07.26.10
Posted in News Roundup at 6:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Why do some people choose to run Linux as their PC platform of choice while others opt instead for other ways of running their computing experiences?
Is it market share, perceived ease of use, slick marketing overtures, users wanting to use what they already know? This list might explain why people might choose OS X or Windows.
But what approach to computing (and life) prompts a person to use a Linux box on a daily basis? I’ll share my insights based on personal experiences and other observations accumulated over years of living the Linux lifestyle full time.
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Server
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You get to spend countless hours dealing with “me myself and I” users who always seem to have issues that can escalate to bringing the world as we know it to an end if not promptly attended to. The pay is bad and the work hours are long. Simply put system administration is a job for those who love and have a passion for administering computers and their users.
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Graphics Stack
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Measures to optimise the power management code and fully support the Turbo Core function of recent AMD six-core processors increase the data throughput and processing speed of Linux 2.6.35. Further kernel additions include tracing interfaces for KVM, another kernel configuration program, and functions for de-fragmenting the working memory.
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Applications
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You can find CDargs on most Debian-based distros, so if you’re using Debian, Linux Mint, or Ubuntu you should be able to just grab it with sudo apt-get install cdargs. It’s also available on Fedora, and you should be able to find it through the openSUSE Build Service as well.
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Proprietary
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Some people hate the idea of adding proprietary software to their desktop Linux. For these people, there are Linux distributions such as gNewSense that use only free software. For the rest of us, who use distributions such as Fedora, openSUSE and Ubuntu, there are times we either want to, or feel forced to, add proprietary programs such as Adobe Flash or Skype or the ability to play proprietary audio and video formats such as MP3 or commercial DVDs to your Linux desktop. Here’s how to do it.
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Instructionals
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Desktop Environments
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If you’ve read me long enough, you know I am a desktop junkie. Much to Jaqui’s chagrin, I do love my desktops. So much so I could have a different desktop every day and still not be completely happy. During my trials and tribulations with the Linux desktop I have, surprisingly, missed the whole Xfce train. Why? I have no idea. I’ve known of it, I’ve used it briefly, and never really thought much more about it. That is, until recently.
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Reviews
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The main purpose of the reviews published on this site is to give readers a good idea of what they would experience if they actually downloaded and installed the distribution on their computer. It is, therefore, necessary to highlight good features, or features I think will lead to a positive user experience. It is also necessary to highlight badly implemented features, or features that could give a negative user experience. For this review, let’s begin by looking at the features I think you’ll like on Sabayon (5.3).
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Debian Family
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The organisers of the DebConf10, the upcoming annual Debian Developer conference, announced that there will again be a Debian Day for everybody interested in free software. It will be on the 1st of August at the Columbia University in New York City. During this event, there will be a full day of talks on several subjects such as free software in government, design and free software, free software advocacy as well as string of talks about the Debian project and operating system. Debian Day is free of charge, but a registration via e-mail is required to ease the organisation of that event. More information is available on http://debianday.org/.
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Imagine the following situation: you find yourself with ten to twenty brand new Notebooks and the opportunity to install them with Debian and customise to your own taste. In any case it would be great fun to manually perform the Debian installation and configuration on each Notebook. This is where Debian Preseed comes into play.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Android
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Hidden away in a bland update about terms & conditions, Google’s Android Developer Blog has revealed the next phase in Google’s plans to make Android a little more pleasing to the mass market—direct carrier billing for app purchases made via the Android Market.
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Although Android itself is under an Apache licence, within Android are GPL licensed components such as the Linux kernel. This means that although vendors can freely use Google created layers such as the Dalvik VM, user interface layer and other services, the operating system’s kernel needs to be made available as source code to anyone who receives the code under the GPL licence.
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Mozilla
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Though still in its initial stages of development, Tab Candy is an interesting new Firefox 4.0 feature, which has every potential to get adopted by every single browser out there. Like for example, the tabs itself were invented by Opera, and now it’s a default and a must have feature in web browsers.
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Oracle
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OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 was released on June 4 and a new master workspace was branched off for the upcoming 3.3 on June 5. The code in this branch will be stabilized and later become the product release that will find its way onto your desktops.
With the feature and UI freeze of June 24, only fixes will go into this new OOO330 release code branch. New features will be merged into the DEV300 development code line as 3.3 is readied for release.
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Have you looked at the new Microsoft Office 2010 yet? How many of its few, new features does your company really need? And are these features worth the investment? Here are five reasons your company doesn’t need to purchase Office 2010.
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On the surface, it would seem Oracle, as the new proprietor of all things Sun, is now the master of Java’s fate. Besides inventing Java, Sun had steered important Java technologies such as the GlassFish application server, which has served as the open source reference implementation of enterprise Java. Sun also held power in the Java Community Process (JCP), the official scheme for amending Java.
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Simon Phipps/Semi-Open Source
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Simon Phipps is one of those technology purists that makes you wish you were even half as enthusiastic as he is about your favourite subject. As Sun Microsystems’ chief open source officer/evangelist he was a welcome addition to JavaOne events, where he would typically install himself in the press room alongside the technical journalists and file Flip-video reports on his own company’s event with tremendous gusto.
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Phrases like “we can’t give everything away” garnish the thought, and it’s easy to be drawn into sympathising with them. But they are wrong. Open source itself is not about making money – that’s the job of its participants.
Open source is what happens when several different people choose to work together on the same code base rather than working separately. They use an OSI-approved licence and gather as an open source community around the resulting free-software commons. Each of them is there for their own reasons; each covers their own costs and contributes the code they choose to. There is no pooling of funds to pay for work to be done because everyone is solely responsible for their own costs.
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Programming
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Once one of the pillars of the Internet, is Perl now fading away — or will Perl 6 will spark a renaissance for the programming language?
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Environment
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SynapSense is one of a handful of companies designing data center energy management systems, which use sensors to collect environmental data from inside data centers.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) won three critical exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) anticircumvention provisions today, carving out new legal protections for consumers who modify their cell phones and artists who remix videos — people who, until now, could have been sued for their non-infringing or fair use activities.
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The first of EFF’s three successful requests clarifies the legality of cell phone “jailbreaking” — software modifications that liberate iPhones and other handsets to run applications from sources other than those approved by the phone maker. More than a million iPhone owners are said to have “jailbroken” their handsets in order to change wireless providers or use applications obtained from sources other than Apple’s own iTunes “App Store,” and many more have expressed a desire to do so. But the threat of DMCA liability had previously endangered these customers and alternate applications stores.
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Xmonad + Compiz 0.9
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:52 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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So. They tell us to buy another operating system. Thou shalt use proprietary software. Is that the government’s role? If we want to use Netflix, we have to have two operating systems, one just for that? I wonder if a different legal argument were made if it might be successful, namely that the government should not be in the position of forcing citizens to spend money to have two operating systems just to be legal. Nor should a government aid certain vendors to make money by such compelling of citizens to buy their products. Nor should the government endorse products or enable certain companies to make competing products less desirable in the market.
I mean, to think about how silly this is, turn it around. Let’s say the US Copyright Office said you could only view movies and DVDs on Linux. Imagine if they told protesters using Microsoft and Apple that Linux is free, so they can just download it and dual boot, so there’s no problem? Can you imagine the uproar? From Microsoft, for starters. They fight like pit bulls when any government suggests using Linux too, and when they say they will only use Linux, what does Microsoft do? Well, legally they argue it’s prejudicial. Why isn’t this similarly prejudicial?
Of course, Netflix and Hollywood could do the right thing and solve this in the marketplace by making their works available to Linux users. Hollywood seriously needs to think about its use of Linux while making it impossible for Linux users to enjoy the resulting works. They use Linux because it’s the best tool they can find. So do we.
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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At Akademy, we ran in to many interesting people, including “random motorcycle adventurer” Henri Bergius, who is also a board member for Akademy co-organizers COSS among his many other free software related activities. Read on for the full conversation.
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Journalist Gaia Vince recalls how Seed magazine, owner of ScienceBlogs, spiked one of her articles because it was critical of a potential advertiser
While the science community reacted with indignation and shock this week over ScienceBlogs’ decision to publish a blog on nutrition written by food giant PepsiCo, I was unsurprised. I’ve been here before with Seed magazine, owners of the ScienceBlogs network.
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A federal judge has declared unconstitutional a little-known law making it a crime to falsely claim to have been awarded a military medal.
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Science
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Sikorsky Aircraft says it will build a full-size, piloted electric helicopter this year to explore the benefits of an electrically powered helicopter. The company announced Project Firefly at the Farnborough Airshow outside London and says the electric helicopter will be unveiled at EAA Airventure in Oshkosh next week.
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Environment
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More than 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells lurk in the hard rock beneath the Gulf of Mexico, an environmental minefield that has been ignored for decades. No one — not industry, not government — is checking to see if they are leaking, an Associated Press investigation shows.
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A photographer taking pictures of a BP refinery in Texas was detained by a BP security official, local police and a man who said he was from the Department of Homeland Security, according to ProPublica, a non-profit news organization in the U.S.
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Former BP contractor Adam Dillon went public last Friday, telling a local news station in New Orleans that he was fed up with BP’s handling of the spill response, not least of all its information clampdown. In an interview with Mother Jones this week, Dillon, who claims he was fired for raising concerns about the cleanup with his bosses, elaborated on his experiences in the Gulf and vented his frustrations with BP.
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We’re helping citizens to use balloons, kites, and other simple and inexpensive tools to produce their own aerial imagery of the spill… documentation that will be essential for environmental and legal use in coming years.
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The average British carnivore eats more than 11,000 animals in their lifetime, each requiring vast amounts of land, fuel and water to reach the plate. It’s time to think of waste as well as taste
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Finance
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If you’ve been paying attention this past decade, it won’t surprise you to learn that the country’s policy elites are in the midst of a destructive, well-nigh unhinged discussion about the future of the nation. But even by the degraded standards of the Washington establishment, the growing panic over government debt is shocking.
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International Monetary Fund says only western countries in the most severe difficulty should try to reduce their deficits, appearing to back former Labour government’s policy
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By contrast, the IMF reckoned the world economy was recovering faster than expected, although it warned that Europe’s debt troubles posed a big risk.
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I have often maintained that any action by any company, individual or group of individuals, that has a mass negative affect on the people should be considered an enemy of the state. In fact, some actions taken by these individuals may even be considered treasonous. I believe that some high ranking government officials have commited treason but their actions, by virtue of who they are, are not dealt with as they would if it were you or I doing the same things.
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Through May, the treasury department reported that 340,000 of the 1.5 million homeowners who been offered trial modifications had received permanent modifications. Almost as many, 300,000 homeowners, never even started on the trial after it was offered. Roughly the same number of homeowners had their trial modifications cancelled before being offered a permanent modification.
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Unfortunately, almost no one in Washington talks about this route either. They are concerned about interfering with the Fed’s independence. After all, Greenspan and Bernanke have done such great things for the economy how can anyone suggest changes?
For now at least, we can only talk about helping homeowners if most of the money goes to the banks. Since we aren’t actually helping homeowners with current policy, maybe we should just end the discussion and make the banks work for their money instead of relying on taxpayer handouts.
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Health
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A recent, dramatic warning about synthetic chemicals causing cancer came from an unlikely source — the normally staid President’s Cancer Panel. In the past, the federal panel’s annual reports have explored maximizing the nation’s investment in cancer research or promoting healthful living, or they simply assessed the nation’s progress in fighting cancer.
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China’s ban on GM rice questioned as environmental activists discover unapproved transgenic products at two grain sources
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Dozens of blogs by some of China’s most outspoken users have been abruptly shut down in an apparent crackdown.
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Country will need to regulate and supervise foreign media who take advantage of its legal protection
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A veteran British journalist and author promoting his book on the death penalty in Singapore was arrested in the country today for alleged criminal defamation and other offences.
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A U.S. Congressman has introduced a resolution that would protect citizens who videotape cops in public from getting arrested on state wiretapping charges.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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INTERNET DEMOCRACY is set to be crushed and hopes for an Internet that is fair and open to all look doomed as Republican senators push legislation that will force antitrust like laws on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Facebook will try to get a New York man’s claim for majority ownership of the website thrown out of court, attorneys for the social networking site said Tuesday.
A complaint by Paul Ceglia of Wellsville claims that a 7-year-old contract he signed with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for software development entitles him to 84 percent of the company.
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Copyrights
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Silence isn’t always golden after all — at least not for Bethany Hare.
The 10-year-old budding actress’ effort to raise money for a U.K. children’s hospice through a homemade video has been dealt a setback by a copyright dispute with a New York-based publishing company that owns the rights to a song from a Charlie Chaplin movie.
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While we’re on the subject of rants (a real rarity here at the Underground), we’d like to point out it’s not exactly been a great decade for the PR departments of most corporations (the financial industry recently brought the world economy to its knees, and if you haven’t looked to the Southeast USA lately, you’ve missed the specter of BP work crews burning oil-covered sea turtles alive).
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Over the years, we’ve written many, many, many times about Perfect 10, the former publisher of a porn magazine who has spent the last decade making ridiculously laughable arguments about how every search engine on the planet is infringing on its copyrights for pointing people to images that people had scanned from Perfect 10′s magazines and put online. For the most part, these lawsuits have gone nowhere, but Perfect 10 is incredibly persistent. Last month, we wrote about a countersuit by Rapidshare, which detailed how Perfect 10 is now a “copyright troll,” that (according to Rapidshare’s claims) purposely tries to spread its works online in order to have more companies to sue. Obviously, a key target of Perfect 10 has been Google, though Perfect 10 keeps losing (and then continues to come up with ridiculous reasons to keep the lawsuit alive).
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The complaint reads like most of the other, similar complaints we’ve seen, explaining the basics of BitTorrent to establish the claim that these “Does” infringed on the copyright. Once again, it seems like an open question as to whether or not it’s actually legal to include all of these defendants in a single lawsuit. It’s also not clear if the goal here is to send similar pre-settlement letters, but that sure seems likely.
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U.S. President Barack Obama isn’t the only government official who wants to smack down copyright infringement and counterfeiting.
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WEB HOST Rapidshare has won an appeal against film distributor Capelight Pictures that absolves it of blame for the dissemination of a film through its network.
Capelight Pictures, known for peddling such motion picture marvels as Cherrybomb, Dood Eind and Fanboy, had accused Rapidshare of not undertaking “all reasonable measures” to stop the spread of a title through its network. Capelight had initially won an injunction against Rapidshare, however the Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf has reversed that decision.
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On that first one. Just saying it’s a “review” doesn’t automatically give you fair use rights. And there’s no fair use for “satire,” only parody — and it’s not clear that the review is actually a parody (or, for that matter, satire). Going through the four factors for fair use… you could make an argument either way as to whether or not it currently is fair use. It would really depend on the judge, and I’d actually guess that the sheer amount of the movie that is used would probably tilt the scales against fair use.
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News of an act being given a £1m record contract by a major label conjures up images of a big cheque and instant riches. But what does a £1m record contract actually mean?
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Digital Economy (UK)
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When the last UK Parliament rushed the Digital Economy Act into law without debate, hours before it dissolved for the election, it appointed Ofcom, the telcoms regulator, to work out the details. Specifically, it charged Ofcom with sorting out some high standards for what evidence a rightsholder would have to produce in order to finger an online infringer (the DEA gives these rightsholders the power to eventually disconnect entire families from the internet on the strength of these accusations).
Now Ofcom has abrogated its duty to the public and announced that the record and film industry can “self-regulate” their evidence-gathering procedures; in other words, anything that the MPA or BPI say counts as proof that you’ve violated copyright goes. Since these are the same companies that have mistakenly accused dead people, inanimate objects (laser printers), and people who don’t own computers of file-sharing, this doesn’t bode well.
While we get 0.9 compiz
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Posted in News Roundup at 12:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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1) What one big opportunity, outside of technology, has the best chance of being solved the open source way? (i.e., collaboration, transparency, meritocracy, rapid prototyping, community)
Better government. I think most people would find the attributes of open source–collaboration, transparency, meritocracy, etc.–would be a breath of fresh air in government. The Sunlight Foundation is working on this. I am on the board of Open Source for America, and there are many other organizations working on this.
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GNOME Desktop
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Under the terms of the partnership, the LiMo Foundation will join the GNOME Foundation’s Advisory Board and the GNOME Foundation will become an Industry Liaison Partner for the LiMo Foundation. Morgan Gillis, Executive Director of the LiMo Foundation, said, “This close alignment between LiMo and GNOME provides important support for this commitment and will take in an expanding ecosystem of products and services developed by GNOME developers in conjunction with the members of LiMo Foundation.”
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This is a huge head start toward a free web. I think what’s missing is a client platform which catalyzes the development and use of FLOSS web applications.
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CMS
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There are many trends driving its momentum, including adoption by publishers seeking more cost-effective content platforms, and the fast-growing sophistication of the platform.
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Open Data
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I’m very pleased to announce that mySociety’s upgraded point and postcode lookup service, MaPit, is public and available to all. It can tell you about administrative areas, such as councils, Welsh Assembly constituencies, or civil parishes, by various different lookups including name, point, or postcode.
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Open Access/Content
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The first, found via Karl Bode, is a story about how Mark Rein, a VP from Epic Games, the large video game developer behind Gears of War among other games, audibly scoffs at Cliff Harris of the one-man shop Positech Games (whom we’ve written about before, concerning his plans to “compete with pirates.”) Harris was on stage discussing how indie developers, like himself, had an easier time “forming personal relationships with gamers.” Apparently, Rein loudly announced that forming a personal relationship with “a small number of gamers” was a “waste of time.” Harris shot back on his blog, pointing out that (a) whatever he’s doing is working for him, because he’s been happily making games (and a living) for 13 years and seems to have a devoted fanbase and (b) Mark Rein is a jerk for acting the way he did.
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New research suggests that misinformed people rarely change their minds when presented with the facts — and often become even more attached to their beliefs. The finding raises questions about a key principle of a strong democracy: that a well-informed electorate is best.
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Science
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SpaceShipTwo staged a dress rehearsal for its glide flight and flew with a crew for the first time.
Anticipation mounted yesterday as word spread that SpaceShipTwo, attached to its mother ship Eve, departed the Mojave Air and Space Port. Many, including us, were anxious to hear whether the first glide flight of the spacecraft also known as VSS Enterprise would happen, especially since we knew a chase plane followed SpaceShipTwo into the sky.
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Security/Aggression
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Lots of folks are submitting the big interactive investigative report put out by the Washington Post, detailing the massive bureaucratic mess that has become the US’s anti-terrorism operations. Basically, since September 11, 2001, when the government (reasonably) agreed to devote more resources to the counter-terrorism, it’s been an opportunity for both government employees and the private sector to build up giant, well-funded bureaucratic entities that have little to no oversight, and quite frequently seem to overlap with what others are doing…
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Britons face being spied on and pursued by foreign police officers even for the most minor offences in an European agreement the Home Office will sign up to tomorrow.
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Fox News’ senior judicial analyst made some surprising remarks Saturday that may go against the grain at his conservative network.
In a interview with Ralph Nader on C-SPAN’s Book TV to promote his book Lies the Government Told You, Judge Andrew Napolitano said that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney should have been indicted for “torturing, for spying, for arresting without warrant.”
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A presentation on the “Chinese Cyber-army” that delved into China’s cyberspace activities between 2001 and 2010 has been yanked off the agenda of the upcoming Black Hat security conference. The talk was canceled by Armorize Technologies after concerns were raised by the Taiwanese government over its content.
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But there is a better option that would eliminate this problem, as well as others: Get rid of the no-fly list entirely. For that matter, get rid of the requirement that passengers provide government-approved identification just to go from one place to another.
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Environment
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Our natural environment underpins our economic prosperity, our health and our wellbeing. As a result, protecting the environment and enhancing biodiversity is one of Defra’s top 3 priorities, as outlined in the Department’s Structural Reform Plan.
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For the last few weeks, BP has been offering signing bonuses and lucrative pay to prominent scientists from public universities around the Gulf Coast to aid its defense against spill litigation.
BP PLC attempted to hire the entire marine sciences department at one Alabama university, according to scientists involved in discussions with the company’s lawyers. The university declined because of confidentiality restrictions that the company sought on any research.
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Finance
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This recession has caused a generational restructuring of America’s labor market.
Many job skills in high demand 20 years ago just aren’t today, and some of the fastest-growing careers now weren’t even conceivable then. That’s why this administration is refocusing job-training efforts to give workers the skills they’ll need to compete successfully in a 21st century labor market.
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But despite that drought, Harley’s profits are rising — soaring, in fact. Last week, Harley reported a $71 million profit in the second quarter, more than triple what it earned a year ago.
This seeming contradiction — falling sales and rising profits — is one reason the mood on Wall Street is so much more buoyant than in households, where pessimism runs deep and joblessness shows few signs of easing.
Many companies are focusing on cost-cutting to keep profits growing, but the benefits are mostly going to shareholders instead of the broader economy, as management conserves cash rather than bolstering hiring and production. Harley, for example, has announced plans to cut 1,400 to 1,600 more jobs by the end of next year. That is on top of 2,000 job cuts last year — more than a fifth of its work force.
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The other day, a mortgage broker named Deb Killian called me, more or less out of the blue. Ms. Killian has been in the business since 1994. She and her husband run Charter Oak Lending Group, a small firm based in Danbury, Conn., that they founded in 1996. She is a member of the board of the National Association of Mortgage Brokers. By her estimate, she has closed more than 3,500 loans during her career.
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I am winging my way home from Canada, flying over Minnesota into Wisconsin. I am catching up with some reading, but I had to comment on all the Sturm und Drang about the expiration of the Bush Tax “cuts.”
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Instead, Ms. Warren’s supporters want President Obama to nominate her as the first head of a new consumer financial protection bureau created by the legislation he signed into law last week. They say that Ms. Warren, who conceived the idea and helped shepherd its passage into law, is the only acceptable choice to finish the project.
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When times are hard financially, families frequently let their credit card balance expand. But they also slash expenses to meet their new financial situation. They stop going out for dinner, for instance, or take their vacation locally instead of abroad. They might even downsize their house.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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American businesses weren’t very happy about a privacy bill that Rep. Rick Boucher announced in May. The Interactive Advertising Bureau, for instance, said the Virginia Democrat’s draft legislation would have “major” effects on legitimate business practices.
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What is most interesting is why Wikileaks – a Web 2.0 User Generated Content site if there ever was one – chose Mainstream media as its organ of publication and dissemination rather than just getting it out there on the Web. If there is one thing this proves, it is that the role of the Olde Media is far from redundant. The deep throating may now be very 2.0, but the reporting is an interesting combination of Old Hacks drinking from New bottles.
[...]
As to the actual incidents themselves, there will no doubt be a lot of hand wringing from the self-declared sensitive types, but the more prosaic truth about these facts is that this sort of thing was ever thus (Allied exploits in WW2 do not make them out as angels at all, and just ask the average British tankie about US “friendly fire” in the Gulf Wars), its just its all come out in the open this time (A process that started in the Crimea, by the way).
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Is no secret safe?
That’s the moral to the Wikileaks war log story: you never know what might be leaked. Of course, that itself is nothing new: Whenever we reveal information to even one person, we risk it being spread. The ethic of confidentiality (and privacy) rests with the recipient of that information.
So what’s new now? There are more means to get information since it is pooled and digital. There are more means to share information; Daniel Ellsberg had to go through media to spread his Pentagon Papers while Wikileak chose to go through media so they could add value (perspective and attention) but didn’t have to. And there are new means to stay anonymous in the process.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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A new court ruling on Friday could set a legal precedent that allows bypassing digital rights management (DRM) for fair use purposes. New Orleans circuit Judge Emilio Garza found that GE hadn’t violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by using hacked security dongles to repair uninterruptible power supplies from MGE UPS Systems as the goal itself was legal. While a jury fined GE $4.6 million for breaking copyright and misusing trade secrets, Judge Garza determined the DMCA hadn’t been broken, as using hacked items by itself didn’t constitute violating protection at the same time.
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The FCC, which proudly and repeatedly proclaims they embrace “transparency,” is taking considerable heat this week for meeting behind closed doors with the largest carriers to hash out a deal on network neutrality.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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A group of experts mandated by the WIPO Intergovernmental Committee on on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore (IGC) met from 19-23 July to discuss possible text for an eventual international legal instrument on the protection of traditional cultural expressions and expressions of folklore.
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On Tuesday July 20, a group of public interest organizations, represented by Sean Flynn, Associate Director of PIJIP, will file a complaint alleging that U.S. trade policy in the Obama Administration reduces access to medicines in low and middle income nations, and therefore violates international human rights obligations. The complaint will be filed with the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health, Anand Grover. A press conference announcing the complaint will be held at the International AIDS Conference in Vienna.
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Copyrights
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Following the country’s first ever raid on a BitTorrent site in 2009, Russian authorities have now begun a criminal investigation into the operators of Interfilm.ru. Run by a married couple, the site is now at the center of copyright infringement claim which runs to a staggering $1.25 billion. Reports suggest that the investigation has also traced some of the site’s top users.
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In the end, the former Rolling Stone senior editor chose Bronfman over Jobs for Fortune’s Fool: Edgar Bronfman Jr., Warner Music and an Industry in Crisis, in no small part due to the intense motivation exhibited by the heir to the multibillion dollar Seagram throne to transform his family’s liquor-derived empire into an entertainment company.
Why, when he could have spent his life playing tennis, did Bronfman persevere? And why does he continue to believe in the value of recorded music, despite having shown the poor timing to invest in the major-label system not long before Napster introduced the world to file sharing, causing the financial worth of recorded music to decline?
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The convicted Guns N’ Roses uploader, Kevin Cogill, isn’t the anti-piracy pitchman the Recording Industry Association of America was hoping for.
A year ago Wednesday, the 29-year-old Los Angeles man was sentenced to two months’ home confinement and a year of probation for uploading nine unreleased tracks of Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy to his music site. Federal prosecutors initially sought six months of prison, but Cogill got no time after agreeing to do an RIAA public service announcement that would scare future file sharers straight.
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A leading music industry figure has labelled attempts to thwart internet file-sharing as a “waste of time”.
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Copyright enforcement outfit Righthaven has filed some questionable lawsuits in the past, but really outdid itself in a case against Anthony Curtis, publisher of the Las Vegas Advisor.
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Next up at the Westminster eForum is Peter Jenner, emeritus president of the IMMF – a manager and “recovering economist”. He says he’s going to look at copyright more from an economist’s point of view, too, getting away from the law.
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UN1TE Dance Company‘s choreographers feel free to use whatever music they like in their classes. Unfortunately, it’s not so easy when you put videos from those classes online.
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The estate filed a similar lawsuit last year in England against Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, the UK publisher of the Harry Potter franchise. Now in a statement, Jacobs estate trustee Paul Allen says the estate is contemplating legal action in key territories worldwide and the “USA being the world’s largest market for Potter books means that our first overseas action is brought here in America.”
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ACTA
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The level of secrecy shrouding the EU’s ACTA negotiations reached new heights earlier this week, with the news that Pirate Party MEP Christian Engstrom felt compelled to abandon a meeting with ACTA negotiators in the European Parliament after he was forbidden from sharing information with the public.
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So, we now know for certain that the ACTA negotiators’ promise of “transparency” over negotiations was an outright lie. They fought it every step of the way, falsely claiming that if the draft were public, some members would leave the table. It was only after a pretty massive smack down from the EU Parliament and the fact that the draft was already leaked that negotiators finally agreed to release a draft that left out lots of pertinent information.
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They don’t allow countries to experiment with different types of copyright law to see if they work better. That, of course, is one reason why ACTA is so troubling. However, before ACTA there were other such international agreements, such as WIPO and, most famously, the Berne Convention.
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With yesterday’s leak of the full ACTA text (updated to include the recent round of talks in Lucerne) the simmering fight between the U.S. and the E.U. on ACTA is now being played out in the open. During the first two years of negotations, both sides were at pains to indicate that there was no consensus on transparency and the treaty would not change their domestic rules. Over the past four months, the dynamic on both transparency and substance has changed.
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Most of our work…work done by The HeliOS Project involves working with kids one-on-one. We find children that do not have computers due to financial disadvantage and do our best to give them one. It is indeed gratifying work. I have not had many chances to work with kids in large groups before…I mean working with them in a technical environment.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Mesa
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Mesa 7.9 is shaping up to be one hell of a release. Mesa 7.9 is already set to carry many ATI Gallium3D driver improvements along with enhancements to the LLVMpipe driver that uses the CPU for rendering, the early R600g driver, various Gallium3D architectural and state tracker improvements (MSAA, Stream Out, etc), more OpenGL 3.x functionality, and tons of other changes. But there’s still more coming! Intel’s Ian Romanick has announced on the Mesa development list that they would like to merge their new GLSL compiler into Mesa in August.
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Applications
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Being able to touch type is the ability of typing without looking at the keyboard. When touch-typing, the individual uses all fingers instead of just a few fingers. Consequently, typing speed increases dramatically.
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Open Source and Linux provide rewarding surprises. And one of these surprises is the software Synfig.
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Neil Patel is the Technical lead for Ubuntu Netbook Edition and Unity at Canonical Ltd. With the current drawbacks with Gwibber’s UI in mind, Neil have created some really good looking Gwibber UI mockups.
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Instructionals
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In this article series by John Ward,author of BIRT 2.6 Data Analysis and Reporting we will be looking at a practical example of building a reporting site. In this part of the article, we will be looking at a scenario where we have a Bugzilla instance setup with a series of bugs related to BIRT. We will look at a series of requirements and build the reports necessary to fulfil those requirements.
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We just wrapped up the Ohio LinuxFest call for presentations, so pitching presentations is on my mind. Regional, volunteer-run conferences are not only a good way for people without a travel budget to see some big names in open source, they’re also a way for first-time or inexperienced speakers to hone their presentation skills. Regional conferences also provide an excellent forum to educate users about your favorite project or topic.
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Games
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25th July 2010 – v0.65 is now available.
* Added the next part of the story
* Dying and then being stunned by a Centurion no longer leaves you immortal
* Fixed a crash when creating the Fire Shield
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Desktop Environments
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I compared a couple of ideas on the desktop to a piece of art by Cezanne. In it, I explained that this expressionist painting was able to make people who looked at it, understand that although it is expressionism, you still understand the shapes and forms in it and relate them to elements in real life. Later, I received this comment “A desktop is a tool, not a piece of art.” Is this true? I want to put this question to you all.
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New Releases
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PelicanHPC is a live CD for high performance computing cluster and is based on Debian. The latest version of the distro is PelicanHPC 2.2 RC and runs only on amd64.
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Fedora
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Whenever I make a major jump to a new computer and/or operating system, there’s usually quite a bit of distro-hopping instability as I try to figure out what works best for my hardware, my work and my moods.
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Debian Family
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For the past four or five days I have been running the Mebius laptop as my home file server, torrent slave and music player. I jumped to put a larger hard drive into the machine when I realized Debian could configure the network, the sound card and the hard drive (at its full 120Gb size!) without any extra effort from me.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I ended up having to obliterate Quickweb off the drive in favor of the much more feature-rich but still very fast booting Ubuntu. Now i’m not going to sit here and preach how good Ubuntu is–just go out and try it. Download the Live CD, you don’t even have to install it to try it (although it wont be fast unless you physically install it). But Ubuntu, thus far anyway, runs like butter with the Core i5 and 8gigs of ram. Much faster than any other OS i’ve had experience with (Yes, even you, OS X).
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint 10, based on the upcoming Ubuntu 10.10 “Maverick Meerkat”, will be released in November this year under the codename “Julia”.
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The PobBox reportedly runs a customized version of Linux 2.6 as its internal operating system, on a RISC-based Sigma Designs SMP8643 system-on-chip (SoC) processor. For more specs and features, including details on the device’s hardware and its supported multimedia formats, read our earlier PopBox coverage.
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Pros: This tiny home theatre box is the perfect partner for streaming HD content to your TV, or as a mini Linux entertainment system
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Phones
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Linux will dominate mobile devices by 2015. That’s according to a new report from technology analyst ABI Research.
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Tablets
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Olive Telecom has announced the launch of OlivePad – VT100, India’s first 3.5G Pad.
Designed as a multi functional device, Olive Pad operates on an Android Operating System and supports 3.5G HSUPA, Wi-fi, and Bluetooth.
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The situation is pretty simple to explain: As Microsoft scrambles to position Windows Phone 7 against Apple’s iPhone, and Windows 7 for tablets against the iPad, Google keeps lining up more and more hardware partners to build tablets running Google Android.
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Events
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It’s my favorite conference, I think. I love the smaller, more focused events too, but OSCON is a gathering of the tribes and we need one of those.
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BSD
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In these benchmarks we compared the performance of the traditional ATA infrastructure in FreeBSD/PC-BSD 8.1 to that of the new CAM-based ATA infrastructure when using ZFS. The tests included LZMA compression, Gzip compression, Compile Bench, PostMark, and the Threaded I/O Tester.
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Openness/Sharing
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Joi Ito wants to revolutionise the internet. His vision is of a world unperturbed by a complicated, costly and outdated copyright system, where everybody can collaborate and share content on the web as they wish.
He doesn’t want to get rid of copyright, he just wants you to be able to adapt it to your needs. He wants to build a sharing economy.
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Open Data
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Standards/Consortia
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For people who adopt software, trying to judge the value of so-called “standards support” in a product can be an incredibly frustrating experience. Standards implementations often fail to live up to their promises and, worse, it can be very hard to tell in advance of installing and running the software whether or not the “standards support” it supposedly provides is actually going to meet your needs.
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I first blogged about webm the day Google released it. It has taken some time but now I have full support for webm in my preferred Linux desktop distro (Fedora 13). I’ve been doing some testing and I have to say I’m impressed.
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Three people working with the Scott McInnis for Colorado governor campaign have resigned their positions. This comes as McInnis, a Republican, has been battling plagiarism allegations.
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Science
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A new kind of time travel based on quantum teleportation gets around the paradoxes that have plagued other time machines, say physicists.
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Security/Aggression
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Researchers found the widespread use of CCTV, ID cards, electronic registration systems, fob-controlled gates and fingerprint technology as schools attempt to crackdown on troublemakers.
Staff at one comprehensive patrolled corridors and playgrounds with radios to make sure children behaved at lunchtimes, while teachers at a private school used technology to spy on children’s computer and internet use.
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THE owners of a new bar have defended their decision to install a CCTV camera in the men’s toilets.
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More than 21,000 fines of between £60 and £120 were issued for motoring offences such as stopping to drop off family and friends.
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Lorretta Cole says she was trying to teach her neighbour’s children a lesson after she claims the ball repeatedly landed on her property and even damaged her car.
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The Government has until the end of the month to decide whether to opt out of the scheme – which would give authorities in any country in the whole of the EU the power to order our police to produce evidence, or even interrogate or launch surveillance of suspects without their knowledge.
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West Sussex County Council has been described as showing ‘poor regard’ to the importance of protecting children’s personal information after an unencrypted laptop containing information about children was stolen from the home of one of its employees.
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Environment
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In May, PRWatch reported on a controverisal new group, “Balanced Education for Everyone” (BEE), that is trying to stop public schools from teaching kids about climate change science. BEE argues that teaching climate change is too scary for kids and “unnecessary.” But BEE’s efforts also raised other questions, like what are kids learning about climate change in school, anyway, and who is influencing it?
[...]
Connecting the Dots: Hushed Relationships Between ACE and BP
ACE was founded with an initial donation of $2.675 million in “private funding,” the source of which is undisclosed on ACE’s Web site. However, a September 30, 2009 article about an ACE school presentation says all of money to start ACE came from one person: Michael Haas, the group’s founder. A second article posted on Grist.com in July 2009 confirms this. So why is ACE so cagey about reporting this on its website?
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The Los Angeles Times reported last week that, “worst-case estimates place the total oil spilled in the gulf at about 126 million gallons over two months. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates the country disgorges that much hydrocarbon pollution to the air in 10 days.”
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U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson questions BP’s widespread application of oil dispersants in the Gulf of Mexico, as does everyone else. According to Jackson, the government is “uncharted waters” with the use of dispersants in the Gulf of Mexico. “The amount of dispersant being used at the surface is unprecedented,” Jackson says. BP is also applying the chemicals in the sub-sea environment. In addition, dispersant is stopping oil from collecting on water surface, where it can be more easily controlled.
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Leaders of the Gulf Coast states have designated Sunday a day of prayer for the regions affected by the oil spill that has sent millions of gallons of crude gushing into the Gulf of Mexico for the last 66 days.
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There’s something missing in the Coast Guard’s latest PR photos of oil spill cleanup workers: protective gear.
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NOAA, the FDA and the Gulf states have been rigorously testing Gulf seafood for oil—doing smell tests with teams of human sniffers, and performing chemical tests for the harmful polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, found naturally in crude oil.
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The oil is too dispersed to take advantage of the converted Taiwanese supertanker’s enormous capacity, said Bob Grantham, a spokesman for shipowner TMT.
He said BP’s use of chemical dispersants prevented A Whale, billed as the world’s largest skimmer, from collecting a “significant amount” of oil during a week of testing that ended Friday.
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Rachel Carson ignited the debate over pesticide safety a generation ago. Its latest phase began today (July 15).
Chemical farming interests have taken aim at Environmental Working Group’s (EWG) influential “Shopper’s Guide To Pesticides In Produce,” a popular consumer tool introduced more than a decade ago that has helped drive expansion of organic produce sales at the expense conventionally grown, pesticide-contaminated fruits and vegetables.
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Finance
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As members of opposing political parties, we disagree on a number of important issues. But we must not allow honest disagreement over some issues interfere with our ability to work together when we do agree.
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AFR’s 250 consumer, labor, business, housing and grassroots groups, along with dozens of academics and think tanks, came together in an unprecedented effort to pool their expertise on complex financial matters to provide a counterweight to the big money lobbying onslaught and technical expertise of Wall Street.
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These numbers are much higher than what is reported in the media because CMD’s Wall Street Bailout Cost Table takes into account all 35 government programs, not just the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) managed by the U.S. Treasury Department. Still unpaid: $568 billion in TARP money and $1.4 trillion in Federal Reserve loans and investments.
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What is a corporation? In the aftermath of the financial crisis, the nature of the corporation has been the subject of considerable debate. While this is a very complex topic, two major points of view seem to be emerging, which we can use to book-end the different ends of a spectrum, with many hybrid positions in-between.
[...]
At the other of the spectrum, is the view of the corporation as an organization that will use all lawful means for its single-minded objective of generating profit and wealth. As we have seen with the financial crisis, that single-minded focus on wealth can degenerate into a behavior dominated by greed, where a relatively small number of people will do whatever they can to earn large sums of money without worrying about the impact of their actions on the larger society.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The “Chez Sludge” scandal in San Francisco, involving the city giving away free toxic sewage sludge as “organic Biosolids compost” for gardeners, took another turn on July 13, 2010. The Food Rights Network filed a formal letter of complaint with the California Bar Association, asking the professional society for California lawyers to investigate Chris Desser, attorney for Francesca Vietor, in Vietor’s threat of libel against the UK Guardian newspaper.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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I’ve been disagreeing with a lot of people about transparency recently, and even though it’s kind of going out of fashion on the edge of my community, I’m still going to stand up for the principle. Transparency, real and true, is a good thing for many reasons. It’s not magic fairy pixie dust that makes the world a wonderful place, and anyone who sold it as such needs to do their historical homework. What is does it complex, important, but not sexy enough for many activists.
What a lot of people commenting on the debate about government transparency don’t get is that it’s not just about the information. Action always has an inherent politics to it; publishing data about itself is as much about telling government how it’s supposed to behave as it is about the data. Even if you’re wildly juking the stats, you’re at least communicating to yourself how different things should be. The action involved in transparency is the action of telling on yourself. No matter how subverted, two things remain true: you know that you should be doing better, and you’re going to accidentally expose incidental truths.
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It recently came to light (thanks to some good reporting) that the Government has been fishing around with ISPs for their support on a new and radical data retention policy. This would legally oblige telcos to retain large amounts of data about their customers’ communications activities in case law enforcement needed them at some point in the future.
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Members of the European Parliament are being asked to sign a written declaration that will, ostensibly, “set up a European early warning system for paedophiles and sex offenders”. In reality, it will extend the Data Retention Directive to search engines.
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Copyrights
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A claim arguing both copyright infringement and moral rights infringement looked for $27 million in damages. (Plus, amongst other things, the goods and services tax on the monetary awards.) By the end, the Honourable Mr. Justice Russell of the Federal Court of Canada determined that the defendants’ copyright misdemeanor was confined to posting the plaintiff’s work on their website, without his consent. Justice Russell did not conceal his opinion of the plaintiff’s conduct; “The evidence adduced concerning infringement of copyright suggests that the Plaintiff’s claims are disproportionate and opportunistic.”
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A new study has been making the rounds, concluding that only 0.3% of all files available on BitTorrent are confirmed to be ‘legal’. The results of the study were promoted by anti-piracy outfit AFACT and have been picked up by several news outlets, including Ars Technica and ZDNet, who all failed to see that the report is bogus.
[...]
Unfortunately, the results of these type of studies are pushed by anti-piracy outfits and taken for granted by outsiders, even by respected news outlets on the Internet such as Ars Technica and ZDNet. In this case their reporters were completely taken in by the report.
Just a few minutes into reading the study we were shaking our heads here at the TorrentFreak headquarters. Mistake after mistake is made in the report and conclusions are drawn based on painfully inaccurate data and methodologies. We’ll lay out the most critical errors below, which represent just the tip of the iceberg.
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ACTA
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Just who is the bad apple at the ACTA negotiations, excluding the public and forcing discussions between the parties to be held in secret?
Not us, says the EU, which has come in for some stick of late – not least from Pirate Party MEP Christian Engstroem – for its refusal to allow MEPs to disseminate anything from the talks back to their voters. Rather, the blame should be laid at the door of just one of the parties to the talks, but the official line is that they are staying schtum on just which.
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Digital Economy
XBMC Mythbox Demo
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Security/Aggression
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Many encryption utilities–such as the BitLocker feature in Windows 7 Ultimate, or the Rohos Mini Drive utility for protecting info on a thumb drive–are available. But my favorite tool covers all the bases: It’s free, it’s easy, it’s effective, and it works on all major operating systems. TrueCrypt lets you create virtual encrypted drives. Versions are available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux; if you install it on several machines running different OSs, you can open your encrypted files from a network share, thumb drive, or other shared storage device.
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A huge cache of secret US military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency.
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Environment
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BP has said that it is not the only oil Company responsible for oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The Company is firm on the view that the claims of its negligence in the oil spill are baseless.
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Tony Hayward, chief executive of BP, is to leave the company, bowing to pressure over his handling of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion, the aftermath of which has become America’s worst environmental disaster.
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Finance
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Wall Street took the latest government report on its pay practices in stride Friday, saying it would review U.S. pay czar Kenneth R. Feinberg’s suggestions about compensation while privately expressing relief that the report wasn’t tougher on them.
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Citigroup Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are among the banks that sold Goldman Sachs Group Inc. protection against a failure of insurer American International Group Inc., said two people with knowledge of the transactions.
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Kenneth Feinberg, the Obama administration’s special master on executive compensation, called on 17 bailed-out financial firms including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Citigroup Inc. to adopt compensation policies that allow directors to lower top executives’ pay when a firm’s survival is under threat.
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Goldman Sachs told United States investigators which counterparties it used to hedge the risk that American International Group would fail, three people with knowledge of the matter told Bloomberg News.
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The inspector general of the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating whether political or other factors influenced the timing of the filing and subsequent settlement of the commission’s securities fraud case against Goldman Sachs, according to letters between his office and a Republican congressman.
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H. David Kotz, the S.E.C. inspector general, who is an independent watchdog for the agency, began the inquiry in response to an April 23 letter from Mr. Issa, a California Republican who is the ranking minority member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
The S.E.C. has denied that its timing was influenced by politics.
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A nonprofit accuses the bank’s traders of starving people by dramatically bidding up prices for wheat, corn and rice. Is that fair?
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International banks and financial companies were indirect beneficiaries of the government’s 2008 bailout of American International Group Inc., according to newly released documents.
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The government’s pay czar announced Friday that 17 companies benefiting from federal bailout money handed out $1.6 billion in excess executive pay at the height of the financial crisis. The firms include Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America.
Kenneth Feinberg, who was appointed as the Obama administration’s special master for compensation, examined executives earning more than $500,000 at the 419 companies that received taxpayer assistance. Of the 17 companies that he found were egregious in their compensation, 11 have paid back the assistance received from taxpayers.
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Goldman Sachs (GS) has contracted documentary film maker Ric Burns, co-producer of the Emmy-award winning 1990 documentary, The Civil War, to make an “industrial,” a movie about Goldman for internal consumption only, according to The Wall Street Journal’s Susanne Craig, citing a Goldman rep.
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That isn’t a real movie title. But filmmaker Ric Burns, who created the PBS series “The Civil War” with his brother Ken, is shooting a documentary about the Wall Street firm. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is paying for the film, has editorial control and is overseeing the project through its marketing department, a Goldman spokesman said.
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The creditors claimed the unit facilitated the fraud committed at Stamford, Connecticut-based Bayou, which filed for bankruptcy protection in May 2006. Bayou co-founder Samuel Israel pleaded guilty to directing a $400 million fraud and is serving 22 years in prison.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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In an unprecedented development, close to 92,000 classified documents pertaining to the war in Afghanistan have been leaked. SPIEGEL, the New York Times and the Guardian have analyzed the raft of mostly classified documents. The war logs expose the true scale of the Western military deployment — and the problems beleaguering Germany’s Bundeswehr in the Hindu Kush.
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The closing date for comments is 30 July, so you have a few days to mull things over before submitting.
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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What exactly does it mean when Richard Stallman says that the Creative Commons’ Attribution-ShareAlike license has a “Weak Copyleft”? Why exactly is it that “Freeware” and “Non-Free Software” mean the same thing, while “Free Software” is something else entirely? And what is this business with “Free Beer”, and where can I get some? If you’ve asked yourself these questions, this column is for you.
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“We have reduced their bills and given them what they needed,” says McGrattan. “We’ve also moved them from proprietary systems to open source so all they have to pay is a support bill. So they are quite happy. They have recommended us to other customers and governments and told them what we have done.”
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One of Southern California’s successful, serial entrepreneurs is Winston Damarillo, who founded Gluecode, which he sold to IBM in 2005. Earlier this month, his latest startup, El Segundo-based Morphlabs announced it had raised a Series B funding worth $5.5M. We thought we’d catch back up with Winston to hear about the Morphlabs.
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[Winston Damarillo:] All of your startups have been centered around open source projects. What’s the open source connection here?
Winston Damarillo: Sixty to seventy percent of our ingredients are based on open source. I always mention that anything I do has an open core, which is, the core of what we do comes from open source. In our case, the workload manager comes from Eucalyptus, the configuration management from Puppet, and a third systems management tool. All three are open source building blocks.
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Winston Damarillo: One of the things I’ve learned, is that open source is now an accepted ingredient for any enterprise user. People are not scared anymore of using that. On what you need to know, from the business model side, is that we realized that open source support, by itself, is a declining and diminishing return on revenue generation. The more mature the open source product or project, the less the opportunity to make money. A good example of that is the Apache web server, where no one pays for support–they just download it and use it. What a successful company does, is implement what we call an open core–the idea is, you use open source, which you expect will mature over time, but later a product on top of that commercially, which allow you to make open source more scalable. That makes it more sustainable as a product, and not just as a support service.
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Gurock Software announced an offer to provide free licenses of their web-based test management software TestRail to open source projects and teams.
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Security
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Mention ‘open source security tools’ and the first words that come to mind are Nmap and Nessus. Of course, Nessus is no longer open source. Its open source offshoot OpenVAS, has failed to acquire the same levels of popularity. Apart from Nmap and Nessus, Metasploit is probably one of the more popular offerings available on the open source security block.
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Unfortunately, the flame wars stirred pent up frustrations among the projects’ leaders. SourceFire’s Vulnerability Research Team (VRT) continued the debate through performance tests posted on its blog, contending that “Suricata’s performance isn’t just bad; it’s hideously, unforgivably bad.” The article goes on to state that Suricata’s capabilities are inherently limited by its choice of the Snort rule language, and that despite a million dollars in development, the OISF has “failed, utterly, to deliver on their promises.”
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The latest version of Truecrypt has many new features, including partitions with larger sector sizes, a volume organiser and automatic mounting of volumes.
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Graphics
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While working on some combat animations, I decided that the current Phoenix animation editor is too hard to use, and there are too many bottlenecks in the route to making it better. So, for now, I am looking into alternative approaches to editing animations.
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As I mentioned before, here in the studio I use a Linux computer. Well, calling it a Linux computer is a bit inaccurate. I have a computer and it runs Linux. PCLinuxOS, to be specific. PCLinuxOS, like all Linux distributions, is freely available for download at many different websites. If you want to try Linux, I strongly suggest PCLinuxOS. if you want to explore a bit more, then visit DistroWatch.com. There, you can download and test drive (via a Live CD) any flavor of Linux being distributed today.
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Symbian
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Only companies can become Symbian Foundation members and therfore play a role in decision-making over future developments in the open source mobile operating system. The Symbian Developer Cooperative (DevCo) has now been founded to ensure that the voices of individual programmers are not ignored.
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The Symbian Foundation and Nitobi team up in an effort to make it easier for mobile application developers to create mobile apps for any device.
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Going Free
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The former leaders of IBM’s Visual Communications Lab have been hard at work on a “summer project” — desktop software that will display large amounts of information in a number of visual formats.
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Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg of Many Eyes fame will be releasing a new data visualization tool they call ‘Time Flow’ soon on the website of their current company ‘Flowing Media’.
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Mozilla
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Beta 2 was actually slated for release today, but the download page is still serving up b1. When it’s ready, you’ll find Firefox 4 beta 2 at getfirefox.com/beta/.
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SaaS
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Heroku Add-on System will make it possible for the Ruby developers to make use of Apache’s open source CouchDB and offer systems capable of storing the unstructured data generated by web applications.
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Rackspace’s OpenStack could signal a new race to open up cloud computing technology
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Open Source integration provider WSO2 is shipping a business rules server aimed at letting companies quickly and easily create, access, and manage business rules within an SOA framework. WSO2 Business Rules Server (BRS) delivers a tool for separating business logic from underlying infrastructure code.
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Consider Facebook. Like its web peers, Facebook uses a ton of open-source software. While ostensibly free, to make projects like Linux work for its purposes, Facebook heavily customizes them. While the company may not buy as much software, it ends up writing or customizing quite a bit of code.
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CMS
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This past March we saw a hint of what was coming from the open source Web CMS project called MODx (news, site). Now their latest release, MODx Revolution v2.0, has officially arrived. This is the future of the MODx project. Let’s take a peek.
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If open source still makes you think of feature-bare products, command lines and dense nerd-level manuals, then you need to get with the times. TeamLabs is a fine example of open source Enterprise 2.0 at work. No more complicated than shopping on Amazon, it allows users to communicate, collaborate and project manage in a clear, stress-free style.
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Chalk this one up as a victory for the free software movement: Thesis, the wildly popular proprietary WordPress theme from developer/designer Chris Pearson, is now available under a split GPL, the license that makes it possible to alter and redistribute this software as you see fit.
Pearson’s decision marks the end of a high-drama clash between him and Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPressWordPressWordPress and of Automattic, which runs WordPress.com and a handful of related software. Some folks wondered if the battle of words might end in a battle of legal precedent as Mullenweg struggled to preserve free software principles and Pearson struggled to maintain control over his highly successful software.
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Joomla!
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The project lead team behind open source content management system, Joomla!, is looking for greater contribution from the wider community on which features make the cut, and which are left for the future.
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With an estimated 10 to 50 million public websites running under Joomal and with 750,000 downloads per month it is an important open source project. Computerworld Australia caught up with co-founder and core developer, Andrew Eddie, about his own history as well as that of Joomla’s, and where the content management system is headed in the future.
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Education
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IT directors interested in open source software have an ever increasing number of resources available for learning more about options, best practices, and pitfalls. Online communities, conferences, blogs, and Webinars all provide perspective.
After a dozen interviews and review of even more online sources, THE Journal put together a list of tips for IT directors considering open source software (OSS) in their districts. The main take-away? Focus on what is needed and what will be accepted in any given situation–and the cost savings aren’t so bad either.
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Healthcare
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David Riley, head of the CONNECT initiative for the Federal Health Architecture (FHA) Program. Riley is responsible for creating the product direction and overseeing product development for CONNECT.
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I think the collective awe of health care aficionados at the Open Source Convention came to a focal point during our evening Birds of a Feather session, when open source advocate Fred Trotter, informally stepping in as session leader, pointed out that the leaders of key open source projects in the health care field were in the room, including two VistA implementors (Medsphere and WorldVistA), Tolven, and openEMR–and not to forget two other leading health care software initiatives from the U.S. government, CONNECT and NHIN Direct.
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Semi-Open Source
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Clearly, individual OSI directors have been less than thrilled with the open core business model. Simon Phipps, in particular, made a pretty strong argument that open core was just plain bad for business. But, though Phipps is an OSI director, he wasn’t speaking in any official capacity on behalf of the OSI with these statements.
This weekend, Russ Nelson, another OSI director and License Approval Chair posted an entry on the OSI Board Blog sharply criticizing open core. This falls under my definition of official response.
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Ihaka learned about the open source movement during his time at MIT. “That is really where free software came from, that is were Richard Stallman was and the free software foundation is still based in Cambridge I think. Those ideas were sort of hanging around in the air.”
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BSD
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Putting out new releases of OS software isn’t always about adding major new features — sometimes it’s just about making existing features usable and stable. In the case of the open source software FreeBSD, that’s certainly the case with the newly hatched 8.1 release.
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Project Releases
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The Open Information Security FoundatThe Open Information Security Foundation (OISF), a group funded by the U.S Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and several security vendors, this week released an open source engine built to detect and prevent network intrusions.ion (OISF), a group funded by the U.S Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and several security vendors, this week released an open source engine built to detect and prevent network intrusions.
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The main feature of the new version is a completely re-write of TimeLive with fully integrated set of tools for managing every aspects of projects.
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Government
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The Australian Greens will use any gain in political influence to push for more open source software procurement by Government, according to its spokesperson, Senator Scott Ludlam.
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Standards/Consortia
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It was just back in May that Google opened up the VP8 video format that they got their hands on through the acquisition of On2 and at the same time they created the WebM container format. VP8 has already received a lot of love by the open-source community — both developers and end-users — and support for it has already worked its way into FFmpeg, GStreamer, and other multimedia projects. Google released the libvpx library as their official VP8 decoder library, but now the FFmpeg developers have created their own decoder and it’s shockingly faster than that of Google’s own open-source library.
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Now is a particularly good time to ditch Windows for good, for workstations as well as servers. For instance, now that Microsoft stopped supporting Windows Server 2003 on July 13, you’ll need to find something different to use for your servers. Whether it’s switching from Windows Server 2003 to 2008 or to Linux-based servers–or changing out tired and faulty Windows Vista desktops for the alien Windows 7 or something more user-friendly–Linux provides you with freedom and freedom of choice.
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I like messing around with my desktop. I decided to give it a retro Windows look. I used the Redmond theme, set all my fonts to Monospace 10, used a boring gray background, and tweaked my editor and terminal colors.
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After doing everything I (and the consultancy I work for) would have done, I determined that the best approach was to re-install the OS. Problem is, he couldn’t find his restore discs and (as I mentioned earlier) he didn’t want to shell out the money for Windows 7. This laptop was just going to be his spare laptop for home use (it was his primary laptop at work).
I decided it was time for an experiment. I knew the laptop had a restore partition so if I left that partition alone we could still restore the machine back to factory defaults (if he could find his restore discs). So…it was time to bring out the big guns. Said big guns? Ubuntu 10.04. I was fairly certain 10.04 would work like a champ on the machine. It did. But the big test would be when the user had the machine in his hands and put it to use.
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Linux is customizable. As the video for Compiz Fusion showed, the visual appearance of linux and the desktop environment can be extensively customized – and once again, this all can be done for free. In contrast, Windows has more limited customization. While there are programs that allow one to change the appearance of Windows dramatically, many of these programs are not free. Additionally, the capabilities for customization with linux extend past visual customization. Beginning users can stick with default settings, but more advanced users can dive deep within the system to tweak how it will work with their hardware, improving speed and power. In contrast, the Windows operating system is closed to a point, and tinkering is not supported or encouraged.
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The question is simple and understandable: does this shift to prepackaged, easy-to-use linux distributions alienate those who appreciate the ideals of linux’s origins? Do user-friendly linux distributions proliferate at the expense of the core users?
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Server
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If you ever wanted to explore the latest content management, wiki, or microblogging products without the headache of setting them up, a free solution from the BitNami Project is just what you need.
One of the benefits of free and open source software is the ability to download world-class software and implement it gratis on your systems. At times, though, there is a big difference between theory and action. Complex server systems, like Ruby on Rails, Tomcat, Joomla!, or even a straight-up LAMP stack can be difficult to install and properly configure on a Linux system, particularly for admins with a little-less-than-expert rating on Linux.
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Audiocasts
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Applications
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Canola is a open source media center application which was primarily built for smart phones and netbook devices. To be frank, I had never heard about Canola before and so I decided to give Canola Media Center a spin in my laptop powered by Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx.
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My toolbox is very plain Jane, and for a reason. It’s basic because these are the tools that get the job done on every Unix-like platform available. Everything I’ve come to rely on is open source, even on proprietary platforms like AIX. If there’s a part of my toolbox missing, I’ll download the package or source and make sure it’s available.
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gnuA major power tool that I left out of my sysadmin’s toolbox article is GNU Screen. Screen has been an absolute lifesaver in the past, especially because I sometimes work remotely over wifi connections that might not always be the most reliable. Screen is a session manager for shells, a way to run and preserve multiple shells without actually having to be connected to the server. The most common way I use screen is over ssh. When connected to a server over ssh, the bash session is run over that connection, so any programs or scripts that are run are also dependent on the ssh session being active. However, when screen is run, it runs in the background, separate from the ssh session. That means screen lets your wifi connection die in the middle of running a script without the script dying as well.
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you can play Dwarf Fortress at the console, which is either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your perspective. The 40d19 version for Linux which was released a few months ago allows you to set some options and send output to the console instead of its conventional SDL “translation,” if I understand it right.
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Feh is a fast, lightweight image viewer that uses imlib2. It is command line-driven and supports multiple images through slideshows, thumbnail browsing or multiple windows, and montages or index prints using TrueType fonts to display file information.
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There are still a few more unofficial plugins to go until we have 100% feature parity with the 0.8 branch. Among some of the ones I’m working on right now:
* Animations Plus
* Newton (Physics Engine for Compiz)
* Sound (ALSA based sounds on window events)
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5 Best Web eCommerce Software for Linux: The buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks is called electronic commerce (commonly known as e-commerce or eCommerce). Today, eCommerce is mostly done on the web and is conducted entirely electronically for buying virtual items such as access to premium content on a website and purchase of physical items using eCommerce payment gateway.
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New website PortableLinuxApps features a number of portable Linux applications, which will work on any Linux distribution. These can run off your flash drive or from a folder in your home directory; it doesn’t matter. Best of all, there’s documentation out there to help you make your own program, should you not be able to find what you’re looking for.
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GStreamer is a pipeline-based multimedia framework which provides an interface to programmers for writing various multimedia applications.
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Proprietary
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The new application also provides event notification for backup, continuous data protection (CDP), replication and file level activities; real-time tracking and alerts of user file system activities; and new support for Linux Master, Linux Client and Linux Deduplicated Repository.
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The SDR-2010 is a very powerful and adaptable Linux-based signal processing platform. It is an Intel (News – Alert) 64 Architecture Server hosting the new high-performance PRO-2910 PCI Express based carrier cards. Each card has dual XMC/PMC sites.
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Instructionals
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Expect-lite is targeted at the verification testing environment; it produces a pass/fail result at the end of the script. However, its use is not limited to this environment. The tool is written in the Expect scripting language, but it requires no knowledge of Expect. In fact, it’s so simple it takes no more than five minutes to learn.
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Games
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If you are looking to do some Linux / open-source gaming this weekend but are looking for something new besides the recent release of VDrift, the Sauerbraten developers are out with their first update in 14 months. Sauerbraten 2010-07-19 “Justice Edition” has been released with plenty of changes.
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I’ve been meaning to mention this game for months now, so here it is: Sleep is Death is the latest game from indie developer Jason Rohrer, who also created the acclaimed games Passage, Between, and Primrose. As with his other projects, Sleep is Death is not a traditional game, focusing on two players crafting an interactive story akin to an online multiplayer Dungeons and Dragons session minus the players’ guides.
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For those wondering, FRAPS is a Windows program that can be used to record video streams of applications running on your desktop, most often games. For instance, I’ve used FRAPS to grab a handful of cool videos while playing Live for Speed.
Being able to record your desktop activities has many aspects – educational, tutorial and sometimes sheer bravado. There are circumstances where nothing short of a video demonstration is going to work.
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The Reticule recently posted a new article on the rise of Mac and Linux gaming. The article included discussion of the release of Steam for Mac, as well as the importance of independent developers in keeping Mac and Linux gaming alive. Developers such as Spiderweb’s Jeff Vogel and Wolfire’s John Graham offered their comments about the benefits of supporting multiple platforms.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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When I started looking at moving away from Ubuntu I was leaning toward KDE after the wealth of great screenshot I’d been seeing in the Ubuntu Forums monthly desktop screenshot threads. I was especially interested in the possibilities of Bespin, a theme/widget style for Qt4 that has knocked my socks off in some desktop screenshots. I’ll admit I haven’t played with Bespin much yet but I definitely need to track down the info I was given before so I could look into it. Logo for the K Desktop Environment (KDE)On the whole I’m really liking KDE. There’s a lot to learn, and I do have to relearn how to do some things in KDE but it’s definitely a learning curve worth climbing. One of the things you learn pretty quickly about GNOME is the fact that a lot of the configuration tasks are hidden away from the general user, and while the GNOME Configuration Editor and Ubuntu Tweak do help a lot there are some things, like screensavers, where all but the most basic things are not available, and even then you can easily have to deal with the command line to make further tweaks. If the tweaks are even doable under GNOME. With KDE there are user changeable options for just about everything, if you can figure out where to look. Unfortunately finding information isn’t as easy in KDE as it is in Ubuntu, which lets you search one in the Help app and get results in every installed app. In KDE I first have to know where I want to look and I’ve started in the wrong place a few times. I’ve also found the KDE help files aren’t nearly as in-depth as GNOME’s are so I’ve had to turn to my web browser a few times to find the information I need.
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Will I switch? I don’t know. What I do know is that starting Monday I am going to actively begin hunting for a good KDE distro that plays well with my WiFi card. I would LOVE to keep using this edition of Mandriva, but where I could probably find every package I need or install every utility I need from source I am less sure that I will be able to fix the suspend/resume +no wifi problem that I have.
Because of the WiFi problem that I have in Mandriva I am going back to Ubuntu this weekend. For the sake of this series I stuck with Mandriva in order to use KDE4, but I cannot keep doing the reboot thing, I use suspend/resume a LOT.
All in all this was a very informing exercise for me. I hope I was able to translate what I experienced this week in writing to you guys – if you have any suggestions on how to improve these seven day challenges let me know!
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Today I stumbled across Netrunner GNU/Linux Community Distro and it made me wonder about a few things.
Originally, it was Ubuntu with out the “evil Mono(tm)”, now of course mainline Ubuntu has no mono either, so their USP was gone! So they changed their main idea.
The latest release is based on Kubuntu (which makes it a 4th generation distro) and aims to improve the KDE that is provided by Kubuntu by, this is what really got me, integrating more of Gnome into KDE.
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GNOME Desktop
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I’d like to present you The Board.
[...]
What is it made of? The Board is built on top of bleeding edge GNOME platform. It’s written in Javascript using the GObject Introspection-based Gjs. The UI is fully written with Clutter and Mx (with some small bits of GTK+ and Clutter-GTK+). It’s a nice example of how you can do cool apps using the GNOME platform nowadays.
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In the light of the upcoming GNOME 3, the more document-centric Shell and the browser-mode nautilus (instead of spatial mode), I wanted to remix my thoughts a bit.
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In the past week I’ve used Ubuntu 10.04, Mint 9, and Arch + GNOME, but Arch + XFCE seems to beat all of those.
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Reviews
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It’s been a while since our last review of the Jolicloud operating system, and since we just got a brand-new eMachines eM350 netbook (see it in the enclosed image) we thought to give you guys a glimpse into the new release of Jolicloud 1.0. As many of you already know, the distribution is not yet available for download as an ISO image. At the moment, Jolicloud 1.0 is only available as an upgrade option to selected users. But don’t despair, as it will be available for download by the end of the month!
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This is first review of Puppy 5 lucid which is Ubuntu based. It is the fastest OS I used ever,it feels better than DSL.So I am going to share my Experience with you.
[...]
Puppy 5 is a tremendous success. The boot sequence has been improved; it looks nicer, more polished and is more streamlined. The desktop is even more refined. You get tons of great programs. Then, there’s Quick pet. Everything works out of the box, including Wireless, Samba, multimedia playback. All of this in just 130MB.
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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#1 PCLinuxOS is a Mandriva Spinoff
It was started with a Mandriva base, but over the years it has grown to different personality. Except for the beloved Control Center none of the components are borrowed from Mandy. PCLinuxOS 2010 is built from the ground up using the home grown repository. Tex and PCLOS devs have taken bits and pieces from Fedora, OpenSuse and Mandriva, even some of the patches used are from Debian, PLD and Chakra. Would you call it a respin of all these distros?
The greatness of a modern linux desktop distribution lies in how well you integrate components, no matter from where they are taken, and how well you take decisions regarding choosing/upgrading the critical components and introducing new technologies. In this regards, PCLinuxOS is tightly integrated, well-put-together, stable and out-of-the-box usable distribution. It’s a respin of none!
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Red Hat Family
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The ClearFoundation has announced the release of version 5.2 of the enterprise edition of its open source Linux server, network and gateway solution. ClearOS, formerly known as ClarkConnect, is aimed at small businesses and distributed environments, and the latest release includes a number of updates, changes and new features.
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Fedora
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Research Purpose
To find out how to maintain, sustain, and grow the Fedora Project’s online open source development community.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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As others have said, Ubuntu is the great beginner’s distribution, and now, after seeing how well my less than mainstream hardware was handled, I can say it should be the very first distribution anyone should try. [I did not always feel this way, as only last year I truly believed that there were fewer problems with OpenSuSE 11.2 versus any other distributions I have tried, which includes all the usual suspects, and few less popular ones, like Zenwalk]
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Flavours and Variants
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I make a point of trying as many different variations of Ubuntu as I can, this way I can be informed when I recommend one version over another to friends and family. The following is a round up of my favorites I have found over my last three years in the world of Linux.
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Lubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat, the unoficial LXDE flavor of Ubuntu got an artwork update last week. I’m posting this only now because I had some issues downloading the latest Lubuntu development ISO.
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Manhattan OS is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu created by Kevin McDole, a frequent WebUpd8 reader and commenter. Manhattan OS is in fact inspired by everything we post here, at WebUpd8. Initially I though this review would be really easy to do since I am very familiar with everything in Manhattan OS, but I then realized half of WebUpd8 is used in Manhattan so that would take like… a year for a full review. So we’ll do a light review only and for any application for which you want to find out more, just search for it on WebUpd8.
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Peppermint
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There are so many Linux distributions out there. Some of them are pretty standard and some of them go well out of their way to try to bring something different to the table. I’ve seen just about every take on the Linux desktop. Today, however, I came across a distribution, Peppermint Linux, that added another new twist to the desktop. It’s nothing earth shattering. In fact, it really only takes advantage of a technology given to us by Mozilla Labs. That technology? Prism.
[...]
With just a bit of tweaking on the desktop I believe Peppermint Ice has a real winner on their hands. It’s a unique idea that needs just a bit more work to make for the ideal social desktop.
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As one of the world’s top providers of virtual private server cloud hosting, VPS.NET is constantly researching and developing smarter and more intuitive services to meet these growing needs. As part of its commitment to innovation, VPS.NET is sponsoring the soon to be released Peppermint OS, a Linux-based operating system that is cloud/web application centric. VPS.NET will be providing the infrastructure for Peppermint OS’ online presence.
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Embest has released an evaluation kit – the Devkit3250 – based on NXP’s LPC3250 ARM926EJ-S microcontroller, supporting by the Linux open-source operating system.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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The nonprofit Linux Foundation on Friday said the GENIVI Alliance will go with the open-source MeeGo OS for its new In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) system. The decision gives automakers like BMW, GM and PSA Peugeot Citroen the new mobile platform and makes Delphi, GM, Intel, Magneti-Marelli, Visteon, Wind River and others the suppliers. IVI includes apps in vehicles that can be used by everyone in the car, including navigation, media, location-based services, and access to the Internet as well as media players and phones
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Android
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One of the massive advantages of the Android platform is that it’s open source, so anyone can use it to load onto their phones.
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Sub-notebooks
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Jon Rubinstein confirmed the Fortune Brainstrom Tech that netbooks running webOS platform are in the pipeline.
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Ok, so you know about the XO-1.5 and you’ve been told about the XO-1.5 HS which is an X0 but with a different keyboard.
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On Friday I covered the $35 tablet prototype that the Indian government unveiled. Over the weekend, it’s been called everything from the “future of computing” to “devices [that] cannot compensate for [India's] crumbling education infrastructure and absenteeism of teaching staff.” A few more details have emerged, however, suggesting that this prototype is a lot closer to a reference spec than something that will see the light of day soon.
I started digging into this a little bit further when a little birdie from Intel said “It doesnt add up – the sum of the parts is no where near the whole cost they are claiming…” Not a literal birdie, of course, but I’m waiting for an OK to attribute the quite reasonable statement to a source. Regardless, both the Times of India and thenextweb.com shed a bit more light on the device.
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Send this to a friend
07.25.10
Posted in News Roundup at 4:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Games
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First released as a free, open-source download for PC gamers in 2005, the fast-paced twitch shooter Nexuiz is to arrive on consoles as a downloadable title, powered by the tech behind visual feast Crysis 2.
[...]
Originally expected to launch during summer 2010, development studio Illfonic decided to re-code Nexuiz using Crytek’s CryEngine 3 after seeing it in action at E3. The team have until September to get that new version up and running in time for an appearance at the PAX Prime expo in Seattle.
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Ernest Hemingway once said that one cat just leads to another. Somehow, the same happens with Linux: rarely is it that penguin lovers only try one distribution. Of course, the enormous variety of distributions can be frightening to beginners but, once they get over this initial reaction of confusion or fear, if they decide to learn, they benefit from the vast assortment that Linux provides. Yes, one Linux leads to another. Once you try several Linux distributions, you pick your favorite one and, in the process, you learn to navigate several other OSs. Today, that is TRULY A GOOD THING.
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According to HawkBoard, the development board based on OMAP-L138 processor integrates an ARM 926 applications processor processor enables Linux developers to harness the power of floating-point DSP to design open source applications.
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Android
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In his latest pricing and licensing column, Doug Carolus of N’Compass Solutions discusses Digium, Asterisk, and open source software as it relates to enterprise communications. As an aside, Doug provides the best thumbnail definition of “free” software that I’ve heard, and one that’s good to keep in mind when thinking about this category of product. Open source software is “free” in the sense of “free” speech—i.e., relatively unrestricted—as opposed to “free” in the sense of “free” stuff—i.e., it costs you nothing. Theoretically, Asterisk doesn’t cost you anything either, but as Doug demonstrates, actually obtaining it and following through all the way to deployment in an enterprise is not at all without cost.
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McArdle is developing an integration framework for a suite of open-source applications to ensure they all communicate with one another. He is pulling standard applications such as Enterprise Resource Planning, customer relationship management, database and records management, a web content management system and “telephony solutions”, all free open source products, into the framework. The integration element will include an enterprise service bus, a portal, rules management and business process management engines and an overarching administration and configuration console.
The entire package will be known as EOSS, for Enterprise Open Source Solutions, with a company of the same name to sell and support it.
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For companies which are interested in installing collaborative tools on their own servers or modifying the platform in accordance with their specific needs, TeamLab is offered as a free open-source software. TeamLab open-source solution is distributed under GNU GPL v3 license terms and listed in SourceForge open-source library.
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There is no doubt that open-source technologies have gained traction in small to midsized enterprises, especially when IT budgets are tight. But as enterprises take a hard look at open-source technologies, relevant issues must be considered before taking the plunge. Can open source really benefit the enterprise? What areas offer the most potential for SMEs? What are the potential concerns?
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The development of open-source software has resulted in savings of about $60 billion per year to consumers, according to a report published by the Standish Group. That probably means that consumers who would have to pay to use those products, now may use them for free, under a special software license, which also allows users to contribute to further develop the concept.
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What’s the reason for the lack of adoption of open source software — software developed and shared by a community and available for free — for the power grid? Well, according to our Open Source Smart Grid Primer, published on GigaOM Pro (subscription required), some of the reasons for the lack of support is that utilities are risk averse, used to working with proprietary gear and vendors, and need to recover costs and earn profits on investments into their grid.
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The Open Source Project Imixs Workfow provides a Business Process Management Solution based on Java.The project focus on human based business process solutions also known as workflow Management Systems (WfMS).
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ByWater Solutions, an open source community supporter and official Koha support company, announced today that the Luther Rice Seminary and University, of Lithonia, GA. has partnered with them for the hosting and support of their official Koha integrated library system installation.
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Did you know that 50% of the Top 10 downloaded Open Source products are Apache projects?
Did you know that most Enterprise Java solutions are built using Apache?
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Vodafone
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Two years after it bought Wayfinder for 230 million Swedish crowns (now $31 million) to power its location services, Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) is now giving it away – it’s making almost all Wayfinder code available via open source.
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IBM
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Q. IBM is making EGL open source. What does this mean, really? Will IBM open source all of EGL? Or just parts, like a community edition?
Darnell: The open source offering will definitely just be parts of EGL and its tooling. From my perspective, the best parts are slated to be made open source while some of the “baggage” is being left behind. For instance, the Java and JavaScript generation targets are definitely making the trip to open source but COBOL generation is being left out. Developers working to enhance EGL under the open source project won’t be burdened with ensuring compatibility with COBOL, nor will time have to be spent developing and testing COBOL generation, compile, and debug features.
[...]
Ultimately, I don’t expect the IBM i community to pay much attention to EGL going open source and I think that is a mistake on their part. I also don’t expect that IBM is going to go out of their way to sell EGL (in any form) to the IBM i community–a huge mistake on IBM’s part because EGL has so much to offer to that customer base. I suspect that IBM has a different audience in mind for EGL open source than their traditional customer base. Does that audience exist outside of the imaginations of IBM’s project team? Only time will tell.
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International
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Liferay, Inc., provider of leading open source portal software for the enterprise, recently inaugurated a new office in Recife, one of Brazil’s growing IT centers, as part of an ongoing global growth strategy. The new office will act as a strategic center for sales, development, training and support services to the fast-growing South American market.
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Prominent Malaysian software developer Colin Charles says the site, www.malaysiacrime.com, which is also available as a iPhone app, is made possible by Malaysia’s open source codes policy.
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Mail
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Open-Xchange, a provider of business-class open source e-mail and collaboration software, announced today an agreement with NetCologne, one of the largest regional telecommunication and Internet service providers in Germany, to replace its existing webmail solution with Open-Xchange. Plus, NetCologne will offer its users additional Open-Xchange groupware and mobility features as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
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Events
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The panel will be chaired by the journalist, author and passionate open source advocate Glyn Moody.
Starting on the 15th September at London’s historic Lord’s Cricket Ground, the two-day conference seeks to unveil the paths of global technological innovation throughout the next decade.
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The engineering and technology students were called upon to work together to promote and encourage the use of open source software at all possible levels of computing.
Participating in the State-level workshop on Free and Open Source Software organised by the Free Software Foundation – Tamil Nadu at Velalar College of Engineering and Technology here on Saturday and Sunday, resource persons said that open source was a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process.
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It’s hardly pertinent to summarize an unconference, because it’s all over the map by (lack of) design. Anyway, you don’t need me to tell you about the the topics at this year’s community leadership summit because you can view the wiki pages for the Saturday and Sunday sessions. What I like each year is the little space we all create for ourselves at CLS in a forlorn corner of an overwhelming, cold conference locale that makes it very hard to feel community.
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OSCON
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Palm was naturally a part of this presentation as many components of webOS are open source, from the Linux Kernel all the way up to the WebKit web browser and V8 JavaScript engine. Unfortunately, Robb didn’t really delve into how Palm fits into HP’s overall open source strategy as I anticipated he would – he mentioned the company maybe once or twice – and Josh Marinacci from developer relations gave a brief 15 minute demonstration of Ares and gave a few phones away at the end of the presentation.
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Beer is near and dear to the open source community, though, and his remarks were well received. The mayor also plugged Portland’s commitment to open source in government, touting technology as a tool to interact and collaborate with citizens, a theme of this year’s conference.
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Mozilla
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SaaS
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OpenStack, a new open source cloud computing initiative, is like the porcine ice cream.
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Databases
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CMS
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Joomla vendor Jentla and its integrator, Energetica, won the Local-e contract following a competitive tender process involving both open source and proprietary bidders.
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Healthcare
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After years of talk about taking medical records online, serious action is afoot. The Obama administration is waving $27 billion in incentives at doctors and medical offices to take records online, Verizon is touting its Health Information Exchange as a cloud-based way for records to be shared, and Google has a pilot project focused on electronic medical records, too. Will there be room for open source software solutions as the transition to electronic records begins in earnest?
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Funding
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Portland, Oregon-based Puppet Labs, commercial sponsor of the open-source server configuration framework Puppet, announced today that it has secured a $5 million Series B funding round, led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Existing investors True Ventures and Radar Partners also contributed, bringing Puppet Labs’ total funding to date to over $7 million.
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Project Releases
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The FOSSology Project has announced the release of version 1.2 of their free software tools for the study and analysis of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). The project began as an internal software development effort within Hewlett Packard’s (HP) Open Source and Linux Organisation. Using FOSSology, which originally only consisted of a few simple shell scripts, developers and IT buyers can locate open source software within an enterprise and perform various tasks, such as licence management.
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The Open Information Security Foundation (OISF) has introduced Suricata 1.0, an Open Source engine for Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) that will secure networks against next-generation network security threats.
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The Open Information Security Foundation (OISF) today announced the introduction of Suricata 1.0, an Open Source engine for Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) that will secure networks against next-generation network security threats. Available immediately for download under the Open Source GPL (GNU General Public License) version 2, Suricata includes innovative new features that will enable it to identify and prevent more of the pressing security concerns faced by organizations today.
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Government
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In other words no more LA wide deals. None of the VLE or Assessment tracking agreements or MIS lockins are guaranteed anymore. It is one thing to accompany BECTA execs to see Bill Gates in Seattle then ‘help’ LAs back home to ‘make choices’ for schools than it is to jolly along thousands of Head Teachers.
If it bodes ill for the likes of RM in education, DELL who is the second biggest hardware supplier in education and also features prominently in the Public Sector generally is feeling chill from the OGC so much that its public sector VP Ferenc Szelenyi was also moved to make a statement a tiny clip of which follows:
‘…the coalition government’s approach to public sector procurement is too one-sided…’
this was after having just not been invited to a big meeting with the Cabinet Office attended by rivals HP, IBM and Fujistu!
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Licensing
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There’s one more free/open robot operating system option out there today. Jean-Christophe Baillie of Gostai SAS writes, “I thought you might be interested to know that the Urbi Operating System for robotics is now going open source.”. If you’re familiar with Urbi, you may know that the component architecture and library code have been free software licensed under the GPL but the actual Urbi kernel has been proprietary up until now. With this announcement, the kernel is being relicensed under the Affero GNU GPL v3, allowing it to join the other components as free software (or open source software if you prefer).
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Openness/Sharing
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The MP has been given the job after producing a blue-print for a reformed planning system before the election, called Open Source Planning. It is this document that will apparently underpin the reforms.
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Basically, open source software is software that can be tweaked and modified. It’s a way for developers like Headd to build new tools.
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IdeaScale Application Programming Interface; Tornado, a lightweight, open-source web development framework; MongoDB, an open-source, document-oriented database; Googlechart, an API for chart generation; Uservoice, a free, Web feedback forum; and Github, a Web-based hosting service for projects that use Git revision control system.
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Programming
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Our sister site has rolled out the beta of SourceForge 2.0, aimed at offering better tools and an improved experience for anyone developing open source projects. It’s a whole new forge development platform.
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Much of the reflection has focussed around what ScienceBlogs, and indeed Nature Network is, or was, good for as a place to blog. Most have mentioned the importance of the platform in helping to get started and many have mentioned the crucial role that the linking from more prominent blogs played in getting them an audience. What I think no-one has noted is how much the world of online writing has changed since many of these people started blogging. There has been consolidation in the form of networks and the growth of the internet as a credible media platform with credible and well known writers. At the same time, the expectations of those writers, in terms of their ability to express themselves through multimedia, campaigns, widgets, and other services has outstripped the ability of those providing networks to keep up. I don’t think it’s an accident that many of the criticisms of ScienceBlogs seem to be similar to those of Nature Network when it comes to technical issues.
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Figures (albeit unofficial) released today claimed The Times’ website had lost two thirds of its readers since its paywall introduction, leaving just 15,000 clicking through. This was despite 150,000 registering for it when the trial was free.
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Security/Aggression
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For it seems clear to me that on that day Simon Harwood wilfully misconducted himself to such a degree as to amount to an abuse of the public’s trust in him as as a police officer without reasonable excuse or justification.
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Finance
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Since the United States government stepped in to rescue the American International Group in the fall of 2008, Goldman Sachs has maintained that it would have faced few if any losses had the insurer failed. Though it was the insurer’s biggest trading partner, Goldman contended that it had bought credit insurance from financial institutions that would have protected it, but it declined to identify the institutions.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Word leaked out slowly, spread by Web-savvy folks on Twitter: Internet porn that once was blocked by Chinese government censors was now openly available.
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tcrown007 sends along an appeals court ruling that, for once, limits the reach of the Digital Milenium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention clause.
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Copyrights
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ISPs have called on the government to protect them from having to police their networks for copyright infringement, arguing that such a regulatory change would lead to “de facto censorship”.
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Mass lawsuits against alleged file-sharers, such as those from the US Copyright Group and lawyers ACS:Law and Gallant MacMillan in the UK, are generally accepted to have been generated from evidence gathered from big public BitTorrent sites. Now it appears that at least one other firm has jumped on the bandwagon, this time targeting a large private tracker.
Firefox: Tab Candy
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