough knowledge of tradecraft to push back in a serious way.
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Internet/Net Neutrality (Canada)
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Every time you think the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, the CRTC, has finally been chastised and in the process, learned a lesson, the bozos who run the circus come up with a new and silly act meant to help the broadcasters. And, as is usual with these folks, somehow ends up diminishing our choices as consumers and costing us more money in the long run.
Last time the genius’ at the CRTC had the brilliant notion that behemoths Rogers and Bell should have the right to tell their sub-buyers like Teksavvy what they could charge for internet use. This blew up in the CRTC’s face when most Canadians saw through the money grab by the big providers and began a protest that made the suggestion disappear faster than a Liberal leader in the 21st century.
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The Conservatives hold their convention later this week with 80 resolutions being considered for possible debate in the plenary session. The resolutions are proposed by local chapters and at least two focus on Internet access and net neutrality. Resolution P-063 (Durham) on broadband states:
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Departments and agencies are hoarding hundreds of patents and copyrights each year, violating the federal government’s long-standing rules on so-called intellectual property, says a new report.
For more than 10 years, federal policy has been to assign contractors the rights to any intellectual property produced during their work for departments and agencies.
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The government delivered its Speech from the Throne on Friday, which included a commitment to “introduce and seek swift passage of copyright legislation that balances the needs of creators and users.”
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Copyrights
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The music industry has backflipped on its long-held demands that repeat music pirates be disconnected from the internet as a new UN report declares such a policy would be a breach of human rights and international law.
But film studios, represented by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT), are still backing the controversial measures, arguing protection of intellectual property is a human right. It has released research saying film piracy costs the Australian economy $1.37 billion a year.
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Revisions to the Copyright Act are essential to Canada’s digital economy strategy as incentive to move the creative economy forward, and also to satisfy demands by its trading partners that Canada implement the WIPO “Internet Treaties”. Bill C-32, which died with the election call, included many new exceptions from infringement and some confusing language that would have led to costly litigation. It was clear that many proposed changes, some unintentionally, eroded creators’ rights.
Arts and culture industries provide over 630,000 jobs and contribute $46 billion to Canada’s economy. Copyright revision should be supportive of these industries, big and small, and encourage their growth. The works of creators are the foundation of all such industries. A bill like C-32 would make it significantly more difficult for creators to carry on their copyright-reliant businesses, cause them significant income losses, and be a real barrier to the continuing growth of Canadian digital content and Canada’s digital economy.
HUGE explosion on the Sun on June 7, 2011
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in Novell, OpenSUSE at 5:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Hardships for OpenSUSE following the Microsoft patent deal at the end of 2006; we take stock of the past fortnight’s news and predict where the project is going
OPENSUSE news is relatively scarce (things dropping off) and it includes stuff like security issues and HOWTOs [1, 2]. Novell’s PR department seems to be somewhat defunct, which doesn’t help this project either.
In a rare post from Novell’s PR blog (mostly inactive these days) there is this statement about “Oracle’s Contribution of OpenOffice.org to Apache”. It generally speaks about LibreOffice (which has some correlation/connection with Go-OO). Being an IBM partner, Novell feels obliged to state: “SUSE is looking forward to the future contributions of IBM and potentially others into this new ASF incubator project, but would certainly have liked to see such contributions go directly to LibreOffice. We will follow the incubation process very closely to understand future opportunities and possibilities which can improve our offerings for our users and customers.”
“Novell’s PR department seems to be somewhat defunct, which doesn’t help this project either.”One of the promotional Novell blogs has gone rather quiet, with just a few updates here and there (about SUSE Studio). Thanks to Google’s funding (GSoC) there is still some development activity making it into the Planet [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]. Google unfortunately gave some money to Mono in the past; OpenSUSE itself is being used as a ramp for Mono intrusion. There are generally positive sides to this GNU/Linux distribution (like medical spins [1, 2]), but the issue is that OpenSUSE helps Mono and SUSE, which helps Microsoft make money out of GNU/Linux and make it normal for Free software to be taxed by Microsoft.
Richard Hillesley has this good new article titled “Novell’s open source legacy – wake up, little SUSE” (Hillesley is a Mono sceptic). Yes, the project is getting smaller and it needs to consider becoming independent (which it is not).
The major part of Novell’s investment in open source was SuSE. Soon after the Novell acquisition SuSE became SUSE with a capital “U”, and Novell remodeled the SUSE Linux offerings with an enterprise desktop offering (SLED), an enterprise server offering (SLES), and a community edition (openSUSE), which plays the same role as Fedora plays for Red Hat, prototyping technologies for enterprise editions.
The image and fate of SUSE among the wider community, if not among its friends in other developer communities, has been coloured by Novell’s policy mishaps – love-ins with Microsoft, patent indemnifications and ‘mixed source’ portfolios, and the undercutting of Red Hat support contracts. But SUSE can hope for redemption with its new-found independence and reputation for solidity and technical excellence, assuming it takes a leaf from Red Hat’s book, rediscovers its free and open source heritage and sells it as a virtue, not a hindrance.
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The openSUSE board is currently working on the practicalities of such a development which “as they are very determined to make it happen, is therefore very likely to happen – I personally hope before the next openSUSE conference”, says Jos Poortvliet, the openSUSE community manager.
Amid lack of strategy and downtimes, Poortvliet does damage control. He is an employee in charge of the OpenSUSE community/activities/PR along with more senior and technical people like Andreas Jaeger who help the project orientation-wise and coach Poortvliet. He announced this first milestone in an official blog which is hardly active anymore, except items like this one (the volunteers make up for it, along with developers). It’s a shame about the OpenSUSE Web site. It used to be well populated, but now it is mostly Poortvliet and a small ‘choir’ there (and he posts about other subjects too while not busy at Attachmate).
We are not entirely sure what will happen to OpenSUSE. There is no clear obligation to it from Attachmate. Currently it relies on the goodwill of some people and on GSoC. Why not just fork it and go independent? █
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Posted in Novell at 4:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: More Novell vice presidents such as Dave Cutler and Carlos Montero-Luque are confirmed to have left; they won’t be obligated to Microsoft anymore
AS we explained just over a month go, Novell layoffs are not human causalities. It is most likely that all those who lost their job at Novell will simply find another job elsewhere. That’s capitalism. Novell as a public company is dead, especially after a deal with Microsoft put the patents in Microsoft’s hands. The Microsoft deal obviously left it robbed and naked, just like Linspire. They just never learn, do they? Anyway, news about Novell is extremely scarce now, but it allows us to see who is going where.
Looking elsewhere at what happened to departing Novell staff (Attachmate installed a new leadership, more obedient to other causes), Ivancic gets assigned as follows:
THE Attachmate Group has unveiled a new executive leadership team across its global business units, including the appointment of Boris Ivancic as vice-president and general manager for Asia-Pacific.
More here: “The Attachmate Group today announced a new executive leadership team across its global business units, with the appointment of Boris Ivancic as vice president and general manager for Asia Pacific. In his expanded role, Ivancic will be responsible for driving customer success and developing market opportunities for Attachmate, NetIQ, Novell and SUSE across Australia, New Zealand, China, India, Japan and Singapore.”
One who participated in the sale of Managed Objects to the now-dead Novell is making his move (also noted here):
His accomplishments include achieving double digit year on year growth at both CA and Managed Objects, managing the successful acquisition of Platinum Technologies and Sterling Software on behalf of CA, and participating in the sale of Managed Objects to Novell Inc.
Carlos Montero-Luque, a Novell Vice President, makes his move as well:
Montero-Luque brings to Apperian an extensive background in engineering. He joins the company from Novell, where he held several positions, including Vice President, Business and Product Management for SUSE Linux; Chief Technical Officer for Security and Identity Management; and Vice President, Engineering, for the ZENworks product suite.
Someone who is labelled “the partner sales manager for the Quebec business unit of Novell Inc.” is mentioned here:
During his tenure, he grew the company sales from $8 million to $50 million. Before joining Averna, Mr. Zuchowski was the partner sales manager for the Quebec business unit of Novell Inc.
Steve Hale, whose departure from Novell we mentioned here before, gets mentioned here:
Most recently, he served as vice president, global channel sales, at Novell in the security, systems management and operating platform group. He’s also managed worldwide and regional channel programs at companies including Microsoft and F5 Networks.
Another Novell Vice President, Dave Cutler, finds a new home based on the report which says: “Cutler was most recently Appoints Veteran Customer Services Leader Dave Cutler to Vice President of Worldwide Customer Support Vice President, Global Technical Support, at Novell, Inc.” See the official press release about this appointment.
This collapse of Novell does not prevent some companies from quoting a vice president, Scott Lewis. This says that “[i]n early May, for example, a desire to consolidate Novell skill sets prompted Novacoast to buy another Novell solution provider, Data Technique Inc., which has developed an innovative cloud identity management service.
“In a statement announcing the merger, Novell Inc. vice president of partner marketing Scott Lewis, said: “Novacoast’s acquisition of Data Technique Inc. is a significant channel development for Novell customers. This merger combines the reach and service levels of two strong Novell Partners for our shared customers.”
Scott Lewis is apparently still at the company. At Novell’s PR blog it is only Amie that’s left (as noted before, it is just more PR for proprietary products), so maybe a lot of the PR staff got laid off). Despite activities like this demo at Novell’s campus, a lot of the staff that worked there was laid off. The account Novelldemo keeps uploading many more videos on Vibe and there are several more from Novell Polska. Maybe a spillover of whatever remained in the marketing pipeline? Either way, we are seeing the death of Novell in the news after almost 5 years of the “Boycott Novell” push.
It would be useful to have a list of who stays and who walks away or gets laid off. This would help determine what Attachmate, a Microsoft partner, is likely to do with SUSE and other assets (more on that in the next post). Attachmate is slicing the company known as “Novell” and shelving it under other management. Assets are being folded (or renamed/rebranded/reassigned) to be vanished from their former identities. Growth by layoffs? Surely not. █
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Posted in Antitrust, Courtroom, Mail, Microsoft, Novell, Office Suites at 3:17 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Customers continue to replace GroupWise and Techrights wonders what Attachmate will do about the WordPerfect case
Attachmate, a Microsoft partner, has bought Novell while leaving Mono out in the cold and letting Microsoft take the patents. The thing is, Attachmate has hardly said anything about GroupWise. A tricky situation for sure as the product keeps bleeding. EAT is the latest large user to dump it. From the news: “The chain rolled out the cloud-based Apps productivity suite seven months ago to help meet its goal of doubling the size of its business. It replaced a 10-year-old Novell GroupWise system.”
There is more about it here and here:
The migration involved a move away from Novell Groupwise.
Cesar Ramanauskas, systems engineer at EAT, says in a blog post, “In preparation for our goal of doubling in size, EAT migrated to Google Apps for Business, after more than a decade of using Novell GroupWise.”
Inaction from Attachmate cannot help much, can it? But the elephants in the room are actually SUSE, the SCO case, and the Microsoft case. Will Attachmate dump the case against its partner, Microsoft? We are not sure what might happen with the antitrust case because Attachmate never mentions it and the Microsoft booster portrays it as just a “headache” when he argues:
But Microsoft’s antitrust problems aren’t ending just yet. Another old case involving WordPerfect, the once widely used word prcoessor, has been resurrected by a U.S. Court of Appeals ruling overturning a previous judgment in favor of Microsoft and allowing the case being pursued by Novell to proceed. Novell, now owned by Attachmate, owned WordPerfect for a couple of years in the mid-1990s before selling it to current owner Corel.
Some of us think that Microsoft toys around with Skype and Nvidia simply because of loose/lenient oversight. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Mono, Novell at 2:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Mono is being phased out of sight and out of existence despite deparate attempts from Microsoft proponents to breathe life back into it
EARLIER today we wrote about Microsoft betraying those who adhered to its APIs, including Mono/Moonlight boosters. The biggest Microsoft boosters at Novell created a poorly-funded startup called “Xamarin” [1, 2, 3]. It is almost nowhere in sight*, except for the ‘Microsoft press’ (advertising) and other Microsoft-boosting ‘news’ sites (pushing Microsoft promotion as ‘news’). Mono is clearly beneficial to Microsoft, but it is good for nothing else. Its CEO is a former Microsoft employee, as we noted before. Part of the funding comes from a Microsoft MVP. Techrights wishes to draw attention to the following new articles:
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As .NET’s sun sets, its open-source counterpart Mono may be fading on Linux, too.
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Let us hope that the first article’s contention is correct and that, given C++ advantages over Mono, Tomboy will be removed from Ubuntu. There is no future for Mono and even Microsoft is not rescuing Mono. █
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* These are just the only new articles we found about it; there is no intent to hide anything as means of fitting to a generalisation. Upon second look (just before finalising this post), Timothy Prickett Morgan did touch on the subject (more recently), albeit in a different context:
Just after Attachmate’s takeover of Novell and just before it did the breaking of that company into two divisions, SUSE selling Linux and Novell selling everything else, Attachmate told the people working on the open source Mono project they were no longer needed at the company. But it is a lot harder to kill an open source project than taking away techie paychecks, and a new project has sprung up to carry on the Mono work.
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 2:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
(ODF | PDF | English/original)
Resumen: Hacer frente a la falacia de que un aumento en las solicitudes de patentes (monopolio) es indicativo o un éxito.
Las patentes de software son el único mecanismo que puede evitar que los sistemas de bajo costo sigan ganando terreno. China debe rechazar las patentes de software por razones de competencia, sino que sucumbe a la presión para cumplir con algunas reglas universales o sufrir represalias, es por ello que China tiene que ignorar sus propios intereses. No es un problema sólo para China, sin embargo.
Aquí en Europa tenemos muchos abogados de patentes celosos que buscan nuevas maneras de hacer dinero (o un euro). Para ellos, patentes no son algo diseñado para alentar la publicación o la innovación, para ellos, son sólo negocio. La EPO (Oficina Europea de Patentes) dice que les da más negocios[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-03/fiserv-epo-ihop-one-less-nemesis-netflix-intellectual-property.html], lo que significa que la EPO está agravando más y más productos, perjudicando a los consumidores y desarrolladores al mismo tiempo, mediante la adición de una maraña de litigios y la burocracia. Para citar un nuevo informe de Bloomberg:
Las solicitudes de patentes presentadas en la Oficina Europea de Patentes en 2010 aumentaron un 11 por ciento respecto al año anterior, según un comunicado de la EPO.
¡Que vergüenza! Esto sólo puede indicar que la barra está bajando los impuestos de patentes van en aumento. Esto no es una medida de la innovación real, porque, en todo caso, las patentes impiden innovadores.
Este problema con las patentes de software en Europa[http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/Software_Patents_in_Europe] es más explorada por la FFII (Fundación para una Infraestructura de Información Libre) a la luz de los mensajes como éste[http://patlit.blogspot.com/2011/06/that-non-paper-on-unified-patent.html] sobre lo que acaba de proponerse presionado por las EMPRESAS EXTRANJERAS Y MONOPOLISTAS. Ellos quieren ser capaces de demandar a más compañías con más facilidad, o al menos aplicar la fuerza coercitiva a nivel mundial.
La EPO no necesita ir por el mismo tobogán que la USPTO (Oficina de Patentes y Marcas de los Estados Unidos), que ya está adquiriendo una gran notoriedad. Los funcionarios tratan de hacer girar la crisis como algo que no lo es por la falsa promesa de “aumentar la calidad de las patentes.” Es una admisión implícita de que las patentes son de “baja calidad”, lo que ello pueda significar. Esperamos que nos va a ayude a mostrar que la USPTO está quebrada en el próximo par de posts. █
Translation produced by Eduardo Landaveri, the esteemed administrator of the Spanish portal of Techrights.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, IBM, OIN, Patents at 2:44 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Lo que Europa necesita no es lo mismo que los Estados Unidos necesita.
(ODF | PDF | English/original)
Resumen: Las noticias sugirien que IBM está mayormente entre los que trajeron el Intercambio de Patentes a Europa.
IBM es una empresa sobre las que tenemos sentimientos ambivalentes. Por un lado, IBM ayuda a que el fenómeno del software libre (abarcándolo más bien de atacarlo), pero por otra parte, IBM sigue siendo una empresa de software propietario en su núcleo y por lo tanto, aboga por políticas que entran en conflicto con una mentalidad/doctrina de software libre. No es ningún secreto que IBM prefiere mantener las patentes de software[http://techrights.org/2009/08/12/ibm-promoting-software-patents/] y su estrategia para defender el software libre en el proceso abarca sólo el software que IBM depende. OIN (Invención de Red Abierta) y RPX[http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/RPX], por ejemplo, no hacen más que legitimar el sistema al mismo tiempo tratar de la reforma en algunos aspectos (la disuasión demandas), especialmente en formas que son beneficiosas para IBM y sus aliados. En la superficie, esto puede parecer bien. OIN hace que el deteriorado sistema actual de un poco menos letal. Sin embargo, distrae la atención de una mejor y permanente solucion al problema en cuestión. En particular, la OIN hace casi nada para destacar los problemas fundamentales con las patentes de software. Una mirada a sus partidarios muestra por qué.
Recientemente escribimos sobre una iniciativa cuyo impacto es muy similar[http://techrights.org/2011/06/01/patent-mopolies-in-the-eu_es/]. El problema es que ahora esta iniciativa va más allá a Australia y el Reino Unido, que podría, a su vez, ayudar a validar algunas patentes allí. Para citar el presidente de la FFII (Fundación para una Infraestructura de Información Libre)[http://twitter.com/zoobab/statuses/76318976887619584]:
IBM validaría sus patentes de software a través de la Peer2Patent en el Reino Unido:
El punto de enfoque del Intercambio de Patentes está en cierto modo empeorando las cosas. Toma patentes que ya pueden ser dudosa y luego se extiende a los demás a despedir a uno o reforzarlas. Esto es lo que una publicación pro-patentes[http://www.managingip.com/Article/2840709/Managing-Patents-Archive/IBM-prominent-in-peer-to-patent-pilot.html] escribe sobre este tema:
Las primeras 20 solicitudes de patentes en la salida a bolsa del Reino Unido piloto de Intercambio de Patentes se han publicado en línea
Ahora es el momento de voluntarios para regar jardín o cosecharlas para aquellos de la talla de IBM, ¿eh? Bueno, citando este informe[http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/news/patent-site-broadens-public-access-to-review-process-30819], el presidente de la FFII señala[http://twitter.com/zoobab/statuses/76321802871255040] que:
Las solicitudes de patentes concedidas después de usar el sitio web de revisión intercambio de patentes será potencialmente más fuertes.
Nosotros explicamos nuestros puntos de vista[http://techrights.org/2011/05/25/peer-to-patent-in-the-uk/] sobre el tema muchas veces antes. APOYE A LA FFII, NO AL ENFOQUE de Intercambio de Patentes. La solución al problema de patentes depende de los intereses creados; para IBM, las “malas” patentes son el problema. Para Microsoft, las patentes “anti-Microsoft” son el problema. Para la gran mayoría de la gente, TODAS las patentes de software (tal vez las patentes en general, dependiendo de la zona/país) son un problema. █
Translation produced by Eduardo Landaveri, the esteemed administrator of the Spanish portal of Techrights.
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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These days, Linux has managed to draw more attentions from those users who want to get faster result from their complicated task. It is an open space operating system, and it allows the users to accomplish their challenging task properly.
Whether you want to use the Linux in your system or want to know the graphic design for Linux system, you need to move for the online media. Here, you can get numbers of important information through which you can know the importance of graphic design for Linux system. With the Linux you can monitor the system files, networks, and many important applications of a system easily and fast.
At present, Linux is the vital opportunity for maintaining the system safe and secure. It is not requiring any types of anti-malware, anti-spyware, or anti-viruses for maintaining fast and secure system. With this system you can not face any kind of problems like severe system damages. It’s time to install it in your computer.
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Desktop
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That desktop, however, is not the topic of this blog. Instead, I want to go on the record to say that the recent announcement of ASUS Pre-installing Ubuntu 11.04 on three of their EeePC machines (1001PXD, 1011PX, and 1015PX) is not big news.
Although the Linux community will stand up against me to say that any time a company sells a piece of hardware with the Linux operating system pre-installed is a win; this “win” just doesn’t feel like a win. Why?
We’re talking about netbooks. Again.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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The second -rc release for the Linux 3.0 kernel is rather quiet and not too exciting. Linus pushed out this new kernel release in the early hours of the morning.
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Applications
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It’s based on mplayer, so regarding audio and video you have the same feature of this software, BUT, there is also a native integration with Shoutcat to search for radio station and listen to them, and a search engine to search video on youtube.
After all the motto of this software is ”UMPlayer plays everything!”
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Bottom Panel is a new GNOME Shell extension which, as the name says, adds a bottom panel to GNOME Shell. The panel includes a window list, workspaces switcher which you can right click to set the number of workspaces and a button to display the message tray (because the tray hot corner is hidden by the panel).
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We all love Google’s new cloud music service, but I’m not loving that Linux was forgotten when the Music Manager client was written. It’s one of those things where I’ll have to sit down and configure Wine (a helper application that runs Windows applications on Linux) to run it, and I don’t have time or patience to do that just yet. Wine is picky, and while it may be easy, it may just be horribly difficult. If you’ve used it, you know what I mean.
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Desktop karaoke application OSD-Lyrics has been updated with exciting new features.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Ever since the release of Maniac Mansion on the Commodore C-64, and probably even earlier than that (Guild of Thieves for instance), I was fascinated by adventure games. You know, the click and point type of adventure games where you had to pick an action and combine that action with something or someone on the screen. Lucas Arts made that genre popular, today it is just a shadow of its former past.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC), Qt
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After blogging about Polka, my experiment with a radically new take on an address book, I got a lot of great feedback. I appreciate all the comments, questions, and encouragement. Two people made me particularly happy, as they not only sent feedback, but also contributed some welcome work. Sascha Manns built packages, and Saleel Velankar created a beautiful logo. Free software rocks.
[...]
My first attempt resulted in a port of Polka to MeeGo. MeeGo is a system targeted at touch interfaces, and being Qt based it seemed to be close enough for a getting Polka to work on it.
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In essence, this means there is no KDE 5, and there will never be. During the sprint here in Randa, we’ve spent a lot of thinking about the future of the KDE Frameworks, and we will be forthcoming with plans to further modularize these frameworks, which consist of what’s currently found in the kdelibs, kdesupport, kdepimlibs, kde-runtime and kdepim-runtime modules.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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There has been much work put into Mageia but in today’s computing world your product has to be far more than merely functional With so many other distro’s competing for your attention, I think Mageia is not yet ready to become a player at the top of the league for Linux distro’s with the RC seeming more like a beta. My requirements of an OS are not satisfied with Mageia and should I remain with this distro, I would not be as productive. That is not acceptable and so for me its goodbye, with an appreciation that KDE is not for me either. I will certainly be looking at the Gnome flavour of Mageia on a secondary rig and I would expect a more favourable opinion since I do love Gnome.
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Gentoo Family
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Do you think there is only one penguin Tux? You are wrong. There is whole family of them. They are all brothers, because they have same father: Linux kernel code by Linus Torvalds. But they are not identical. They have their own names: Debian, RedHat, Slackware, Arch. Eac
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Red Hat Family
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If you needed a demonstration that Oracle is not CentOS, then look no further than the fact that only two weeks after Red Hat announced its Enterprise Linux 6.1 update, software giant Oracle has kicked out its Linux 6.1 clone. This is despite Red Hat’s attempts to slow down the RHEL cloners and others – such as Oracle and the former Novell – that offer technical support for RHEL distributions.
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The Dow dropped 2.33% in four days for its fifth straight weekly loss, the longest such slide since since July 2004 — back when Greece was the pride of Europe (at least in soccer). Seven years on a Moody’s cut of the country’s credit rating, allied to May’s paltry payroll increase of 54,000 here at home, sent exchanges into a tailspin. DuPont (DD), down 1.72% after Friday’s grim jobless data, was appropriately among the blue chips’ worst performers; its most famous product gave Ronald Reagan the nickname of “Teflon President” after he won a reelection landslide despite 7.2% unemployment but with the rate now standing at 9.1%, President Obama has a hard act to follow. Bank of America (BAC), which fired John Thain after he amassed a $1.2 million bill on an office restoration, wrote a check for $2,534 in attorney’s fees rather than lose its office furniture.
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Fedora
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As quite often happens with Fedora releases, I think version 15 is great in some respects and falls behind in others. Take, for instance, YUM — it’s probably faster than it has ever been and I was quite impressed with the command-line program, but the GUI front-ends still lag behind their counterparts in performance. This release handled my hardware really well and comes with some interesting technology previews — whether you are a fan of GNOME 3 or not, I think we can agree it’s nice to see a distribution offering it for people to try and, on cards/drivers which don’t support 3-D effects, the display “falls back” nicely to the classic theme. I think it’s good that the developers have managed to increase compression on the live disc without negatively impacting performance, but I wonder why they didn’t use the opportunity to add more software as there is about an extra 100 MB of space available on the CD.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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As you might have heard, we are planning to close down the “Ubuntu Ready” programme in time for Oneiric Final Release.
The aim is to simplify the public Canonical endorsed certification programme to only one:“Ubuntu Certified“.
To straighten out any confusion about what our certification offering will be here is a quick fact sheet about certification:
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These tidy bullet points list a few examples:
* Raised the visibility of Linux overall.
* Generated excitement and given desktop Linux much-needed accelerant.
* Entered commercial arenas both server and desktop: Dell, independent Linux OEMs like System76, ZaReason, Emperor Linux; commercial training and support.
* Inspired hosts of derivatives such as Vinux, Mint, Mepis, nUbuntu, Gnoppix, Ulteo, moonOS, SuperOS, and dozens more.
* Created good name recognition for “Ubuntu” out in the real world.
* Created a welcoming, supportive developer community that supports noobs.
* Streamlined and popularized the LiveCD.
* Maintains multiple official editions– Ubuntu Server, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, Mythbuntu, Ubuntu Studio, and Kubuntu– that all share the same repositories, with 100% compatibility.
* Pioneered an easy installer.
* Created UCK, Ubuntu Customization Kit, for easily creating your own customized Ubuntu LiveCD.
* Created netbook/tablet/touch versions before any other distro.
* Continually pushing ahead on multiple fronts.
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With Ubuntu 11.04 the Ubuntu Linux brings a new look to the desktop called Unity. I have installed Ubuntu 11:04 on a desktop computer and very soon, I will install it on my laptop and net-book. There have been mixed reviews of Unity; I have found Unity to be different and will take a bit of time getting use to. That said I would encourage all of us to give Unity an extended test period.
The gnome desktop has been my standard desktop for many years now, so it is only natural that a departure from the norm will feel a bit strange. So you may be asking why do it?
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One of the primary goals in the Ubuntu community is to encourage and inspire people to get involved in different parts of the project. Getting people involved typically requires a few key steps:
* Inspire – Get someone interested in joining the community.
* Provide Opportunities – Find something for them to do.
* Review – Review their work to help them be successful and have their work included.
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There are a couple of things that are obvious and yet don’t work. For example, lots of upstreams think they should form a non-profit institution to house their work. The track record of those is poor: they get setup, and they fail as soon as they have to file their annual paperwork, leaving folks like the SFLC to clean up the mess. Not cool. At the end of the day, such new institutions add paperwork without adding funding or other sources of energy. They don’t broaden out the project the same way a company writing documentation and selling services usually does. On the other hand, non-profits like the FSF which have critical mass are very important, though, which is why on occasion we’ve been happy to contribute to them in various ways.
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When we debate our goals, principles and practices in the FLOSS community, we devote a great deal of energy to “how things should be”, and to the fact that “men are not angels”. I think the approach of James Madison is highly relevant to those discussions.
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Flavours and Variants
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Pinguy OS is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu. The latest version – 11.04.1 is based on Ubuntu 11.04, but comes with the Classic GNOME 2.32.1 desktop instead of Unity.
Pinguy has launched Pinguy OS Mini, a stripped down version of Pinguy OS which comes with all the tweaks and fixes that are available in the main Pinguy OS 11.04.1, but without most of the applications preinstalled in Pinguy OS.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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I finally purchased a tablet PC for testing usability of recent GNU/Linux desktop on touch devices. Though there are not so many choices that meet my requirements (PC compatible, reasonably fast and cheap, and available in my country), Acer ICONIA TAB W500 looked fine. Actually F-15 final installed on that device without any problem and GNOME-Shell works fine on it (the peformance is not that bad as I expected from its 1GHz CPU clock).
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This type of thinking also deeply effects the free and open source culture. Since one of the reasons for using FOSS is ultimate control (and responsibility).
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Industry observers have been predicting for years that open-source software will achieve mainstream adoption. Five years ago, open source was in its “nascent stages” and its future “was promising but still unknown,” said Michael Skok, general partner at North Bridge Venture Partners. He presented the fifth annual Future of Open Source Survey at Computerworld’s Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco. The latest survey results “clearly demonstrate” that open source “has gone mainstream,”
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Events
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The Linux Foundation will be teaming up with Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab (OSL) for Linux Learners’ Student Day, to be held in Vancouver on August 16 (the day before LinuxCon begins). The program includes sessions from OSL presenters on Linux basics, Python, embedded systems, and careers in open source.
“The OSU Open Source Lab is very excited to be leading the sessions for Linux Learners Day,” said Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Outreach Manager. “We see educating future generations of Computer Scientists as one of the most important parts of our mission to serve the open source community.”
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Though the final version of Firefox 6 isn’t due until August or so, this Aurora release can now be downloaded for Linux, Mac and Windows from the “Future of Firefox” page on the Mozilla Project’s Web site.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Things are never dull here in the Linux blogosphere, but there’s no doubt they would be a whole lot less entertaining without Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL).
How else, after all, would we get the opportunity to ride on a thrilling emotional roller coaster such as the one Oracle’s had us on since it acquired Sun?
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The world of LibreOffice and OpenOffice(.org) has been heating up recently with several exciting and, at times, bewildering developments. The Document Foundation remains very active as is LibreOffice development, but Oracle has given up on OpenOffice and slapped LibreOffice in the face by giving it to Apache. Perhaps the most important announcement was the release of LibreOffice 3.4.0.
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CMS
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I recently extracted some data from the Drupal project’s CVS and Git logs to see how the number of code contributors and total contributions have changed over time. If there was any doubt of our continual growth, the resulting charts demolish it.
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DuckDuckGo is a silly name, possibly based on the duck, duck, goose game. Even the developers of the so knighted search engine admit as much. But under this seemingly simple and somewhat unprofessional moniker lurks a very powerful, refreshing and unique search engine. We checked.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Yet reading NATO’s new draft general report on cybersecurity, one gets the impression that what the alliance worries about most these days is not an “armed attack,” but a cyberattack on its network servers, or the infrastructure of any of its member countries.
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Cablegate
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A crowd of supporters were in Leavenworth Saturday to protest the holding of a prisoner on Fort Leavenworth suspected of leaking thousands of documents to the website Wikileaks.
The Rally for Bradley Manning drew people from across the state and from areas like Chicago and Oakland, Calif. — close to 200 people in all, according to one of the event’s local organizers, Jim Davidson of Lawrence, Kan.
The event started at Leavenworth’s Bob Dougherty Park, where Davidson said about 15 speakers from different organizations supporting Manning’s release, from Iraq Veterans Against the War to gay rights organizations, addressed the crowd before a march to the intersection of Seventh Street and Metropolitan Avenue, in front of Fort Leavenworth’s Grant Gate.
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The Afghan man with a grizzled beard puts his life at risk every time he chats with U.S. Lt. Col. William Chlebowski.
As an informant for the U.S.-led coalition, the middle-aged man — whose name wasn’t disclosed for security reasons — talks to insurgents one day and snitches on them the next. He’s part of a network of Afghans across the country who tip coalition forces to the location of roadside bombs and weapons caches and share information about what militants are doing and planning.
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Is the founder of WikiLeaks the ministering angel of press freedom as his pale appearance might suggest? Or is he the demonic leader of the most dangerous hacker collective on the web? As one outspoken critic suggests, is he “worse than the Stasi,” or does he represent hope for those struggling against oppression? Either way, by the end of 2010 it became clear that a hitherto unknown organization had forever changed the global media landscape. Within a few months, some of the best-known newspapers – The New York Times, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, Le Monde – began to woo this small group of enthusiastic members of information transparency movement.
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Secret internal American government cables, accessed by Dawn through WikiLeaks, provide confirmation that the US military’s drone strikes programme within Pakistan had more than just tacit acceptance of the country’s top military brass, despite public posturing to the contrary. In fact, as long ago as January 2008, the country’s military was requesting the US for greater drone back-up for its own military operations.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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THE UK could be forced to rely on overseas countries for more than two thirds of its oil and gas supplies due to a “severe” decline in energy production in the North Sea, US diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks have revealed.
Cables seen by The Scotsman reveal that Britain’s gas and oil reserves are declining by 8 per cent a year, and that the country will import 60 to 80 per cent of its oil and gas supply within less than ten years.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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As if we need further proof of the commercial sector encroaching on the right to free speech, we have an interesting story from India. Perhaps a sad indictment of todays business where they view the net and its billions of users with greedy eyes, wanting the attention drawn to their products but not wanting you to put your opinion forward unless it favours them.
Vodaphone is alleged by a customer (Dhaval Valia) to have sent a take down notice ordering removal of Facebook comments in regards to his unhappiness at the service Vodaphone provides. What Vodaphone did not count on (and maybe shows ignorance on their part) is that the story would hit the web and expose even more people to the incident (certainly more so than the Facebook users who saw the customer’s complaint)
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Intellectual Monopolies
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A new report finds that Canadian government departments are hoarding hundreds of patents and copyrights each year in violation of the government’s own IP policy.
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Copyrights
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It sounds great doesn’t it? I think it sound great too, but, and this is a big one, do you really want to trust Apple or Google with all your data? What happens if you don’t pay your fee to Apple? What happens if the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) demands a copyright audit of all my music on iTunes Match?
Charlie and the Apple Factory
Credit: TinyOgg
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