04.10.14
Posted in News Roundup at 3:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
UK
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Influential government service supplier Memset has urged local and central government to ditch VMware in favour of open source alternatives, promising that open-source-based service suppliers can shave as much as 40 percent off government bills simply by removing the licensing fees.
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HMRC
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HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) is driving the use of open source technology with a Hadoop NoSQL big data engine to analyse corporate tax.
Continental Europe
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The European Commission and European Parliament are doing nothing to rid themselves of their dependance on Microsoft, two lobby groups said Wednesday, Document Freedom Day.
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and Open Forum Europe urged EU institutions to support open standards in an open letter to Giancarlo Vilella, president of the European Parliament’s Directorate-General for Innovation and Technological Support. He also chairs the body that coordinates IT activities for government agencies including Parliament, the Commission and the Council of the E.U.
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For most organisations the primary reason for moving from Windows to Linux is perceived cost savings. The secondary reasons are factors such as interoperability and greater compliance with standards, which themselves bring longer- term cost benefits. Unlocking interfaces and data from vendor lock-ins may be rather time consuming and costly in the short term, but doing so brings considerable cost and efficiency pay-offs in the long term.
One of the payoffs for the City Council, other German councils, the Linux community and other interested parties, has been the development of LiMux, the German language Linux distribution which has since been approved as an official distribution by the German government. The work of Munich will make it easier for others to follow.
In an ideal world, LiMux would provide a model that would inspire more government-sponsored IT projects in the UK, which are all too often outsourced to proprietary interests. Whether it does or not, is yet to be seen.
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The TYPO3 CMS project has a long history as open source project, with its foundation going back as far as 1997 when it was initially developed by Danish Kasper Skårhøj. Currently, the TYPO3 project has a solid foundation in Europe. Large cooperations like Deutsche Bank, Airbus, Air France, as well as, universities and non-governmental organizations like Food and Agriculture Organization, Greenpeace, and Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons run on the TYPO3 CMS.
National Geospatial Intelligence Agency
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The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency did a first for a U.S. intelligence agency by opening an account on open source site GitHub earlier this month.
NASA
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As a part of a federal order to make technology transfer faster, NASA is building a central location for the public to dig into more than 1,000 of its past projects.
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The 330-pound Robonaut 2 measures 3 feet, 4 inches tall from the waist, and is equipped with more than 350 sensors. Its stomach-located brain runs Linux on 38 PowerPC-based processors. The robot is operated remotely by humans, using the Robonaut Tele-operation System (RTS). This telerobotics system requires a ground- or space-based user to wear a 3D visor, vest, and pressure-sensitive gloves. (For more on the R2, see our original coverage.)
Misc.
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LibrePlanet examines our modern technological society and finds much to criticize. But it is not a crabfest for frustrated policy wonks: these people are making new tools in hardware, software, and networking — tools that may well become as mainstream as GNU/Linux is already in data centers, cell phones, and stand-alone computer systems.
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04.09.14
Posted in News Roundup at 2:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Python
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I’m very excited to announce Pyston, a new open-source implementation of Python, currently under development at Dropbox. The goal of the project is to produce a high-performance Python implementation that can push Python into domains dominated by traditional systems languages like C++.
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Java
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Java 8 has been reengineered with the strength of Project Lambda Expressions.
Lambda, is a Java function that adds ‘closures and related features’ dedicated to supporting multicore programming.
DevOps
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You probably think I’m going to talk about all the reasons why you should use open source tooling as the foundation for an effective DevOps culture in your organization, but that’s not what this is about. Not to marginalize the complexity of the challenges faced by the team I work with, but I have confidence that the engineers are going to figure the tooling part out. Believe it or not, the daunting part is wrapped in cultural change.
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The ‘developer’ and ‘operations’ DevOps role is now an official part of the tech industry nomenclature.
The number of permanent and officially recognised DevOps Engineer posts in the UK has jumped 347% in the past two years.
LLVM
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Chris Lattner has announced the LLVM Foundation this morning as “The LLVM umbrella project has grown over the years into a vibrant community made up of many sub-projects, with hundreds of contributors. The results of this project are used by millions of people every day. Today, I’m happy to announce that we are taking the next big step, and forming a new, independent non-profit to represent the community interest.”
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Months ago there was work on advancing Gallium3D’s LLVMpipe software-based driver with its OpenGL 3.x support, including work-in-progress patches, but nothing was merged at the time. With that said, it was a surprise to see fake MSAA support added tonight for Gallium3D and used by the LLVMpipe driver so it fakes OpenGL 3.0 compliance and forces the necessary extensions for handling OpenGL 3.2.
Leftovers
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It’s not hard to come up with a dozen different reasons why the rise of open source development has been a watershed event in both the software and hardware industries. All of us can build new web applications faster with our feet firmly planted on the shoulders of jQuery, Bootstrap, and Apache. Languages like Ruby, PHP, and Python power the Internet, and operating systems like Linux and FreeBSD provide the foundation for thousands of companies and services.
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I’m proud to announce the very first beta release of Advanced Gtk+ Sequencer. There many improvements releated to thread safety and synchronization. It was a hard way to get to this point but I just want to say I love C programming with GNU tools.
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And sadly, gender inequality in open source communities is widely acknowledged to be even worse than in the proprietary software world. Figures are hard to come by, but a 2009 keynote at OSCON Alex Bayley cited a 2006 EU survey that found only 1.5 per cent of contributors to open source are women.
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Misc. GNU Packages
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I’m happy to announce the 2014.04.06 release of GSRC, the GNU Source Release Collection.
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GNUnet
Kernel
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Following last night’s release of the Linux 3.14 kernel, the GNU folks are out with their Linux-based “Freedom Pi” kernel.
The GNU Linux-libre 3.14-gnu kernel is the upstream Linux 3.14.0 kernel but is “100% free” and removes non-free components from the kernel source tree like firmware blobs and “[code] disguised as source code." The libre kernel flavor also disables run-time requests for non-free kernel components.
MediaGoblin
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Running on GNU, MediaGoblin allows user to upload videos, images, audio, and other types of digital media. But, unlike YouTube, Flickr, and Soundcloud, users control their own servers. And, if Webber, Nicholson, and the rest of the MediaGoblin community have their way, each users' media will be stored on Tahoe-LAFS, an encrypted server that does not know what data it stores.
Compiler
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Following Facebook's announcement of the Hack language and being one of the organizations backing the new WebScaleSQL, Facebook developers ended out last week by announcing Warp, their latest open-source contribution.
Warp is a C/C++ pre-processor that aims to be as fast as possible. The Warp pre-processor aims to be much faster than GCC's pre-processor.
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GMP
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Version 6.0.0 of the GNU Multiple Precision (GMP) Arithmetic Library has been released and it's landing heavy with new features.
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A new major release of the GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library (GMP) is now available.
Philosophy
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It’s clear that a lot of IT hardware is being supplied to consumers and organizations with built-in malware, stuff that spies on us and supplies people like NSA with information we don’t want them to have. Ironically, we actually subsidize this activity with our money either by taxation or the purchase-price.
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Richard Stallman will be speaking as part of TedxGeneva. His speech will be nontechnical and the public is encouraged to attend.
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Jaewoo Cho recently started working at the FSF as a licensing intern. In this post, he writes about his experience with free software and his goals for the internship.
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Age of Wonders III, a turn-based strategy developed by Triumph Studios and published only on the Linux platform, has managed to get the Linux community all riled up, no matter the platform.
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When Crytek announced that it was going to provide support for the Linux platform in its CRYENGINE technology, the community immediately understood that this was a game changer for developers and the future of Linux as an entertainment platform.
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Centration, a multiplayer survival horror sandbox game developed by Angry Engineers Entertainment, is now available on Steam for Linux with a 15% discount.
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Evolution RTS, an open source real time strategy developed and published by Frozen Yak Entertainment, will arrive on Steam for Linux soon.
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Valve has updated their monthly statistics for operating system use and other system attributes via their Steam Hardware Survey.
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To celebrate these improvements being made, I ran a variety of open-source driver tests with this game’s test profile. The tests were limited to AMD Radeon and Intel HD Graphics hardware as the NVIDIA GeForce GPUs would end up generating DRM errors when running Unvanquished with its advanced visual settings. The GPUs tested out-of-the-box on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with this latest Unvanquished version include.
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The latest monthly development release of the open-source Unvanquished first-person shooter is now available.
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Unvanquished, a free, open source first-person shooter combining real-time strategy elements with a futuristic and sci-fi setting, has just reached version 0.26 and is ready for testing.
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I can understand the temptation to give into despair when it comes to Linux versus Windows in gaming. After all it has been Windows that has historically dominated in terms of gaming over the years. Linux was either an also-ran or it simply never mattered in any way whatsoever to game developers. A lot of them would have laughed if you’d mentioned Linux to them as a viable alternative to Windows for their games.
But it’s important to remember that those days are in the past, and they’re never coming again. Valve has made sure of this by releasing Steam for Linux, and the upcoming release of SteamOS along with its Steam Machines will put Linux on the gaming map in a big way. I’ve never seen such excitement among Linux gamers as I have after Valve announced SteamOS, you could tell that things were changing in a big way.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, however, and Linux as a gaming platform won’t be either. Windows has had many years of being the incumbent and that isn’t going to suddenly stop in the span of a few months. So Linux gamers need to be patient as Valve puts the finishing touches on SteamOS, and as more and more games are announced for Steam.
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Posted in News Roundup at 1:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Midori is a GTK-based browser with a clean interface that resembles the one of Google Chrome, using the WebKit rendering engine, and offering plenty of the usual features browsers like Firefox or Chrome ship with.
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YAD (Yet Another Dialog) creates GUI dialogs for data entry, user notification, etc. It was written by Victor Ananjevsky and is described as a fork of Zenity.
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Vuze 5.3.0.1 Beta 15, a BitTorrent client previously known as Azureus, which is built on Java, is now available for download and users can start testing it at once.
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DVDStyler, a cross-platform, free DVD authoring application that allows video enthusiasts to create professional-looking DVDs, is now at version 2.7.2 and is available for download.
DVDStyler is a piece of software that can be primarily used to create and burn DVD-Videos with interactive menus, but it also allows users to design their own DVDs. Even if this activity seems to be going away, this is still a very powerful application with a lot of cool features.
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jAlbum, a tool that can be used to create online photo albums and that has built-in support for organizing and editing images, is now at version 12 and is available for download.
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NixNote, previously known as Nevernote, is an unofficial Evernote client for Linux which was initially written in Java. NixNote 2 is a complete rewrite of NixNote in C++ using the Qt framework, having speed and a reduced memory footprint as the main goals. Java is still used for encrypting / decrypting text in NixNote 2, but it’s optional so you don’t have to install it if you don’t need this feature.
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Linux Thermal Daemon (thermald) is a tool developed by Intel’s Open Source Technology Center which monitors and controls the CPU temperature, preventing it from overheating.
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Posted in Apple, Microsoft, Patents at 5:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Reporting in corporate media generally lacks focus on patent abuse by large companies, but Topix has a long noteworthy article
PATENT coverage has been scarce here recently because corporations won. They warped the debate in such a way that almost no articles criticise software patents anymore; the focus has been shifted to small trolls and politicians are, accordingly, ignoring the big issue, instead pursuing fake ‘reforms’ that hardly address any concerns, other than the concerns of big corporations (it’s like Obama’s so-called ‘reform’ of the NSA). Here for a change is a good Topix article titled “How to Really Fix Patents – and Why Congress Is Unlikely to Do It” (via Glyn Moody).
The article says: “The total loss to the economy caused by junk patents far exceeds $29 billion per year when one takes into account that big companies act like patent trolls too, by obtaining junk patents to keep out their competitors.”
It also states that: “The real costs of junk patents are easy to imagine when you consider some of the egregious patents that should never have existed to begin with. Patent No. 5,851,117 was granted in 1998 to a company for using an illustrated book to teach janitors how to clean a building. Clearly that is not such an original idea that it deserves to be patented. Luckily the economic impact of that patent was likely very minimal.”
And finally: “Patent trolls should be dealt with, but if big companies are able to continue to obtain junk patents for things that are not inventions and then act like patent trolls, then they will be able to continue to corner markets and ensure that new emerging technologies can’t compete with them.”
We recently wrote about Apple's "holy war" against Linux/Android — a subject that was mentioned by a lot of media [1, 2, 3, 4]. Nokia‘s patent deal with Apple, which had already cross-licensed with Microsoft for quite a long time (we have written about this triangle for a number of years), helped show how this “holy war” was going on. This new article states that “Nokia makes up about 80% of them [...] the vast majority of licensing fees Microsoft collects — about $15 per device — comes from the Finnish company. Those fees are about to become an internal exchange once the acquisition deal closes between the two companies.”
The ultimate victim will be Android. They are working on it.
To make matters worse, Microsoft and Nokia feed Android-hostile patent trolls like MOSAID, passing patents for no purpose other than harassment (patent-stacking).
This is trolling. The European authorities have already warned/reprimanded Nokia.
What needs to change right now is the debate. We need to reject the idea that there is this thing called “patent trolls” which basically means small companies with patents and that this alone is the issue with patents. There are much bigger issues. █
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, FUD at 5:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Proprietary but pretending to be pro-FOSS
Summary: Tech City News, Black Duck, and Protecode (in SD Times) show their hostility towards the principles of code-sharing
EVERY ONCE in a while we see articles which are exceptionally hostile towards Free software in the sense that they compare it to a disease. They use words like “contaminate” and “infect”. Here is a new article of this kind. This is the type of FUD that companies like Black Duck, whose latest voice hijack we mentioned twice this month alone, habitually spread. They monetise it. There is more of them in the press and pundits like Mac Asay [1] help them get their message out. Well, they are trying to change perceptions and set trends. Asay is close to them because they helped sponsor events that he was organising. But they are not to be viewed as FOSS proponents. They are a proprietary software company with software patents; they only pretend to care about FOSS and they pretend to be spokespeople for FOSS. Their founder is a marketing man from Microsoft.
Similarly, some proprietary software company called Protecode (with a similar business model) pushes similar messages, having been given a platform at SD Times which is sometimes composed by patent lawyers (and is funded in part by Microsoft). The article then led to more from Adrian Bridgwater.
What we generally have here is a bunch of proprietary players (some with clear connections to Microsoft) talking about how complying with FOSS is risky. They never mention the risk of proprietary software licences that ‘expire’ and can lead to expensive litigation if not obeyed. The only surprising thing is that they continue to receive press space. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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