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07.10.14

Links 10/7/2014: LXLE 14.04 in Headlines, Plasma 5

Posted in News Roundup at 4:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Issue with disc on Linux User & Developer 141

    Summary: Linux Mint 17 – the live-booting distro on the disc for 141 – does not install properly. Please download a newer version of the ISO from the Linux Mint website.

  • Desktop

    • Will upcoming Chromebooks have reversible USB ports?

      The answer to your USB worries was presented in April this year in the name of the reversible USB dubbed USB Type-C. Unlike the present USB, the new Universal Design Bus design will be smaller and symmetrical. So you no more have to worry about the orientation and can smoothly slip it inside the slot without fumbling. Now the latest news is that Chrome developers are reportedly working on supporting the new USB. So suggests the recent commits to the Chromium source code.

    • Free software to assist indigenous access to computers

      But he adds that it is important to make sure there are no compatibility problems between GNU/Linux and hardware, which is often a problem due to its complexity, and to ensure automatic updates are available.

    • No, Linux is not dead on the desktop

      I hate having to wade through these kinds of articles, but it’s necessary to answer them lest the perception take root that “Linux is doomed!” and all the usual blather that goes along with such nonsense. Every single time I read one of these articles my eyes roll into the back of my head and various profanities burst from my lips.

      The article focuses on the corporate desktop, but as we all know there has been a revolution going on inside companies as people move their focus from desktop computers to mobile devices. And Linux has been a part of that via Android and Chrome OS since the very beginning. And let’s not forget that we’ll soon have phones and tablets coming from Canonical that run Ubuntu.

      The author acknowledges the transition to mobile, but then downplays it and focuses back on Windows on the desktop. Well, if Windows is still the main OS being used on the desktop then who’s fault is that exactly? I hardly think that the users can be blamed for that, it’s much more likely the IT department that is making those kinds of decisions.

  • Server

    • Why is Docker the new craze in virtualization and cloud computing?

      It’s OSCON time again, and this year the tech sector is abuzz with talk of cloud infrastructure. One of the more interesting startups is Docker, an ultra-lightweight containerization app that’s brimming with potential

      I caught up with the VP of Services for Docker, James Turnbull, who’ll be running a Docker crash course at the con. Besides finding out what Docker is anyway, we discussed the cloud, open source contributing, and getting a real job.

    • DESKTOP CONTAINERS – THE WAY FORWARD
  • Kernel Space

    • Linux Kernel Testing Philosophy

      Almost all Linux kernel developers, if not all, are very active Linux users themselves. There is no requirement that testers should be developers, however, users and developers that are not familiar with the new code could be more effective at testing a new piece of code than the original author of that code. In other words, developer testing serves as an important step in verifying the functionality, however, developer testing alone is not sufficient to find interactions with other code, features, and unintended regressions on configurations and/or hardware, developer didn’t anticipate and didn’t have the opportunity and resources to test. Hence, users play a very important role in the Linux Kernel development process.

    • Linux Foundation SysAdmin Andy Grimberg Loves New Tech and Snowboarding

      I’ve been doing some form of systems administration since my freshman year in college (1994) and I’ve been making my living as only a sys admin since 2000…

    • Linux Kernel 3.14.12 LTS Brings Updated Nouveau and Radeon Drivers

      Now that the 3.14 branch of the Linux kernel has been declared LTS (Long Term Support), which means that it will be supported for a few years with patches, updated drivers, and general improvements, a new maintenance version is available for download.

    • The future of realtime Linux in doubt

      In a message about the release of the 3.14.10-rt7 realtime Linux kernel, Thomas Gleixner reiterated that the funding problems that have plagued realtime Linux (which he raised, again, at last year’s Real Time Linux Workshop) have only gotten worse.

    • DisplayPort MST Code Starts Lining Up For Linux 3.17, Other DRM Changes

      The DisplayPort MST support code that’s been in the works for several months is starting to land with the Linux 3.17 kernel that will be officially entering development stages next month.

    • try out experimental linux kernel features with the kernel-playground

      Josh Boyer (Fedora Kernel team member & FESCo Nominee) recently announced the new kernel-playground COPR repo. Basically, this is a repo for users that want to try out some new and shiny (yet not ready for primetime) kernel features in Fedora, such as the overlayfs “union” filesystem, and kdbus (the in-kernel d-bus replacement).

      It is important to note that this new kernel-playground is an “unsupported” kernel, designed for developers of the new features they include, as well as curious users that want to test out these bleeding edge features, and that.

    • To Linux Foundation SysAdmin Ryan Day, Elegance is the Best Tool

      System administrators keep our lives and work seamlessly humming. They are the super heroes who often go unnoticed and unrecognized only until things go wrong. And so, leading up to SysAdmin Day on July 25, we’re honoring the hard work of our Linux Foundation sysadmins with a series of profiles that highlights who they are and what they do.

      Ryan Day is one of nine Linux Foundation system administrators, and is part of the global team that supports developers working on collaborative projects. Here he describes a typical work day, talks about his favorite tools, his nightmare scenario, and how he spends his free time, among other things.

    • 3.16 Fedora ARM kernel status

      So 3.16 is has quite a few new features in terms of newly supported devices, also some what surprisingly this blog post will be out before 3.16! In terms of new device support all the SoCs listed here are exciting for a number of reasons for Fedora ARM. Aarch64 (ARM64) makes it’s first debut with support of real hardware although we’ve actually had kernel support enable for it for some time in Fedora even if only usable on the glacial Foundation emulator.

      The 3.16 release is also very likely to be the kernel that ships with Fedora 21 GA and with the Alpha due in about a month we’re starting to polish and test all the platforms and devices we want to support for GA.

    • Linux 3.16 File-System Tests On A Hard Drive

      In complementing the earlier Linux 3.16 file-system tests on an SSD (and the later Btrfs testing), here are benchmarks of EXT4, XFS, and Btrfs from the Linux 3.15 and 3.16 kernels being compared from a traditional rotating hard drive.

      As has become common practice at Phoronix, for each new development kernel we end up benchmarking the most commonly used, mainline Linux file-systems on a hard drive and solid state drive. With the SSD results out there in the aforelinked articles, in this article are results using a high-performance Western Digital HDD from a Core i7 Haswell system running Ubuntu and comparing the mainline stable Linux 3.15 kernel against a daily snapshot of Linux 3.16 from this week.

    • Linux Kernel 3.10.48 LTS Improves Support for Radeon GPUs
    • Linux Kernel 3.15.5 Is Now Available for Download

      The fifth maintenance release of the current stable Linux kernel package, version 3.15, was announced last evening, July 9, by none other than Greg Kroah-Hartman. The release introduces numerous improvements and bug fixes.

    • Linux Kernel 3.4.98 LTS Brings Updated Wireless Drivers and Better PowerPC Support

      Linux kernel 3.4.98 LTS is here to introduce better support for the PowerPC (PPC) computer architecture, several updated wireless, Radeon, ACPI, SCSI, and USB drivers, improvements to the CIFS and NFS filesystems, as well as networking enhancements, especially for Bluetooth and Wireless.

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • 11 ways LXLE Linux will make you forget all about XP

      Windows XP’s long run may have finally come to an end, but that doesn’t mean your XP-era hardware has to go too. No indeed: There are numerous options available in the Linux world, and one shining example is LXLE.

    • LXLE 14.04 review – new paradigms

      LXLE has been kicking around for a while now and, for a supposedly lightweight distro, it’s looking fearsomely feature-packed right now. Having said that, it’s hard not to love LXLE, as it’s treading the line between resource efficiency and usability pretty well, and is borderline addictive when it comes to the DE itself. The clue’s in the updated acronym; rather than standing for ‘Lubuntu eXtra Life Extension’, as it did in the days before Lubuntu LTS releases, when LXLE was around to fill that niche using the LXDE desktop environment, it’s now pitched as the ‘LXDE eXtra Luxury Edition’.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Here comes the first release of Plasma 5

        The KDE Community has announced the first release of Plasma 5. It’s a release candidate so it’s meant for testing and preview purpose, like the developer preview of Android L. The final release will be announced next week so this is the last chance for testers and developers to find issues and get them fixed before the release.

      • KDE’s Frameworks 5 released
      • Firefox Might Finally Be Moving Closer To Better KDE Integration

        For KDE desktop users unhappy with the level of integration with Mozilla’s Firefox web browser, the situation might finally be changing.

        There’s been a bug going back to early 2002 about properly integrating Mozilla with KDE, “Mozilla has ‘Windows Integration’ on win32, I believe it should have such a thing on KDE as well (gnome folks, feel free to file your own bug). We should at least provide an icon in the KDE menu, perhaps we could even tell KDE that some file types can be opened with Mozilla…” That bug, Mozilla Bug 140751, has been open for the past twelve years and finally now might be inching closer to being resolved.

      • Looking Forward To The Future Of KDE Frameworks 5

        While KDE Frameworks 5 was just released this week, there’s already new features and functionality sought after for future revisions of this modularized set of next-gen KDE libraries.

      • Exclusive interview with Nitrux founder Uri Herrera

        Nitrux SA. is well known for their themes and icons and recently they also collaborated with the KDE Community for the default icons of Plasma Next. Nitrux does much more than just themes and icons and in this exclusive interview, the founder and main designer of Nitrux, Uri Herrera talks about it.

      • KDE 4.14 Branched, Mix-Release Planned For December

        KDE 4.14 code is getting ready while being worked on for a December debut is a mix of KDE4 and KF5 application code.

        The KDE 4.14 software code has been branched from master for all KDE Software Compilation repositories (sans KActivites that’s being left out for a 4.14 release). In terms of what’s next for the master code-base, while before a potential “KDE 4.15″ release was talked about, it was agreed upon by KDE developers that 4.14 will be the last of KDE Applications that exclusively use KDE Platform 4.

      • Qt Creator 3.2 beta released

        We are happy to announce the Qt Creator 3.2 beta today. So you can already check out the many improvements we have done for the upcoming 3.2 release, and, not to forget, give us feedback on what we have so far. We mostly concentrated on stability and improvements, so no completely new platform supported this time, sorry Wink . I’ll randomly highlight some of the changes here, but you should probably check out our change log as well for a more thorough overview, and just download the binaries and try it for yourself.

      • On Plasma 5

        This is the first release of a new chapter of Plasma, in which a new release method will be used to celebrate the diverity of the KDE community.
        We used to have a 6 months “big release” of all things KDE, called in the beginning just “KDE”, then “KDE SC”, but this release is not that anymore, because KDE grown a lot in the past years, is not just that anymore, and “a single release of everything” scales only so much….

  • Distributions

    • SparkyLinux 3.4 GameOver — a Linux distro for gamers

      Historically, Linux and gaming were like oil and water — it did not mix. For the most part, this was just accepted as a fact of life. Quite frankly, this was OK as users were more interested in maintaining their box and chatting with other Linux users anyway. However, as time went by, jealousy of DOS, and then ultimately Windows, definitely grew as more and more amazing games were released for Microsoft’s operating system. Even Linus Torvalds himself dual-booted Linux and DOS to play Prince of Persia.

    • Operating System U: a new Linux, Wayland based operating system

      Enter Operating System U, OSu. It’s not Ohio State University with a lower-case “u.” The “u” is for you, the one reading this, and the one wishing to control your operating system. The standout thing about OSu is how much customization it gives to the user. That’s our mission and our statement. (It also happens to be our mission statement, but I’m done with little jokes).

      OSu is Linux-based. It boasts a Wayland display server, which I love because it squashes clunky xorg extensions and renders directly. We’re also looking at starlight and customization through GUI’s.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Touch may be our last hope for a Linux tablet

            My daily computing experience is pretty “tablet-heavy.” My Nexus 7 is my constant companion. In fact, for the better part of the last year, I’ve done the vast majority of my actual work on this little Android tablet of mine.

          • Codio: A Multi-language IDE with Its Own Ubuntu Instance

            Codio is a browser-based IDE supporting a large number of languages and including its own Ubuntu instance to test the code.

          • Ubuntu Touch Apps Pass 100k Downloads Despite No Phones on Sale
          • Flavours and Variants

            • 5 reasons to switch to Deepin 2014

              Deepin 2014 is the latest version of Deepin, a Linux desktop that’s based on Ubuntu Desktop. Deepin 2014 is actually based on Ubuntu 14.04. It was released yesterday.

              Deepin has always been on my list of the best desktop distributions, and Deepin 2014 just vaulted it to the top-2 of that list. The aim of this post is to show you why that happened and why I highly recommend that you should take Deepin 2014 out for a spin. I guarantee that you will like practically all it brings to the table.

            • Tech-Friendly: Bring new life to an old PC with Linux Mint

              Linux Mint (Xfce) has a simple interface and is pretty perky, even on old computers. The installer will install Firefox, the LibreOffice office suite, and a variety of programs for managing e-mail, videos and music; perfect for a backup Internet surfing and word processing computer. The installer will ask if you want to install third-party utilities — choose “yes” for compatibility with websites that use Adobe Flash and other multimedia software. Depending on your computer, the installation should complete in fewer than 30 minutes.

            • Ultimate Edition 4.2 Final

              It is with great pleasure I give you Ultimate Edition 4.2 Lite.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Renesas – Virtual platform and fast Linux porting for new custom ASIC
    • Linaro’s Android Open-Source Project Ported to ARMv8-A

      Following the recent announcement of the Android L Developer Preview supporting the 64-bit ARMv8-A architecture, Linaro, the collaborative engineering organization developing open-source software for the ARM architecture, has announced that a port of the Android Open-Source Project (AOSP) to the ARMv8-A architecture has been made available as part of the Linaro 14.06 release.

    • Automotive Grade Linux Released: An Interview With Dan Cauchy

      On June 30, the Linux Foundation’s Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) project released the first version of its open source AGL stack for in-vehicle infotainment (IVI). Based on Tizen IVI, AGL adds a stylish user interface and various applications written in HTML5 and JavaScript. The AGL stack, which is partially compatible with the somewhat similar, open source Linux GENIVI Foundation spec, supports multiple hardware architectures.

    • Phones

      • Ballnux

        • Samsung Nixes Knox: The Android Security Saga Continues

          Granted, Google has been updating handset issues at a quicker pace – particularly when it comes to security patches, via Play Services –and so far, the telcos have not played spoilers. But remember: Google has not initiated a move to push an entirely new OS directly to users except to those who own Google’s telco independent Nexus brand devices. Keep in mind that there’s a big difference between updating a feature or security patch and producing an entirely new OS. OS updates typically up the Kernel and the radios. It will be interesting (and historical) if the telcos continue to stay out of the way.

      • Android

        • Afraid of the NSA? A new secrecy-cloaking mobile app lets you make, receive private phone calls; available on Android, iOS

          Silent Circle, a company known for mobile apps designed to thwart government surveillance, is introducing on Thursday a secrecy-cloaking phone service that lets customers make and receive private phone calls for as little as $12.95 a month.

        • Android DLP projector doubles as a mobile hotspot

          Sprint has launched the “LivePro,” an Android-based, ZTE-built DLP projector and 3G/4G mobile hotspot shareable by eight WiFi-users, with a 4-inch display.

          ZTE showed off the LivePro at January’s CES show as its “Projector Hotspot“, and it’s now coming to the U.S. via Sprint under the LivePro name. On July 11, Sprint will begin selling the device for $450, or $299 with a two-year contract. Of course, the real money is in the data plans, which start at $35 per month for 3GB of data.

        • Early Reviews of Android Wear Reflect Promise for the Platform

          This week, following much talk about it coming out of the Google I/O conference, there are a lot of discussions arising about Android Wear and whether it will become the next big mobile platform. Some early smartwatches running the open platform are appearing, and some reviewers are really liking them. Just as you once didn’t carry a smartphone, and then did, are you on the cusp of owning an open source smartwatch?

        • Security company says your data can easily be recovered from ‘wiped’ Android phones

          Software maker Avast is calling the security and thoroughness of Android’s factory reset feature into serious doubt today. The company says it purchased 20 used Android smartphones online and set out to test whether personal user data could be recovered from them. Each phone had been reset prior to being sold, according to Avast, so in theory the test should have failed miserably. But that’s not what happened.

          Using widely available forensic software, Avast says it was able to successfully pull up over 40,000 photos previously stored on the phones. Many of those featured children, and others were sexual in nature with women in “various stages of undress” and hundreds of “male nude selfies.” The company also managed to recover old Google search queries, emails, and texts. All told, Avast successfully identified four original phone owners using data that those people falsely assumed had been permanently deleted. Users must overwrite previous data to truly get rid of it, Avast says.

        • LG G Watch Rides In on 1st Android Wear Wave

          Founded in 2008, JFrog provides open source solutions for package repositories and software distribution aimed at a new breed of developers. With a focus on open source and the burgeoning cloud scene, JFrog has garnered their fair share of awards and press from industry heavyweights and communities alike.

        • Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 2012 get unofficial Android L

          Developers have cobbled together unofficial builds of Android L for the Nexus 4 and the first Nexus 7 model.

          Google’s approach to the release of Android L is a little different to that for previous versions of its OS: for the first time, it’s offering developers a preview version and a subset of source code for the forthcoming operating system.

        • CM11 M8 finally released with Android 4.4.4 and ‘Heads Up’

          So last month we saw the release of CM 11 M7 as a Snapshot. Again, those of you who are new to CM a ‘Snapshot’ is a nearly-stable release. This type of release is considered safe-to-use by CM and believed to contain all features and all bugs worked through. It is worth remembering being a Snapshot this does mean it is possible some unknown bugs may still exist although these will be minor. Now already we are seeing the next major release available today. CM 11 M8 was released this morning and offers Android 4.4.4. As the release has only just been made public the devices supported are rather limited although the variance will grow quite quickly knowing CM.

        • Odroid hacker board jumps to faster octacore SoC

          The Odroid-XU3 runs on a 5V 4A power supply, and once again features four energy monitoring chips for tracking the Big.Little cores. A plastic enclosure and an active cooler are available, along with numerous optional modules. OS support has been boosted to Android 4.4.2 and Ubuntu 14.04, available with full source code.
          Schematics will be posted upon shipment, and community support is available via the Odroid project. The quad-core Exynos4412 based Odroid-U3 board came in at third place after the Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone Black in our recent Top 10 Hacker SBC survey.

        • Android mirroring is now available on Chromecast

          Chromecast users can now start ‘mirroring’ their Android devices over the WiFi. Google has pushed an update for Chromecast, which adds this new feature to the device. The feature was already there on Apple TV and the star Android developer Koushik Dutta (Koush) also offered mirroring for his ‘AllCast’ app.

        • Volvo Cars add Android Auto to its next generation cars

          Volvo Cars has joined the Open Automotive Alliance to make the Android smartphone platform available to drivers through its new ground breaking user interface. This move brings together one of the world’s most progressive car companies and the world’s most popular smartphone platform, developed by Google.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Metaswitch launches cloud datacentre open source project
  • Metaswitch Launches Open Source Project Calico

    Metaswitch Networks today is contributing the initial code base for Project Calico, an open-source solution that enables the implementation of large, standards-based, cloud data center infrastructures. The code is available to the worldwide community of network operators, software developers and systems integrators at Project Calico.

  • Distrowatch Disappearance, RentOS 7 Coming, and OSS Lost

    In tonight’s Linux news, Distrowatch.com went offline for much of Sunday. Serdar Yegulalp looks at the upcoming CentOS7, the first since joining hands with Red Hat officially. Bruce Byfield says Open Source has lost its way and is now wandering aimlessly with no purpose. And that’s not all.

  • OPEN SOURCE INITIATIVE (OSI) ANNOUNCES NEW AFFILIATE MEMBER
  • Building, deploying, and distributing software with JFrog

    Founded in 2008, JFrog provides open source solutions for package repositories and software distribution aimed at a new breed of developers. With a focus on open source and the burgeoning cloud scene, JFrog has garnered their fair share of awards and press from industry heavyweights and communities alike.

  • Top 5 open source customer relationship management tools

    Creating and maintaining relationships with customers can be a challenge. But it’s also essential for a business’ survival and growth. To maintain those relationships, a CRM system is a must. And CRM is one area in which open source shines brightly.

  • Open-Source Software: Bad For Non-Profit Organizations? [article now removed for being a trap]

    For non-profit organizations, open-source/free software might not actually be the best solution according to a director at a non-profit software solution provider.

  • Tech Giants Use Open Source to Get You to Cough Up for Other Products

    Most open source software projects come to life because someone is trying to scratch an itch.

    Some group of coders or a team of academics or a fast-moving startup will build some software that solves a very real computing problem, and then they’ll open source the code, sharing it with the world at large. Maybe, the coders are trying to help the larger world of software developers, believing that others will find the code useful too. Maybe, they’re trying to get more eyes on their code, hoping that others will contribute bug reports and fixes to the project. Or maybe, as is typically the case, they’re trying to do both.

  • The open source movement at IIT Bombay

    The activities of FOSSEE revolve around creating educational content around open source software and encouraging the introduction of courses on open source in syllabi of universities, apart from promoting it through publicity initiative.

  • DevOps is inherently open source, discuss

    DevOps (developer-operations) was born out of the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) by its very nature because it aims to address the “incongruous nature of integrating traditional LOB applications” with other applications.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • PostgreSQL: What’s behind the pull of this open source database?

      Postgres continues to ride high in the database popularity stakes — and the new features appearing in its next release will only add to that appeal, according to Dave Page, a member of the open-source project’s core team and EnterpriseDB chief architect.

      The open-source relational database — full name PostgreSQL — for which EnterpriseDB sells apps and services as well as its own commercial fork, currently sits in fourth place in the DB-Engines rankings, behind Oracle, MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server.

    • New release of OpenStack Swift brings storage policies

      Object storage with OpenStack Swift gained an important feature in yesterday’s 2.0 release with the addition of storage policies. John Dickinson, Swift Program Technical Lead, called storage policies the “biggest thing to happen to Swift since it was open-sourced four years ago.” So what exactly are storage policies, and how do they affect the way data is stored in an open source cloud?

  • Databases

    • SolidFire: SSD Offers Huge Performance Boost to MongoDB

      MongoDB is a popular open source “NoSQL” database platform, offering functionality not available in traditional, relational databases, such as MySQL.

      SolidFire hopes the performance increases offered by its all-flash storage solution will attract enterprises aiming to maximize the speed of their MongoDB deployments. “Enterprises choose to deploy NoSQL solutions for a variety of reasons,” said SolidFire founder and CEO Dave Wright. “Our customers often cite performance, scalability, and ease of deployment as key factors in choosing to deploy MongoDB. The YCSB Benchmark demonstrates that utilizing SolidFire’s all-flash array with MongoDB allows businesses to achieve their objectives regardless of type of workload.”

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Honda Smart Home is now open source

      Earlier this year, Honda introduced its Smart Home, a home on the University of California Davis West Village campus that, among other things, produces more energy than it consumes. Interest in the Smart Home has been high, and due to that demand, Honda has announced that its Smart Home is now open source.

    • Lamassu announces Rakia, New Open-source Back-end System for ATMs

      Bitcoin ATM’s have been popping up in cities all over the world during the last 12 months and so are companies that manufacture these machines. Like any new technology, however, the company that keeps their products on the cutting-edge and provides a wide range of services will be the most successful. Bank ATMs often allow not only withdrawals but additional services such as direct deposits and bill paying as well.

    • Open storytelling to boost literacy

      I’m in love with open source, but I’ve been dating open content for many years. You would think these two would jump at the chance to cross-promote, but too often that doesn’t happen. Open source claims it has a headache. Open content says it’s too busy. Really, a headache? Really, too busy?

    • Open Data

  • Programming

    • It’s better to share with functional programming

      Katie Miller is a Developer Advocate at Red Hat for the open source Platform as a Service, OpenShift, and co-founder of the Lambda Ladies group for women in functional programming. She has a passion for language and linguistics, but also for the open source way.

      I have a Red Hat sticker on my laptop that simply says: It’s better to share.

      In this interview, Katie shares with me how she moved from journalism to a job in technology. Also, how she got introduced to functional programming, the Haskell programming language, and how open source is part of her daily life.

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

OpenDocument Format (ODF) Still Alive and Kicking

Posted in Office Suites, OpenDocument, OpenOffice at 4:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

But we may need Google’s help

Building

Summary: Caligra, WebODF and various influential nations’ departure from Microsoft Office will help famous projects such as OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice make ODF the only international standard for editable documents exchange

NOW that the latest Microsoft Office may be banned in China (China, Korea and maybe Russia are moving away from Window and thus away from Microsoft Office too) there is a real chance, boosted not only by BRICS nations, that ODF will be very widespread. The recent new release of Caligra (covered some days ago in our daily links), the advance of WebODF [1] into various frameworks [2] and applications [3], the exciting news from Korea [4] and even actions towards standards and interoperability in Europe [5,6] give us many reasons for optimism. People who state that ODF is “dead” or “nobody uses it” basically try to justify defeatism and continued (exponential) dependence on Microsoft through the network effect.

While some people prefer simpler formats [7], others continue to stick to office suites. Microsoft is trying to invade the Android empire, putting lots of OOXML in it (with Google’s help [8,9]) and now we see claims that Microsoft is ‘supporting’ Android by merely giving proprietary spyware with lock-in to it (for OOXML), not just adding spyware to it and then packaging it as ‘Nokia by Microsoft’:

We have already seen the launch of Nokia’s first Android-powered smartphones under the Nokia X brand earlier this year. And now it seems Microsoft is planning to bring a similar experience for its users under the Lumia brand.

New information from the famous tipster @evleaks suggests that Android-powered Lumia smartphones are currently being developed under the ‘Nokia by Microsoft’ brand.

We have seen a lot of OOXML openwashing as of late. We also criticised Google for its stance on document formats. What we shall end up with as the widespread standards very much depends on the actions of large corporations, not just people (whose choices will be limited by corporations). We need to push hard for ODF and it will most likely win, especially as more and more nations dump Microsoft Office. Google has control over many users’ choice of document formats (Google Apps, Android, ChromeOS), so we need to put more pressure on Google to go against the flow (Microsoft formats) and with the future, which is ODF.

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. WebODF v0.5.0 released: Highlights

    Today, after a long period of hard work and preparation, having deemed the existing WebODF codebase stable enough for everyday use and for integration into other projects, we have tagged the v0.5.0 release and published an announcement on the project website.

  2. WebODF meets ownCloud to fix what’s wrong with Google Docs

    Google Docs is a great resource for collaborative editing and online document editing, however it has one of the greatest problems of all – it doesn’t support the ISO approved document standard ODF. Which leaves governments, businesses and individuals locked into Microsoft’s .docx format.

  3. WebODF Travels

    Yesterday WebODF released v 0.5.0 complete with a library, web editor and FireFox plugin.

  4. South Korea gives up on Microsoft

    South Korea is using the fact that Windows XP is no longer supported as a reason to walk away from Microsoft completely.

    According to a government statement, South Korea wants to break from its Microsoft dependency and move to open source software by 2020″

  5. Optimising Joinup’s interoperability app repository

    First, we hope to boost reuse of these solutions by improving the project descriptions. Over the past months, we selected 40 projects on Joinup that we expect to have the highest potential for reuse, taking into account such factors as the maturity of the project, its use in cross-border cooperation and licence. Together with the project developers, we improved the descriptions of these projects and enhanced their metadata. For example, we added pointers to existing implementations, details on the intended users and ways to participate.

  6. What’s up with Open Standards?

    It is hard enough for people to understand what protocols such as TCP/IP do. These open standards however are invisible to most of them, even if they’re using them on a daily basis. Other open standards, such as OpenDocument Format, are probably not conceivable by some people, who think that an office document is “an extension of Microsoft Office”. I have even heard of teachers, here in France, who refused to even mention ODF because such a thing “could not possibly exist”. The conceptual distinction between a file and an application has not permeated much, even in the twenty first century.

  7. ODT to TXT, but keep the line numbering

    The title explains what this article is about. If you save an .odt file as text, or copy/paste the contents as a text file, or run odt2txt or the unoconv utility, you lose the apparent line structure of the original, and with it the line numbering. But there is a way…

  8. Google Shuts the Door on QuickOffice, as its Work is Done

    At last week’s Google I/O conference, the company announced new levels of compatibility with Microsoft Office documents in its Google Docs cloud-based applications, including the ability to edit Office documents. These capabilities are driven through QuickOffice, a toolset that Google acquired back in 2012. Quickoffice has provided close compatibility with the Microsoft Office file formats, ranging from .doc to .xlsx, for users of Google Docs.

  9. Google kills QuickOffice for iOS and Android, what does it document interoperability?

    When Google acquired QuickOffice back in, we assued it was an effort to bring Microsoft Office like capabilities to mobile devices as there was no polished Office Suite back then. Then Google started integrating QuickOffice into its own Google Docs and there were signs that the company may kill the standalone app.

The Effect of Corporate Media Bias: FOSS Demonisation and Microsoft Openwashing

Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 4:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: A set of very recent examples where the corporate press produces FOSS-hostile articles (or pro-Microsoft articles) by citing biased sources of convenience

Nowadays, and especially in the past few months, those of us who exhaustively scan news feeds (as Techrights has done for nearly a decade) would be seeing a relatively new angle for attacking FOSS. After Microsoft had tried using copyrights with SCO as well as patents through all sorts of proxies (and directly) Microsoft-linked groups, including Black Duck, generated more licensing FUD while monetising it (two birds, one stone). Here is the latest example from the news. It is a classic ‘script’ and it is hosted by IDG, which also offered some Black Duck staff (the one cited here) permanent blog space (a very FOSS-hostile blog). The angle, in short, is inherently anti-GPL, claiming that enterprises are afraid of it. Another Microsoft-linked firm, OpenLogic, used and disseminated the same talking point. These are FUD agencies and this is their purpose — to help marginalise FOSS and produce FUD, creating a warped debate in all kinds of events, surveys etc. that they organise. Very nasty. They actually make money from this.

“These are FUD agencies and this is their purpose — to help marginalise FOSS and produce FUD…”Here is another new example. Acting as if one bug in the code of OpenSSL is somehow so Earth-changing for FOSS as a whole, the corporate press is trying to keep the word “Heartbleed” in the headlines [1, 2]. We wrote about this some days ago and highlighted the insidious connection to Microsoft. This is just another angle of FUD: the security angle. Now that Windows XP is not supported (or not being patched) Microsoft needs to create the illusion that FOSS is “equally insecure”, or something along those lines. And this FUD works. We have seen the effect. I see the effect all the time.

Now, watch another such piece of news-flavoured FUD. Python is now the most popular introductory teaching language at top U.S. universities, according to ACM, but the Microsoft-friendly media emits licensing FUD from a familiar source of FOSS FUD, WhiteSource. Adrian Bridgwater, with his mixed history on FOSS (often FOSS-hostile), wrote in Microsoft-friendly media the headline “43% Python Open Source Libraries ‘Potentially Risky’”. This sounds like security FUD, but it’s actually licensing FUD. To quote:

The study suggested that a large percentage of the libraries are under restrictive licenses. The repercussion here may be that while many Python programmers report substantial productivity gains, the use of open source Python components introduces new challenges.

The so-called ‘study’ comes from WhiteSource, which has a consistent track record of attacking FOSS.

This is the type of trash that dominates the press these days. Who is funding those ‘studies’ and why is it so fashionable to attack FOSS using made up (or merely perceived) risks? These questions are largely rhetorical.

Condé Nasty’s Wired has meanwhile produced yet another openwashing Microsoft piece, nicely disguised with a teasing headline (“Watch Steve Ballmer Mock Linux While Dressed as The Matrix’s Neo”). It would have readers believe that Microsoft is now a friend of FOSS. This site has been doing this for a number of years now, as we repeatedly pointed out before. The new owner seems to have an agenda very different from the original owners’. Wired turned into something suspiciously weird under Condé Nasty’s management.

Wired turned into something suspiciously weird under Condé Nasty’s management.”As we showed before, there are gullible CIOs like Jos Creese who seem like the target audience for this. IDG even has a site called CIO. Facebook too has an openwashing campaign going on (we recently showed more examples of that) and openwashing has been effective at stopping government migrations to FOSS. The British press offers some responses to this trend, include this new article which says:

And Creese isn’t alone in his attachment to Microsoft. Alan Shields, architect team manager at Cambridgeshire County Council, says: “It is incredibly difficult to get away from the stranglehold of Microsoft products, and we are planning to reinforce this by entering into an Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft later this year.”

Other British press goes further with another FOSS-hostile piece from Adrian Bridgwater. To quote parts of it:

Mike James on i-programmer isn’t happy either.

James bemoans the reticence, caginess and ok then downright old stubbornness Microsoft has exhibited over its refusal to open source VB6.

VB6 (or Visual Basic 7) is programming language and IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that dates back to the heady CD-ROM centric days of 1991.

Today the Visual Basic 6.0 Resource Center is mainly focused on selling your migration and “upgrades from” than championing that which was once much loved.

James bemoans the fact that Microsoft “killed” VB6 but now refuses to open source the language despite the firm’s “warmth” for open source.

What warmth?

This rather bizarre piece from Adrian Bridgwater, who has a history of being soft on Microsoft, does not quote any Microsoft critics but only Microsoft boosters who want a little bit more from Microsoft. It is overall a very one-sided article, where the opposition (‘balance’) is basically also in favour of Microsoft (both the pros and cons are Microsoft-friendly). It is a Fox ‘news’-style debate, biasing the hypothesis and pushing for a particular, preconceived outcome, openwashing Microsoft with a list of talking points and then citing a Microsoft booster, Dr. Dobbs’ Andrew Binstock (i-programmer is also pro-Microsoft and .NET/Mono, as we last noted very recently). Binstock is the Microsoft-boosting editor of Dr. Dobbs (with history of whitewashing Microsoft crimes), who is now ‘pulling a Scroogle’ as well. It is essential to remember that Dr. Dobbs too changed management not too long ago. It’s not at all what it used to be.

The final message we wish to get across is that the media is full of FUD and filled with FOSS-hostile articles. Many of them are easy to explain when knowing the background of the authors, the firms that they cite (often Microsoft-linked), and the agenda of the publisher, which is often designed to favour proprietary software (the advertisers). If these pieces of FUD are not being highlighted and challenged, then there’s risk that there will be perception of no opposition to them, hence they must be “true”.

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