07.11.12

Links 12/7/2012: OS4 12.5 Released, LibreOffice 3.5.5 Released, CETA Worries

Posted in News Roundup at 7:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Free photo editing apps reviewed
  • Free-software activists hope for detained engineer’s freedom
  • How To Recruit Open-Source Developers

    Wondering how you can recruit open-source contributors for your project? Here’s how.

    Donnie Berkholz, a council member and developer for Gentoo Linux as well as an analyst at RedMonk, has presented on the topic of recruiting open-source contributors.

  • Google Doodle Turing Machine Now Open Source

    Following on from the release of the Moog Synthesizer Doodle code, Google has now released the JavaScript of its Turing Machine puzzle.

  • Ecotrust releases open source tool for complex decision makers

    Ecotrust this week released an open source software platform that the nonprofit group hopes will be used to support collaborative processes for complex decision making.

    The software, called Madrona, builds on Ecotrust’s 20 years of experience using mapping, database and other software tools to tackle complex topics like marine reserves and forest management.

    “Madrona is essentially a packaging of features into a single platform,” said Tim Welch, senior developer for Ecotrust.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS

    • Stealthy Big Switch plugs into OpenStack clouds

      Big Switch Networks is not even out of stealth mode and has not yet revealed its aspirations and products for software defined networks – SDNs, in modern parlance – and yet the company is nonetheless contributing to the open source efforts to build more flexible and virtual network infrastructure and hoping to build awareness ahead of its eventual launch.

    • OpenNebula 3.6 integrates virtual appliance marketplace

      The OpenNebula project has announced the release of OpenNebula 3.6, code named “Lagoon” after the Lagoon Nebula (Messier 8). The latest stable version of the open source cloud computing toolkit brings performance improvements and better virtualisation management.

  • Data

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Healthcare

    • OSEHRA Open Source Community Celebrates 1,000th Member

      OSEHRA, (Open Source Electronic Health Record Agent) the nonprofit dedicated to advancing open source electronic health records and accelerating innovation in health care information technology, announced today it has surpassed 1,000 authenticated users.

  • Business

    • Semi-Open Source

      • Spring Creator Rod Johnson Leaves VMware

        Rod Johnson, who wrote the first version of the open-source, Java-based Spring framework, and later co-founded SpringSource, has left his position as SVP and GM of VMware’s SpringSource product division. Johnson joined the Palo Alto, Calif.-based virtualization company when it acquired SpringSource in 2009, where he then served as CEO.

      • VMware Revamps Its Zimbra Enterprise E-mail Server

        VMware plans to make a beta version of an upgrade to its Zimbra Collaboration Server available for download on Wednesday, with shipments in final form scheduled for later this quarter, the company said.

  • BSD

    • Debian: Squeeze vs. Wheezy On Linux And kFreeBSD

      With Debian Wheezy now frozen for its release sometime next year, here are some early benchmarks comparing the performance of Debian 6.0.5 “Squeeze” to the latest packages for the Debian 7.0 “Wheezy” release. For this Squeeze vs. Wheezy comparison, both Debian GNU/Linux and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD were benchmarked from an Intel 64-bit system.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Comparison of Diagnostics between GCC and Clang
    • GCC 4.8 To Improve Diagnostics Abilities

      One of the long-advertised features of LLVM’s Clang C/Objective-C/C++ compiler has been that it offers more user-friendly diagnostics than the GNU Compiler Collection. Historically this has been true, especially against GCC 4.2 — the last GPLv2 compiler release. However, GCC developers have been working to improve this situation. With GCC 4.8, it looks like more of this work will come to fruition.

  • Licensing

  • Openness/Sharing

    • TB or not TB: India crowdsources research

      Facing nearly 2 million new tuberculosis cases every year — more and more of them drug-resistant — India has a bigger stake in finding a better treatment for TB than any other country.

      Yet until recently, obstacles hindered Indian scientists’ efforts to conduct advanced research.

      The reason? India’s university professors are bogged down with teaching, and few have the laboratory facilities needed to do cutting edge work. And every year, more of the best minds are lured away by the pharmaceutical industry — which has little interest in TB, from which there is little money to be made.

    • Open Access/Content

      • Open education, open source, and the dilemma over e-textbooks

        Forty years ago, John Holt wondered whether an educational revolution as profound as open education could survive unless it became part of a wider and deeper movement of social change. Until open source and the concept of an open education began to take hold, John Holt’s vision of an open education seemed to be a pipe dream.

Leftovers

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Bravery and drone pilots

      The Pentagon considers awarding war medals to those who operate America’s death-delivering video games

  • Finance

    • America the Beautiful: A Fire Sale for Foreign Corporations

      This may be one of the most important stories ever ignored by the so-called “lame-stream, liberal” media. It’s unlikely you’re losing sleep over US trade negotiations, but the unfolding business agreement among the US and eight Pacific nations -the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) – should cause every US citizen, from the Sierra Club to the Tea Party to get their pitch forks and torches out of the closet and prepare to “storm the Bastille.”
      The TPP negotiations have been going on for two years under extreme secrecy, no information has been made available to either the press or Congress about the US position. But on June 12, a document was leaked to the watchdog group, Public Citizen, revealing the current US position and the reason for the secrecy. The contents are surreal, shocking and prima facia evidence for how corporations have become the master puppeteers of our government.

    • City Of Oakland Taps Occupy Wall Street To Take On Goldman Sachs

      As the world’s most powerful investment bank Goldman Sachs is no stranger to fighting all sorts of battles, but the city of Oakland, Cailf. is challenging the firm like no one ever has before.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Calling for an Open and International Dialogue for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement Negotiations

      The Internet Society welcomes the European Parliament’s rejection of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) as a strong message in favour of open and transparent processes in negotiations dealing with policy issues pertaining to the Internet. The vote followed widespread protests throughout Europe, with Internet campaigners claiming that it posed threats to online freedoms. ACTA was originally meant to address, among other things, the issue of online piracy and the sale or promotion of counterfeit goods via the Internet.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Mega-victory: Kim Dotcom search warrants “invalid,” mansion raid “illegal”

        On January 20, New Zealand police showed up in style at the mansion of flamboyant Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom, swarming over the property and bringing along two police helicopters. They cut their way through locks and into the home’s “panic room,” where Dotcom was hiding in apparent fear of a kidnapping or robbery. They seized 18 luxury vehicles. They secured NZ$11 million in cash from bank accounts. And they grabbed a whopping 150TB of data from Dotcom’s many digital devices.

      • Reforming copyright for the digital age: the Commission takes an important step forward

        Last week’s vote on ACTA – although hardly a surprise for those who’ve been following – was a reminder about the big debate currently going on, about how to balance intellectual property rights with Internet freedoms

        For me it’s about making it easier for artists to promote their work widely, and make a living from it: without constraining the immense innovation of the online world. And, for me, the current copyright system achieves all of those objectives poorly.

      • ACTA

        • Karel De Gucht does it again: CETA

          The European Treaties, however, provide for this loophole which was created for the WTO TRIPs agreement. I agree with Ante Wessels that the Article 207 process should not be used for bypassing national and European legislators. While the European Parliament disagreed with the adoption of measures in ACTA, De Gucht’s administration has other bilateral agreements in the pipeline to the same ends. They deserve the watchful eyes of concerned parties.

        • ACTA Lives: How the EU & Canada Are Using CETA as Backdoor Mechanism To Revive ACTA

          Last week, the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly to reject ACTA, striking a major blow to the hopes of supporters who envisioned a landmark agreement that would set a new standard for intellectual property rights enforcement. The European Commission, which negotiates trade deals such as ACTA on behalf of the European Union, has vowed to revive the badly damaged agreement. Its most high-profile move has been to ask the European Court of Justice to rule on ACTA’s compatibility with fundamental European freedoms with the hope that a favourable ruling could allow the European Parliament to reconsider the issue.

        • The Inclusion of ACTA Within CETA: Why The Concern Is Warranted

          My post yesterday on how the EU plans to use the Canada – EU Trade Agreement (CETA) as a backdoor mechanism to implement the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) provisions has attracted considerable attention with coverage from European media and activists. The European Commission refused to comment, stating that it does not comment on leaks.

        • ACTA is back, completed with investment protections

          The EU – Canada trade agreement (CETA) contains the same draconian civil and criminal measures as ACTA, see Michael Geist. He recommends: “With anti-ACTA sentiment spreading across Europe, Canada should push to remove the intellectual property chapter from CETA altogether.”

IRC Proceedings: July 1st-July 7th, 2012

Posted in IRC Logs at 12:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

IRC Proceedings: July 1st, 2012

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IRC Proceedings: July 2nd, 2012

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Enter the IRC channels now

IRC Proceedings: July 3rd, 2012

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IRC Proceedings: July 4th, 2012

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IRC Proceedings: July 5th, 2012

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IRC Proceedings: July 6th, 2012

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IRC Proceedings: July 7th, 2012

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Enter the IRC channels now

Links 11/7/2012: digiKam 2.7.0, Jolla Rises

Posted in News Roundup at 7:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Teaching the open source way: An interview with Sameer Verma

    Dr. Sameer Verma first learned about open source software when a college friend gave him a weekend crash course in Linux. Now a professor of information systems in the College of Business at San Francisco State University, Verma has taken those lessons to heart—and is teaching his own students the open source way.

    Recently, we talked with Verma about the challenge of open source pedagogy, about integrating open source technologies and values into the college classroom, about the benefits of learning open source project management, and about his work with One Laptop Per Child.

  • Apache Lucene/Solr making gains in enterprise search

    Open source hasn’t made huge inroads in web search but Apache’s Lucene/Solr platform is beginning to make gains in enterprise search, particularly in light of the acquisition binge of proprietary giants.

  • Cultivating A Culture of Free

    Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is based on a principle: Software Freedom. It is given away under a license that allows you to do with the software as you please. You can modify it, redistribute it, and never pay a penny for it so long as you abide by the terms of the license. This model has worked very well for FOSS. But this model doesn’t work for everything.

  • Syoncloud Released Syoncloud Logs 0.3 Log Processing Software as an Open Source
  • The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache Nutch(tm) v2.0
  • Open source Java projects: TomEE

    Apache TomEE aims to provide application developers with a best-of-breed technology stack that can be deployed to a simple and lightweight Java EE container. In this return to the Open source Java projects series, author Steven Haines introduces TomEE, explains how it differs from Tomcat, and helps you set it up in your development environment. He then walks through the process of configuring TomEE to integrate resources such as database connection pools and JMS destinations — bread and butter for today’s enterprise apps.

  • Events

    • GUADEC 2012 Program Published

      The Gnome Foundation has announced the schedule for GUADEC to be held from July 26 to August 1st in Coruña, Spain this year. The event will consist of over 46 talks, with 4 keynotes and a number of lightning talk sessions.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS

    • Lew Moorman: Open Cloud Key to Modern Networking
    • Interview: Whamcloud Wins FastForward Contract for Exascale R&D

      Today Whamcloud announced that the company has been awarded the Storage and I/O Research & Development subcontract for the Department of Energy’s FastForward program. FastForward is set up to initiate partnerships with multiple companies to accelerate the R&D of critical technologies needed for extreme scale computing. To learn more, I caught up with Eric Barton, Whamcloud’s CTO.

    • Beyond MapReduce: Hadoop hangs on

      Hadoop is all the rage in enterprise computing, and has become the poster child for the big-data movement. But just as the enterprise consolidates around Hadoop, the web world, including Google – which originated the technology ideas behind Hadoop – is moving on to real-time, ad-hoc analytics that batch-oriented Hadoop can’t match.

    • Stealthy Big Switch plugs into OpenStack clouds

      Big Switch Networks is not even out of stealth mode and has not yet revealed its aspirations and products for software defined networks – SDNs, in modern parlance – and yet the company is nonetheless contributing to the open source efforts to build more flexible and virtual network infrastructure and hoping to build awareness ahead of its eventual launch.

  • AbiWord/LibreOffice

    • First Peek at LibreOffice Android port Prototype

      That LibreOffice continues to respond to requirements of end-users became truly evident when news of it being developed for Android OS arrived a few months ago. And now with screen shot of the progress made so far being released by its developers, LibreOffice’s progress is good to note.

      In the developers own words, the screen shot only “look like – well, that gives a fairly horrific, bolts and all, barely usable (even with keyboard and mouse) office suite on your tablet.”; However, despite the lackadaisical images of the screen shot, the host of features that will finally come through for an Android OS are evident.

    • AbiWord is ready to work with you

  • Semi-Open Source

    • Jaspersoft 4.7 Adds Interactivity to Open Source Business Intelligence

      New Big Data analysis lands in Jaspersoft’s open source business intelligence suite as data caching accelerates information delivery.

      The whole point of using business intelligence applications is to get better insight out of data, a task made easier by better engaging end users. Given this, the ability to visualize and interact with data is a key focus for open source business intelligence vendor Jaspersoft in its latest 4.7 release out today.

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Gnucash For Android Released

      If you use Gnucash on your PC to track your expenses and accounts, here is great news for you. Now you will be able to do the same from any Android powered device. This application has been ported to Android and should run on Android version 2.2 and above.

  • Project Releases

    • TeX Live 2012 released

      Over the weekend, the TeX Users Group (TUG) released a new 2012 edition of the TeX Live distribution. New features this year include many detailed improvements. For instance, the MetaPost program can now be called by default when compiling a file in the \write18 primitive’s restricted execution mode. Output files from the pdftex TeX extension and the dvips driver can now be larger than 2GB, and dvips automatically embeds the 35 default PostScript fonts in the output file to ensure that typesetting is consistent on all systems.

  • Public Services/Government

  • Licensing

    • Richard Fontana blows hot and cold on GPLv3 fork

      A lack of clarity on the part of Red Hat open source licensing and patent counsel Richard Fontana as to whether he has, or has not, created a fork of the GPLv3 free software licence has led to well-known free software advocate Bradley Kuhn dissociating himself from the project.

    • Copyleft.next and the Future of GNU General Public Licenses

      “I am puzzled as to why this might be thought a newsworthy story at all,” says Richard Fontana, talking about his new licensing project, Copyleft.next (formerly, GPL.next). “Copyleft.next is just a toy research project, motivated initially by a mere desire on my part to learn more about using Git.”

      Fontana is perhaps being mildly disingenuous. Although the importance of Copyleft.next has been greatly exaggerated, he is not ruling out the possibility that it might play a role in the development of future versions of copyleft licenses such as the GPL family of licenses.

      If nothing else, the project seems to reflect the critique of GPL licenses that Fontana has been quietly making for some months now, which deserves wider recognition and discussion.

Leftovers

  • Hardware

    • Introducing the ARM 64-bit Architecture

      ARM announced a few days ago, on July 6th, that they posted a set of Linux kernel patches, implementing support for the AArch64 architecture, also known as the ARM 64-bit architecture.

      The initial support for the ARMv8 64-bit architecture has been added by ARM in the Linux kernel via a set of 36 patches.

  • Finance

    • Satyajit Das: Mr. Smith Goes to Leaves Wall Street

      In his 1933 inauguration address, Franklin Delano Roosevelt attacked the “callow and selfish wrongdoing” in banking and business. Roosevelt told the crowd of over 100,000 that attended that the “rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed” and that “unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion”. Some 80 years later, the money changers have not “fled their high seats in the temple of our civilisation”. “Ancient truths” have not been restored to that temple. Something corrupt and rotten continues to fester at the heart of high finance, economic life and, indirectly, modern society.

    • City of London Corporation: a lesson in lobbying

      For almost 1,000 years, the City of London Corporation has resisted virtually every attempt by monarchs, governments or the people to rein in its vast wealth and influence. From the murder of peasant revolt leader Wat Tyler by the lord mayor of London and his men in 1381, to the dispatching from the City to Northern Ireland of rural refugees forced off their land in 17th-century land reforms, the corporation has long been a guiding hand in British history.

  • Copyrights

    • ACTA

      • CETA, the Zombie ACTA, Must Face the Same Fate

        A leaked version of the Canada-EU trade agreement (CETA) contains the worst parts of ACTA. The EU Commission appears to be once again trying to bypass the democratic process in order to impose ruthless repression online. Commissioner De Gucht cannot ignore the decision of the EU Parliament on ACTA. CETA must be cancelled altogether (or its repressive ACTA parts must be scrapped), or face the same fate as ACTA in the Parliament.

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