09.21.15
Posted in GNU/Linux, IBM, Patents at 8:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
IBM’s infamous love of patents outweighs the company’s publicly-professed love for Linux
Summary: A timely reminder that Big Blue is no true friend of GNU/Linux and other Free software projects, just an opportunist that uses the Linux brand and wants to make the platform a commodity (for servers that run IBM’s proprietary software and use IBM-branded hardware)
Manny Schecter, the Chief Patent Counsel from IBM, is lobbying for software patents in India, based on statements like this one. IBM wants software patents everywhere (not just the US), quite frankly as usual. It also did this in Europe and in New Zealand. The evil side of IBM is clearly Free software-hostile, as it lobbies for laws that are inherently ruling out Free software, or make it incredibly hard to adopt. The article that Schecter linked to says that “Srikant Sreenivasan, co-founder at Mumbai-based cloud technology company CloudLeap Computing Pvt. Ltd, spent four months re-engineering something his company had already built after realizing that they had unknowingly infringed on a patent filed by a multinational company.”
Well, like IBM…
“CloudLeap had to reinvent the wheel since it was catering to clients in the US, where the patent law protects all software, unlike in India, where software was so far patented only if it was used in conjunction with an embedded chip or system.”
Again, like IBM…
We have been writing a great deal about the ugly side of IBM for nearly a decade. The above just serves to remind us that IBM has not changed its ways.
To say that IBM is a “big company” and that its patent policy does not reflect or extend to technical staff is akin to the same apologetic gestures offered by Microsoft boosters when it’s pointed out Microsoft sues GNU/Linux with patents (still). █
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Posted in Microsoft, Vista 10, Windows at 8:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The arrival of Vista 10 heralds the continuation of a trend that Vista 8 cemented, namely an inevitable demise of Microsoft’s common carrier (and formerly cash cow), Windows
THE PAST WEEK has been rather informative as I personally came to discover that Microsoft had shrunk (whilst obviously hiding this from the public and the media). Dedicated “Microsoft” buildings have been ‘folded’ into shared buildings, personal offices became shared offices, and there is generally great fear of Google, with operating systems like ChromeOS and Android (Chromebooks now outsell Windows laptops). Recognition of the end of Microsoft is now acceptable even within Microsoft itself (the staff).
Microsoft is very upset when the media speaks about numbers regarding Vista 10, based on what I have learned. Microsoft is nervous because these are lies, perpetuated at times by overzealous boosters. The numbers that are out there put greater pressure on Microsoft to meet expectations because the true numbers are vastly lower than stated in the media. Low-cost ‘upgrades’ and (almost) forced ‘upgrades’ just aren’t enough. People from Microsoft say to me that Microsoft, for a change, does not want to share Windows numbers. Vista 10 is seemingly the exception. Suddenly the company wants secrecy and silence. There is nothing to brag about.
People who work for Microsoft tell me that Vista 10 has had serious stability issues (hence the frequent mega-patches) and even Microsoft boosters speak about these issues right now. Mary Jo Foley makes it look like a negative story (especially the headline), but it ends up coming across more like a bait/advertisement. Robert Pogson says this is “Why Everyone Should Hate M$ And Their Desktop OS”. In another very recent rant, Ken Starks says: “And as far as them having the right not to install the uploaded file if they have automatic updates turned off, then Microsoft is nothing less than a burglar, jimmying a back door to gain entrance. In my world, even according to current law, Microsoft is committing a criminal act.”
This rant from Mr. Starks is about Microsoft force-feeding users of Windows the Vista 10 ‘upgrade’. This happened (based on timing of reports) just over a month after the release, probably because Microsoft realised people were massively rejecting Vista 10. Breaking the law probably seems like the lesser risk to Microsoft given these harsh circumstances. Nobody wants the common carrier. If Windows dies, Microsoft will collapse very quickly.
Over the past week I saw some people ranting about Windows RT, which is destined to be abandoned by Microsoft very soon. This possibly last update of the system disappoints users, who have already been ranting to me about performance issues, among other, far more severe issues. It’s a disaster.
Windows is in a state of crisis and the empire of Windows collapses pretty fast, largely due to counterparts with their growing development environments, including those which target the Web/browser and mobile devices (only iOS and Android).
Ask people who actually work on Windows (developing it) what they think about the future of Windows — or lack thereof — to better understand where the world is heading. It’s sunset for Windows and, consequently, for Microsoft too. All they have is momentum/inertia and this too is running out. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, GPL, Microsoft at 8:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
What if Microsoft® Windows Azure is actually what Microsoft calls “piracy”?
Summary: Microsoft cannot rely on Windows anymore, so it takes GNU/Linux code and puts its own brand on it, without even releasing the changes (as per the GPL’s requirements)
THOSE who pay careful attention to details and have fairly good memory can still recall that Microsoft had violated the terms of the GPL before it finally compiled. This happened at least once if not twice around the time Microsoft assaulted Linux to promote its proprietary hypervisor (obviously with back doors as Windows is a requirement) and later, just shortly afterwards, lifted some social media code. To Microsoft, GPL is still like “cancer”, to borrow the words of Microsoft’s CEO at the time. Microsoft is just trying to find a way to live with (or co-exist) with “cancer”.
There have been many reports that mostly emanate from Microsoft’s own, self-promotional claims. The Register has one of the earliest reports about this, followed by some Linux sites which asked the right questions, such as: “We don’t yet know when and if Microsoft will release the source code of the project and which licence they will use for it; the Linux kernel is licenced under GNU GPLv2, so it has to be a compatible licence.”
Various news sites twisted the story, if not just in the headlines, then in the body too. Microsoft boosters took this the furthest [1, 2] and rather than admit that Microsoft is more or less defeated by GNU/Linux (at the server level at least), they tried to belittle the importance of these revelations, which would inevitably have come out (Microsoft chose a ‘controlled’ release of the news). “Microsoft has built a Linux-based operating system” was the headline of one such report, but another way to put it is, Microsoft built its proprietary framework using GPL-licensed code from Linux. When will we see the source code and what does it say about Microsoft’s appreciation of its own code, which is obviously unfit for purpose in such complex environments of a very large scale?
To put the story in just one sentence, Microsoft realised that its own code/workforce is unable to put together a reliable hosting platform, so it turned to Linux, took some “cancer” it liked, then put its “Windows” and “Azure” branding on the whole lot. That’s ‘innovation’ the Microsoft way (there are many prior examples) and it may actually — for now at least — be a violation of copyright law. So who’s the “pirate”? █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 7:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: More press coverage about the terrible situation at the European Patent Office
HR Praktijk, yet another Dutch site, joins at least a couple of newspapers with their reports in the country which houses EPO headquarters. Below we make our permanent record of a Dutch article with various translations. The English translation of the article is as follow:
11 September 2015, From: Jesper van Wijk, Via: De Volkskrant
EPOrg employee suicide possibly caused by poisoned working conditions
Staff union SUEPO is raising the alarm on the recent suicide of an employee of the European Patent Organisation (EPOrg) in Rijswijk. De Volkskrant reports that poisoned working conditions may have contributed to the suicides of five employees at the European organisation.
Staff representatives previously raised serious concerns on the policies of French EPOrg president Benoit Battistelli. SUEPO claims that under his reign, work pressures have been radically increased and that Battistelli has unilaterally forced through changes.
Social dialogue
The Netherlands and other members of the European Union have voiced concerns onhardened social climate within EPOrg. “Partly due to these signals, management and staff representatives have entered into a social dialogue,” State Secretary Dijksma of Economic Affairs wrote to the Dutch House of Representatives in July.
The situation has not improved since. In a letter to the 38 EPOrg country representatives who supervise the organisation, the union is now again raising the alarm on the death of an employee who worked at a location in Rijswijk. This is the fifth time in a little over three years’ time that EPOrg employee has committed suicide. In 2013, an employee from the Rijswijk office jumped from the seventh floor of the building during work hours. The other three incidents were of employees of the EPOrg headquarters in Munich, according to the Dutch newspaper Volkskrant.
Possible measures
On 26 August, the union wrote Battistelli a letter requesting a conversation on possible measures to improve the work situation, but so far he has refused. “It’s tragic that SUEPO is again trying to abuse a personal tragedy to stir up controversy in a situation that calls for sympathy,” Battistelli wrote to the union. “The parallel you seem to want to draw between the death of a colleague and recent reforms and the working atmosphere in general is wholly inappropriate.” SUEPO states that a direct link between the suicide and the working conditions has yet to be established, but that the labour inspectorate should be granted the opportunity to research the tragedy.
As we are going to explain later this month (despite us being on vacation), there are many actions in progress and this awareness campaign is even reaching television, not just radio and newspapers. The EPO’s management increasingly finds itself becoming the story. Not patents it grants are the story but the corruption of the management itself. The amount of public pressure has become proportional to the degree of repression and the more the EPO tries to suppress publication (or staff awareness of these issues), the worse it is getting. Some have already pointed out the sharp rise (an order of magnitude) in suicides — a fact that the bureaucrats will find incredibly hard to refute. It is merely a side effect or a symptom of the EPO going rogue. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 1:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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For a few months I’ve being hearing radio commercial for a tech company that does the usual stuff — support, equipment, etc — but they also advertise that they handle open source. They explicitly advertise Linux server deployments and maintenance.
As I said, it used to be lonely being a Linux or FOSS user in Panama. Not so much anymore.
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In case you haven’t already figured it out, this is not meant to be taken seriously. I see all kind of articles, almost on a weekly basis, about how Windows is killing the Linux desktop, how Linux missed its chance with Windows 8, and so on. It’s getting tiring. Saying that Linux can be killed and even considering this means that you have no idea of just how big this project really is, not to mention the community around it.
Linux is not trying to beat Windows, it’s not trying to kill it, it’s not even trying to compete with it. Linux is competing with itself and this is why it’s getting better all the time.
Whether Windows will be around when Linux really takes off for the desktop is actually irrelevant.
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Disney researchers are working on a new protocol – tentatively called the Linux Light Bulb – that flashes out data using visible light. The bulbs are designed to work with gadgets and toys that may not need a full Wi-Fi or wireless component and instead will read data from he environment. The technology is called Visible Light Communication.
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Back in May, things were looking grim for Austin-based TrackingPoint. The company, which manufactures Linux-powered smart rifles capable of nailing moving targets more than a thousand yards away, had posted a notice on its website saying that it stopped taking new orders. Multiple news sites began publishing stories saying that TrackingPoint had laid off half of its employees and was on the verge of filing for bankruptcy.
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In USA, Unknown, probably Android/Linux on a desktop, was 1.17%. GNU/Linux on a desktop was 3.71% (1.92% Chrome OS and 1.79% regular GNU/Linux).
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So, you want to learn Linux, right? And you need an experienced tutor to point you in the right direction and guide you through your learning process. Well, you’ve come to the right place! With this article, I’m starting a series of lessons for those of you who want to learn Linux.
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Desktop
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For years, the “year of the Linux desktop” was right around the corner: Open-source software would displace Windows (or Window$), and usher in a glorious, peaceful revolution in the computing industry.
If Dell is to be believed, that revolution is happening now.
Dell’s head of China told The Wall Street Journal that NeoKylin Linux is shipped on 42 percent of the PCs it sells into the country, primarily for the commercial and government PCs that Dell specializes in. Hewlett-Packard also ships NeoKylin-equipped PCs to China, the paper said, but it’s unclear how many they sell with the OS installed.
In 2010, China Standard Software and the National University of Defense Technology teamed up to launch NeoKylin as a secure alternative to foreign software, such as Windows. (A screenshot of the original Kylin Linux is above.) TechinAsia claims that NeoKylin was based on Ubuntu Kylin, which was developed for the Chinese by Canonical.
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The Chinese market is adjusting itself after Windows XP reached end of life, but it’s not all that keen to get hooked on another Windows OS, so it’s looking for alternatives. The Ubuntu Kylin OS is having a real impact, and Dell is just one of the mediums used to propagate this operating system.
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2007 is when desktop Linux really shifted into high gear for me. A friend had told me that he’d tried Ubuntu and it was really awesome. “It’s designed to be immediately usable as a desktop OS, and it shows,” my friend said. So when my roommate started crabbing about how much he despised Windows on his laptop, I started trying to convince him to install Ubuntu Feisty Fawn. He seemed dubious, and I wasn’t really using my laptop very often, so I did an install on my own laptop and showed it to him. As I answered his questions and solved his potential adoption problems, I started looking seriously at it myself. Feisty was nice, in a way that desktop Linux never had been for me before—it was actually easier to get simple day-to-day tasks done than it was with Windows! Of course, it also had the reliability of Linux, and it was nice using something more like my servers on my desk.
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The Serval ships with Ubuntu right out of the box. I also loaded up openSUSE. Both Linux distributions ran fantastically well. (Would it run Windows well? I have no idea. I couldn’t think of any good reason to check.) When I spoke to an engineer at System76 he regaled me with the story of making sure the firmware on the Serval supported Linux as perfectly as possible right out of the gate. That earned significant brownie points with me.
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Chromebooks are more powerful than you realize already, but zooming around the web in Google’s browser is just the beginning of what Chromebooks are capable of.
Chrome OS is built on top of the Linux kernel, and you can install a full Linux environment alongside Chrome OS on your Chromebook. This gives you access to Steam and over a thousand PC games, Minecraft, Skype, and everything else that runs on desktop Linux.
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There are a number of reasons you might want to install a Linux-based operating system like Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, or Linux Mint on a computer. These operating systems are free to use, which means you can install them on a PC that may not have a Windows license without spending a penny. They can sometimes breath new life into old computers that no longer reliably run the latest versions of Windows. Or maybe you just like the idea of free and open source software.
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Luckily, Windows is not the only game in town, folks. Actually, there are many wonderful operating systems available to you at no charge. Unlike Windows 10, where it is only free with a prior licence, most Linux-based operating systems are entirely free. Period. If you want to try one of these open-source operating systems, you may be confused as to where to start. Don’t worry, I am here to help. Here are the distributions and software you should use.
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Server
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IBM has recently announced the LinuxONE. This is an expansion of their mainframe strategy consisting of a new portfolio of hardware, software and services solutions, which provides two distinct Linux systems for large enterprises and mid-size businesses.
IBM will enable open source and industry tools and software on z Systems. IBM has announced Chef and Docker support, together with other open source tools such as Apache Spark, Node.js, MongoDB, MariaDB or PostgreSQL.
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Kernel Space
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After announcing the release of Linux kernel 4.1.7 LTS, Greg Kroah-Hartman, a renowned Linux kernel developer that currently maintains several LTS (Long-Term Support) branches of the Linux kernel, a core component of any GNU/Linux operating system, announced the release of Linux kernel 3.14.52 LTS.
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On September 13, Greg Kroah-Hartman, a renowned kernel maintainer, had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the seventh point release of the Linux 4.1 LTS kernel series, immediately after releasing Linux kernel 3.14.52 LTS.
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Linus Torvalds is considered one of the greatest living programmers, and for good reason, having written some of the most widely used software, such as the Linux kernel and the Git revision control system. He’s also known for not being shy about sharing his opinions on things that he doesn’t like through colorful and sometimes NSFW language. Sometimes, he’ll direct his sharp tongue at people who, in his opinion, do substandard work or companies and organizations with which he may have a disagreement or be in competition. Most often, though, the target of Torvalds’ ire is technology that he feels isn’t up to snuff. Use the arrows above to read Torvalds’ thoughts about a dozen technologies that have gotten under his skin repeatedly over the years.
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Linux: For most people it’s just a pretty word to say. But for programmers its still a remarkably relevant operating system given that the Linux kernel, the part of the OS managing input/output requests, arrived on September 17, 1991. It was a big deal, the dawn of the open source age for the OS world.
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Graphics Stack
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AMD just released the latest version of Catalyst, the proprietary graphics driver for maximum Linux gaming performance with AMD hardware. Bright minds are hard at work on an entirely new graphics driver architecture to make AMD more competitive with Nvidia’s best-in-class Linux graphics driver, but Catalyst still provides the best performance for AMD hardware on Linux today.
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This post will take a look at the current state of upstream Wayland as the community prepares for the upcoming 1.9 release. The core of the project is quite mature and is currently in a holding pattern as KDE, GNOME, EFL, and others complete their Wayland transitions. As this proceeds the Wayland community will be responding to the needs of these other projects.
Most notably, there is a need to complete the XDG Shell protocol. This aims to become a standard across all desktop environments, but it needs to have strong buy in and collaboration from the desktop environment projects themselves. There’s a number of conversations that need to occur before anything can be nailed down effectively, but the desktop environment developers need to be relatively far along in their implementations before they can have strong enough opinions on what the desktop API should look like.
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The xf86-video-nouveau DDX driver has dropped support for GLAMOR hardware acceleration and in the process eliminated the support for the Maxwell GPUs.
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Applications
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Geoclue is Free Software, licensed under GNU GPLv2+. It is developed for Linux.
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The developers of the well-known Deluge BitTorrent client announced a few hours ago, on September 13, the immediate availability for download of the twelfth maintenance release of the Deluge 1.3 branch.
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Proprietary
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The Opera browser is getting some pretty interesting updates and features, but it looks like not all the platform are getting them. At least one of the new options won’t arrive for Linux.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Football Manager 2016, the latest in the famous series built by SPORTS INTERACTIVE, will arrive on the Linux platforms in just a couple of months.
Football Manager 2016 is published by Sega, a company that has already shown that it’s interesting in Linux users. Also, the guys from SPORTS INTERACTIVE are now at their third game for Linux players, since both of their previous releases have been ported as well.
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As you might know, Steam is the world’s largest digital game distribution platform, supporting all major operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and GNU/Linux or SteamOS, Valve’s own distribution derived from the acclaimed Debian GNU/Linux OS.
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The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a beautiful first-person adventure game developed by a studio named The Astronauts, and it looks like they are finally willing to take a closer look at Linux support.
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AMD is not known for the fact that its driver releases are accompanied by comprehensive documentation and changelogs. For the latest AMD Catalyst 15.9 driver, they revealed too much, and they have sort of confirmed that Alien: Isolation is scheduled to get a Linux port.
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With Valve pushing their own Linux Distro “SteamOS” onto consoles in the livingroom, this will get game developers making games that work with linux, and in turn better driver support for graphics cards, processors, drives. While steamOS will most likely cause havoc for Sony and Microsoft in the console arena. This wont on the Desktop. SteamOS is not intended as a Desktop OS.
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It’s not secret that I consider Victor Vran to be one of the best action RPG’s on Linux, and now even more so with more free content!
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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I’ll first say that this blog post very one sided towards KDE but I do like and love the work that every developer does for Desktop Environments like GNOME Shell, Unity, elementary’s Pantheon Shell and even Linux Mint’s Cinnamon. While I might get some names and descriptions wrong please do correct me.
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This post carries on a bit about the way I build and test packages for FreeBSD. I only have one desktop machine, running FreeBSD amd64, and it needs to function as a desktop even while building and testing packages. Elsewhere, things like Project Neon and the OpenSUSE build service do something similar, on a much larger scale: building packages from various stages of development and delivering them to users. Here, though, I’m concentrating on end-to-end ports and packages testing for FreeBSD for a single computer and user.
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Since then, we got a great Visual Design Team, and we got an awesome default theme (and its dark version).
But, two themes are not enough. People have different tastes.
Now, Sean is back in the Plasma world.
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Talking about Kubuntu, Arch Linux, OpenSuse, …. Questions where I can find the Plasma Widgets, UI Session about Kmail, Plasma, Kdenlive … . Where Plasma Mobile should go, how the user should navigate through Plasma and the phone applications. Starting improvements for plasma. Talking how the VDG can improve the workflow between designers and development. Writing bug reports, fixing bugs. Make code changes, discuss it on reviewboard. Talk to the devs to fix some UI stuff. Go hiking and don’t stop talking about Plasma and KDE. That was Randa for me. It was amazing.
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We have collected 184 third party Qt libraries on Inqlude now. This is a pretty complete map of the Qt ecosystem, quite an impressive number, and lots of useful libraries extending Qt for many purposes.
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…me and 50 other KDE developers met in the Swiss Alps for a week of hacking.
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I was looking for tips and resources to painting with GIMP, until I found out that David Revoy was using Krita to do the free “Pepper & Carrot” webcomic. When I looked up the pictures, I was impressed. Which is awesome.
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I am happy to announce that upcoming release of KDE Partition Manager is split into library (KPMcore) and GUI parts to allow other projects reuse partitioning code. KPMcore is already used by the development versions of distribution independent installer Calamares whose maintainer Teo Mrnjavac contributed a lot to help get this release of KDE Partition Manager out.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Here we are, this is the end of this development cycle and here comes
a release candidate for you to download, build, and test. Enjoy it as
fast as you can, the final release is scheduled next Wednesday.
To compile GNOME 3.17.92, you can use the jhbuild modulesets published
by the release team (which use the exact tarball versions from the
official release).
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The Boston Summit is a 3-day hackfest for GNOME developers and contributors, that we traditionally hold over the Columbus day weekend.
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Reviews
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Last week I updated an article at about.com which lists the top 25 Linux distributions on Distrowatch and gives a short description of who they are for as well as any pros and cons.
There are a few distributions on that list that I haven’t tried and so I just gave a description as provided by Distrowatch. I made a note to myself though that I really should give them a go.
The first one I tried was Q4OS because it was the smallest download (under 400 megabytes) and my internet is playing up again. (The misty hills of Scotland does that from time to time).
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Earlier today, September 19, the developers of the Solus Project revealed the codename of the first ever release of the anticipated GNU/Linux operating system, Solus OS 1.0, due for release sometime in October.
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New Releases
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Developer Ivan Davidov, creator of the Minimal Linux Live shell scripts that lets users create minimal live BusyBox- and Linux kernel-based operating systems, announced on September 14, 2015, the availability of an update version of his project.
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Roberto J. Dohnert from Black Lab Software had the great pleasure of informing Softpedia earlier today, September 14, about the immediate availability for download and testing of the second Beta build of the upcoming Black Lab Linux 2015.12 OS.
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The latest release of ExTiX offers a new spin on an old desktop environment and exhibits a passion for speed and ease of use.
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Arch Family
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In summary, I really like Manaro Linux, and I strongly recommend it. It is well developed and maintained, and it is consistently one of the first distributions to include new/updated kernel, driver and packages. The next stable release (15.09) is likely to be released within the next week or so. That would be a great chance to give it a try, even if it is just running from the Live USB media so that you could check out what Jamie has been raving about.
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Not much has changed since the previous Release Candidate build of the forthcoming Manjaro Linux KDE 15.09 operating system, as it remains based on the long-term supported Linux 4.1 kernel, which adds better support for the latest hardware components, the most advanced Linux technologies, and long-term viability.
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Today, September 20, we were expecting to download the final release of the Manjaro Linux 15.09 operating system, but it looks like Manjaro’s Philip Müller has just announced the release of the fourth build of Manjaro Linux 15.09.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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The next major release for openSuSE is scheduled for 4 November, exactly one year after the debut of 13.2. The second milestone was recently released, so I decided to give it a try.
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Red Hat Family
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Open source software will be the future of IT systems, says global open-source software services leader Red Hat. Over the past couple of years, the myths relating to reliability and security of open source software have been busted given the success of humongous projects including the UID, senior official of the company said.
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Since reaching a 52-week high of $81.49 on June 18, shares of Red Hat (RHT) , the world’s largest provider of open-source Linux software solutions, have lost as much as 18% of their value. And while the stock has rebounded from their summer lows and is now up almost 4% on the year, Red Hat is still 13% below where it was trading three months ago.
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A few days ago, the French equivalent of Hacker News, called “Le Journal du Hacker”, interviewed me about my work on OpenStack, my job at Red Hat and my self-published book The Hacker’s Guide to Python. I’ve spent some time translating it into English so you can read it if you don’t understand French! I hope you’ll enjoy it.
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After announcing the release of a new version of the CentOS Atomic Host project, Karanbir Singh published details about the August 2015 snapshot of the rolling-release CentOS 7 Linux kernel-based operating system.
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Microservices has become the latest buzzword in IT as a new approach to deploying applications and services in the cloud. But much of the debate around microservices has centred on whether containers or some other approach is best for implementing them, while Red Hat said that the API should be the focus.
Enterprises and service providers are looking for a better approach to deploying applications in a cloud environment, and microservices is being heralded as the way forward. By breaking down applications and services into smaller, loosely coupled components, they can be made more scalable and easier to develop, or so the theory goes.
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Overall, analysts are forecasting the company’s year-over-year earnings and revenue to increase.
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Analysts are expecting the company to report earnings of 44 cents per share on revenue of $494.6 million for the most recent quarter.
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Take application development. Many apps require very similar or identical APIs for universal functions, such as connecting to the back-end in an organisation. But because of the lack of coordination across the industry, the same API or app feature ends up being developed again and again by different developers.
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Despite its earnings beats, Red Hat stock has taken a hit in the recent downturn. After hitting a 15-year, post-dot-com-boom high of 81.49 after reporting Q1 earnings in June, Red Hat shares bumped along before dropping 12.5% over six sessions during the market retreat this month.
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Fedora
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Dennis Gilmore from the Fedora Project has informed all Fedora Linux developers and package maintainers that the Beta Freeze for the upcoming Fedora 23 Beta build is in effect starting September 10, 2015.
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Fedora’s latest AMD issues aren’t about some Catalyst graphics driver problem, but rather for the few still left using a 32-bit USB installation on an AMD processor.
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Fedora Program Manager Jan Kuřík announced yesterday that Fedora 23 beta is “GO” for next week. I’m running Fedora 23 Workstation on my main desktop system (and posting this 5tFTW from there), and everything looks great so far. If you’re interested in trying it out, come back Tuesday (as is traditional, the official time is 10am US/Eastern) and get your pre-release downloads. Or, if you’re a little more cautious, no problem — the final release will be in just about a month.
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Debian Family
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The problem of producing reproducible builds requires a number of changes to be made:
1: The source code must be changed so that variables are always initialized to static values (not dynamic values from memory, which can be random).
2: Eliminate the use of timestamps, source code file paths, and build numbers.
3: Specify the exact build environment, so that it can be reproduced on different computers.
As you can imagine, this could be painstaking work on a single project. But the Debian project has over 20,000 packages, and the majority of them need to be overhauled. This is a major undertaking, to say the least.
But it has to be done. A single corrupted package could result in thousands of infected computers.
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On September 17, the Turnkey Linux developers, through Jeremy Davis, has the enormous pleasure of announcing the release of the final version of their TurnKey Linux 14.0 highly specialised virtual appliances created specifically for servers.
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Derivatives
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Parsix GNU/Linux is a live and installation DVD based on Debian. Our goal is to provide a ready to use and easy to install desktop and laptop optimized operating system based on Debian’s testing branch and the latest stable release of GNOME desktop environment. Users can easily install extra software packages from Parsix APT repositories. Our annual release cycle consists of two major and four minor versions. We have our own software repositories and build servers to build and provide all the necessary updates and missing features in Debian stable branch.
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The developers of the Parsix GNU/Linux project had the great pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download of the final version of the Parsix GNU/Linux 8.0 (Mumble) operating system.
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You might remember the Linux Mangaka distribution from Animesoft International, as we’ve written several articles about it in the last few months, but today we report that its developers are currently working on a new version.
From the looks of it, the developers of Linux Mangaka can’t settle for a desktop environment, as the distribution was switched from GNOME-based elementary OS’ Pantheon desktop, to KDE4, and now to MATE.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical’s Alan Pope announced earlier today, September 13, the official dates for the next UOS (Ubuntu Online Summit) event, which will take place online, on the Ubuntu On Air YouTube channel.
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Pedro Dias Vicente, a senior XDA member, posted news on the Ubuntu Touch mailing list informing developers and users alike about his attempt of porting Canonical’s mobile operating system to the Sony Xperia Z Ultra smartphone.
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ODROID is a mini-PC platform, akin to the Raspberry Pi, and it comes with the same kind of functionality. Developers have just released the Ubuntu 15.04 Robotics Edition for XU3 and XU4 models.
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Canonical’s Stéphane Graber has announced earlier today, September 16, that version 0.18 of the LXD next-generation container hypervisor for Linux kernel-based operating systems has been tagged, and it is available for download.
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Users who are running licensed versions of Windows 7 or 8.1 on their PCs get a free upgrade to Windows 10, but those running Windows XP or Vista will have to buy Windows 10. Well, Ubuntu is a free user-friendly Linux based operating system. Yes, absolutely free, including future updates.
Secondly , it is extremely light on PC hardware, so you can even install it on computers that are 3-4 years old, and it will run smoothly . Besides, if you buy a brand new PC without an OS, you could consider running Ubuntu on that too. Ubuntu lets you do everything you can do on Windows, and just as easily…
You can edit documents, work on spreadsheets, create presentations and more with LibreOffice – a fully functional productivity suite. It comes with the Ubuntu installation and supports Microsoft file formats.
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Snapdeal is the biggest retail store in India, and it looks like it’s pulling all stops on Ubuntu products. It now features a customized page that lists a host of Ubuntu-powered products, including laptops.
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You know that a new Ubuntu release is just around the corner when the official wallpaper is made available in Launchpad. Guess what? Now we know what the new wallpaper for Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) is.
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Flavours and Variants
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The Linux Mint developers have just revealed that the 17.3 branch of the operating system will be called Rosa and that it will land sometime in the next few months, but they’ve also said some other interesting stuff regarding the upcoming 18.0 version.
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A startup is launching a “Cujo” home security appliance on Indiegogo starting at $49, that protects devices ranging from PCs to home automation gadgets.
In Stephen King’s book Cujo, a beloved St. Bernard goes bezerk from rabies, embarks on a killing spree, and is finally “put down” with the sharp end of a baseball bat to the eye. Redondo Beach, Calif. startup Cujo presumably named its eponymous home security device after the crazed guard dog to demonstrate the lengths it will go stop hackers, phishers, snoopers, identity thefts, and other evildoers from inflicting harm. Yet, we’d hate to have to take a baseball bat to the cute little gizmo, which has adorable eye features that indicate various modes of operation.
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Qualcomm unveiled a Snapdragon 801 and Ubuntu based “Snapdragon Flight” reference platform for the design of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs).
Ubuntu got a big boost as a competitive operating system for drones with an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) reference platform announced by Qualcomm this week called Snapdragon Flight.
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Avnet released a 100 x 72mm “PicoZed SDR” COM and dev kit for fixed or mobile Software Defined Radio apps, that runs Linux on an ARM/FPGA Zynq-7035 SoC.
In Oct. 2013, Avnet launched two Linux-based Software Defined Radio (SDR) development kits that combined Xilinx ARM/FPGA Zynq-7000 SoCs with the Analog Devices AD9361 RF Agile Transceiver for SDR. The company provides essentially the same ingredients with the new PicoZed SDR Z7035/AD9361 computer-on-module, but instead of using a Zedboard SBC combined with a Xilinx reference board, the PicoZed SDR implements the required functions on Avnet’s much more compact, 100 x 72mm PicoZED COM form-factor.
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Disney Research has demonstrated an LED-to-LED networking method whereby toys, wearables, mobile devices, and IoT gizmos could communicate with one another.
Disney Research has demonstrated an LED-to-LED “Linux Light Bulb” networking technology that would let toys communicate with each other, thereby bringing us one step closer to the reality of Disney/Pixar’s Toy Story. Instead of lip-syncing to the voice of Tom Hanks, however, Woody would argue with Buzz Lightyear with a flash of his eyes.
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Linux Light Bulbs can communicate with each other and with other VLC devices — such as toys, wearables and clothing — over the Internet Protocol, according to Disney scientists Stefan Schmid, Theodoros Bourchas, Stefan Mangold and Thomas R. Gross, who coauthored a report on their work. In essence, they could establish a LiFi network that would function in much the same way that WiFi works.
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Zymbit’s IoT-focused, $15 “ZymKey” encryption and authentication device offers 256-bit SHA security for the Raspberry Pi and other Linux devices.
In May, Zymbit unveiled its hackable, Raspberry Pi-based Zymbit Orange mini-PC for Internet of Things applications (see farther below). Now Zymbit has gone to Kickstarter to launch a $15 ZymKey encryption and authentication device that plugs into the expansion header on the Raspberry Pi, including the one built into the yet-to-be-released Zymbit Orange. There is also an identically priced USB version of ZymKey designed for other Linux-based devices.
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Allo.com’s new SBC runs Linux or Android on a quad-core, Cortex-A9 SoC, and offers amp/preamp, wireless, eMMC, USB hub, and LCD expansion shields.
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Gumstix unveiled a pair of $329, 4.3-inch, wireless, battery-powered “Pepper” touchscreen kits that run Android or Yocto on an 800MHz TI Sitara SoC.
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Calao claims its “SMC-NTKE1″ is the first SMARC COM with a Tegra K1 SoC. The rugged module offers Yocto Linux, crypto and TPM security, and up to 64GB eMMC.
Nvidia’s quad-core Tegra K1 SoC, which features a 192-core Kepler GPU, has appeared on Linux-ready computer-on-modules including Seco’s SECOMExp-TK1 COM Express Type 6 Compact COM and the GE Intelligent Platforms mCOM10K1 COM Express Type 10 Mini module. Now, Calao Systems has launched what it claims is the first Tegra K1-based module to adopt the 82 x 50mm SMARC form-factor. Other Tegra-based SMARC modules include Kontron’s SMARC-sAT30, which used the earlier Tegra 3.
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I used a hierarchical structure. At the top we have a single Raspberry Pi B+, which contains a customised Raspbian – for example, I removed everything to do with X Window, so I saved something like 1 GB, which is even more space for storing the videos. And then I did some adaptations: I hardened the operating system so it would be in read-only mode. In these installations we never know if or when the power supply is removed, so there is the risk of wearing out the SD card if it is storing logs etc. So I put the system in read-only mode, and when I log in via SSH it goes into read-write mode and I can configure, then I reboot and it starts a simple script that runs a simple C file, which reads data from the SD card and then sends it over the network. There is also a modification to add a real-time clock, because we are in a public space and there is also the issue of saving energy. So when the sun is out there is no point having the LEDs working, so from about 10am to 5pm the system is turned off – it stops sending data – and when the WisYasep boards see that no data is coming, they set everything to black so that it draws less current.
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Apparently there’s a trend going on right now: smart devices in your home. I have to admit that I’m one of those people curious about new technology, especially things that you can interact with. You may know them as Internet of Things.
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Phones
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Tizen
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According to shipping reports assembly parts for an Initial 1,000 smartphone units have been shipped from the Korean companies HQ to India, and we would expect more to follow shortly.
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Samsung have decided to launch the first Tizen Smartphones initially in south asian emerging markets. The Initial launch was in India which was then followed by Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka. The Samsung Z1 Smartphone has done better than most would of expected with sales of over 1 Million units since the device went on-sale in January 2015.
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Tizen is an open-source Linux operating system developed under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation, which aims to run on phones, tablets, watches, and IVI (in-vehicle infotainment). A new milestone for the 3.0 branch of the operating system has been released, and it bring some pretty interesting changes.
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Android
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Imagination Technologies, through Alexandru Voica, informed Softpedia about the progress made in adding support for the Debian GNU/Linux 8 (Jessie) operating system to their Creator Ci20 microcomputer.
The Debian GNU/Linux 8 OS for Creator Ci20 is powered by Linux kernel 3.18.21 LTS, about which we reported a while ago, and it brings a great number of improvements to the MIPS hardware architecture. For those of you who are not in the loop, we inform you that the Creator Ci20 development board is powered by an MIPS CPU.
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Google’s Android One initiative aims to bring low-cost, high-quality Android phones to the hands of those who are not able to afford a more premium device. While they are not known for having the fastest processors or the most gorgeous screens, they do come with the promise of a Nexus-like experience of stock Android and fast updates — sometimes even beating Nexus devices at their own game.
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With piracy-related lawsuits becoming a looming possibility, open-source software seems to be the answer
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In this post, I discuss one example of how a choice for software freedom can cause many strange problems that others will dismiss. My goal here is to explain in gory detail how proprietary software biases in the computing world continue to grow, notwithstanding Open Source ballyhoo.
Two decades ago, nearly every company, organization, entity, and tech-minded individual ran their own email server. Generally speaking, even back then, nearly all the software for both MTAs and MUAs were Free Software0. MTA’s are the mail transport agents — the complex software that moves email around from one Internet domain to another. MUAs are the mail user agents, sometimes called mail clients — the local programs with which users manipulate their own email.
I’ve run my own MTA since around 1993: initially with sendmail, then with exim for a while, and with Postfix since 1999 or so. Also, everywhere I’ve worked throughout my entire career since 1995, I’ve either been in charge of — or been the manager of the person in charge of — the MTA installation for the organization where I worked. In all cases, that MTA has always been Free Software, of course.
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Working together on open source tools based on open standards is very important for those involved in the preservation of digital information, says Barbara Sierman, board member of the Open Preservation Foundation.
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On September 9, a Bangladeshi English language newspaper, Dhaka Tribune, reported that the country’s Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Task Force and Copyright officials had seized 69 laptops with pirated Microsoft software and arrested two high ranking officials at Flora, one of Bangladesh’s largest computer retailers. The raid came after two years of newspaper ads sponsored by the country’s Copyright Office warning about the legal implications of selling pirated goods.
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The telecom industry needs to agree on how it wants the various pieces of open source to come together in a platform for the future, AT&T’s Margaret Chiosi said here Thursday. Otherwise, there is the risk of a splintered effort that will ultimately slow critical network transformation.
Chiosi, a Distinguished Network Architect at AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) who is also president of the Open Platform for NFV Project Inc. and one of the original players in the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) NFV ISG, explained why open source is critical to AT&T’s Integrated Cloud (AIC) architecture — its converged services platform moving forward — and outlined the numerous open source groups in which the telecom giant is participating, which span 700 different projects.
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Google’s OCR is probably using dependencies of Tesseract, an OCR engine released as free software, or OCRopus, a free document analysis and optical character recognition (OCR) system that is primarily used in Google Books. Developed as a community project during 1995-2006 and later taken over by Google, Tesseract is considered one of the most accurate OCR engines and works for over 60 languages. The source code is available on GitHub.
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Professionally, Harper was CTO of Threadless and then CTO of Obama for America. He’s currently CEO of Modest, Inc., which was recently acquired by PayPal. I asked him what really drives him and he said, “I like to have fun and do interesting things.” Also, in a talk Harper gave in Sweden in 2014, he said that he strives to hire people who looked different from him. In this interview, I ask him more about that and his upcoming All Things Open talk.
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Google will be coming late to the publishing party, having failed to challenge Facebook with its own social media platforms — the short-lived Google Buzz and the faltering Google+, noted SEO researcher Joshua J. Bachynski. Google’s inability to understand its user base has forced it to form an uneasy partnership with Twitter and others, he suggested.
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Events
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We are happy to announce that an initial, preliminary version of the systemd.conf 2015 schedule is now online! (Please ignore that some rows in the schedule link the same session twice on that page. That’s a bug in the web site CMS we are working on to fix.)
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The Digital Freedom Foundation is organizing our Software Freedom Day event in Phnom Penh together with the National Institute of Posts Telecommunications and ICT and the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications on September 19, 2015 at the NIPTICT Building. There will be 10 presentations and several lightening talks with topics covering free and open source software ranging from operating system, virtualization, drones, mapping, servers, to security. Here is the detailed schedule.
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Software Freedom Day is a global celebration of free and open source software (FOSS). What will you to on September 19, 2015 to celebrate?
We hope you can choose to do many of the options we listed in our poll to help celebrate FOSS on Software Freedom Day, but even if you can only do one that will be a great benefit to the community.
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Web Browsers
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I remain deeply suspicious of Chrome, since it has been reported to be snooping on its users and reporting back to Google. And, sadly, the latest news from Firefox is discouraging. It’s possible that that adware and snoopware will be left out of Mozilla’s SeaMonkey browser, which I have recently installed.
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Mozilla
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For a variety of reasons that nobody outside of Mozilla seems to completely understand, Mozilla ended its relationship with Google late last year to ink a deal with Yahoo. Some pundits are figuring that Yahoo offered better terms and that Mozilla stands to make more money now than before, especially since it’s now selling default search on a country-by-country basis instead of carte blanche for the entire planet. Others say the change in affiliation had little to do with money, but was brought about by ideological reasons, basically revolving around Mozilla’s Do Not Track system, which Google does not support. Reportedly, as part of the new deal, Yahoo has agreed to abide by Do Not Track requests.
Whether Mozilla receives more income from Yahoo than it did from Google is questionable, even if a majority of Firefox users keep Yahoo instead of flipping the switch to Google search, which is doubtful. Certainly, a recent move by Mozilla might indicate that the new deal with Yahoo isn’t as fruitful as the organization had hoped and that it’s scrambling to create new revenue streams.
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The gear keeps turning: we’re releasing Rust 1.3 stable today! As always, read on for the highlights and check the release notes for more detail.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Standardisation Board of the Netherlands wants to make the use of the Open Document Format mandatory for Dutch public administrations. ODF is one of the required ICT standards in the Netherlands, following a policy dating from 2007. However, the document format is ignored by most. This should change, said Nico Westpalm van Hoorn, the chairman of the standards board, speaking on Tuesday at the ODF Plugfest in The Hague.
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The Italian military is transitioning to LibreOffice and the Open Document Format (ODF). The Ministry of Defense will over the next year-and-a-half install this suite of office productivity tools on some 150,000 PC workstations – making it Europe’s second largest LibreOffice implementation. The switch was announced on 15 September by the LibreItalia Association.
The migration project will begin in October and is foreseen to be completed at the end of 2016.
The deployment of LibreOffice will be jointly managed by the two organisations, announces LibreItalia. The NGO will help the ministry to ready trainers in different parts of the military, and the Ministry is to develop a series of online courses to help with the switch to LibreOffice. The material is to be made public using a Creative Commons licence.
An agreement between the Ministry and LibreItalia was signed on 15 September in Rome, by Ruggiero Di Biase, Rear Admiral and General Manager of the Italian Ministry of Defence Information Systems and Sonia Montegiove, President of Associazione LibreItalia.
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The government of the UK, in its guidance on using ODF (Open Document Format) surveys usage of ODF and LibreOffice by EU governments. Usage is huge and widespread and profitable. Lately, The Netherlands is considering making ODF mandatory in government. That this was obvious to me 15 years ago but is now being acknowledged shows the depth of lock-in M$ has caused in the world but, in 2015, folks are now running on the sandy beaches instead of in neck-deep water. The world is finally being freed. Better late than never.
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CMS
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About 75 million Web sites depend on WordPress. If you are one of its many users who recently upgraded to Version 4.3, you may have noticed something new. Recently, a coop worker-member, Pea, informed me that this version includes a new tab with a reference to the GNU General Public License. With some quizzical interest, I ran the upgrade on a WordPress instance I maintain.
I eagerly waited for the upgrade to finish. When it loaded, what I saw was typical for a WordPress upgrade, a description of the version’s new features. Then I saw a tab prominently named “Freedom.” I clicked on it, and boom: right there were the four freedoms of free software, starting with Freedom 0. Take a look for yourself.
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Business
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It became the first $1 billion open source company three years ago and closed its last fiscal year in February at almost $1.8 billion in revenue. That is not chump change, but it’s a far cry from the run rates proprietary software companies tout.
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Semi-Open Source
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VSCO says code for the installer can be found on Github. The company also notes “while the current layout editor has been discontinued, users can continue to edit their layouts with a text editor using resources that have been provided in the source code.”
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BSD
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After a year of development, testing and debugging we are pleased to announce the release of GhostBSD 10.1 MATE & XFCE which is available on SourceForge and torrents for the amd64 and i386 architectures.
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GhostBSD’s Eric Turgeon has the great pleasure of informing us earlier today, September 13, about the immediate availability for download of the final release of GhostBSD 10.1.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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In July, Kilton Library in Lebanon, New Hampshire set up a relay server in the Tor network, which lets Internet users surf the Web anonymously. Tor is relied on every day by whistleblowers, journalists, and dissidents in oppressive regimes, and each relay makes the network stronger. This was the first time a library had set up a relay, and the FSF was excited to see the public institution participating.
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This Saturday, September 19th, is the twelfth annual Software Freedom Day, an international celebration of our favorite thing: free software!
Software Freedom Day means hundreds of fun, educational events, planned by activists all over the globe using resources provided by the Digital Freedom Foundation. Here’s a map where you can find an event near you.
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Public Services/Government
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A fifteen-point checklist to help public administrations to procure open source software solutions and services was published in August by Swiss open source procurement experts. The list helps to determine which procurement specifications take this type of software into account, and which criteria exclude open source.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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On the heels of the University of Maryland University College announcing its plans to eliminate textbooks this fall, the SGA is exploring the viability of open-source textbooks as a cheaper alternative for University of Maryland students.
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Open Hardware
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OSVR is backed by many major companies, such as Intel, Ubisoft, Valve and GearBox, as well as by a long list of universities. The project also boasts many contributors of software design, sensory support, virtual world design, etc.
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Programming
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Developer collaboration services are back on investors’ agenda. Two months after leading a $1.5 million round into GitLab Inc., Khosla Ventures is coming back for more and pouring an additional $4 million into the startup’s coffers to help ramp its battle against the better-known and better-funded competition.
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Standards/Consortia
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Technological evolution is famous for obsoleting wonders created just a few years before. Sometimes new developments moot the fiercest battles between competitors as well. That seemed to be the case last week, when Microsoft announced its Azure Cloud Switch (ACS), a cross-platform modular operating system for data center networking built on…(wait for it)…Linux, the open source software assailed by the company’s prior CEO as a communist cancer.
It also saw the UK Cabinet Office announce its detailed plans for transitioning to the support of the OpenDocument Format (ODF), a document format that was just as fiercely opposed by Microsoft in the most hard-fought standards war in decades. But at the same time, the Cabinet Office announced its commitment to work towards making document formats as close to obsolete as possible.
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Security
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WordPress 4.3.1 is now available. This is a security release for all previous versions and we strongly encourage you to update your sites immediately.
This release addresses three issues, including two cross-site scripting vulnerabilities and a potential privilege escalation.
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The tldr is “much ado about nothing”.
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Vladimir Drinkman, 34, said Tuesday in federal court in Camden, New Jersey, that he plotted with four other men to steal credit card numbers from payments processors Global Payments and Heartland Payment Systems, grocery chain Hannaford Brothers and at least 14 other organisations from 2005 to 2012.
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Red Hat reports that the Ceph community project and Inktank download sites were hacked last week and it’s possible that some code was corrupted.
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Security researchers from Mandiant, which is the computer forensic arm of U.S. security research firm FireEye have detected a real-world attack that has installed rogue firmware on business routers in four countries. It possibly allows cybercriminals to harvest huge amounts of data without being detected by existing cybersecurity defenses.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Here’s another argument for keeping the world’s fossil fuels in the ground: If all the coal, gas, and oil on Earth is extracted and burned, the Antarctic ice-sheet will melt entirely, scientists warn in a “blockbuster” new study published Friday in the research journal Science Advances.
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Finance
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The executive branch will still make a final decision over the matter, to be presented in October.
The ruling progressivist coalition Broad Front overwhelmingly decided to withdraw Uruguay from the negotiations on the supra-national trade-deal TISA (Trade in Services Agreement) in a vote on Saturday.
With a 117 to 139 vote, the decision was backed by the Movement of Popular Participation (of former President Jose “Pepe” Mujica), the Communist Party, the 711 list (of Vice President Raul Sendic), the Party for the Victory of the People (PVP), the Great House (Casa Grande), the Federal League, and the Socialist Party (of current President Tabare Vazquez).
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When YANIS VAROUFAKIS appeared at TUC Congress, he said the ‘magnificent’ Greek people were ready for the struggle with financiers — only to be betrayed by his own party. And he warned that fearful leaders could one day be the downfall of Britain’s people too. Joe Gill reports
GREEK ex-finance minister Yanis Varoufakis brought some rock star glamour to the opening of the TUC Congress on Sunday in Brighton. He smiled for selfie shots with delegates at a 1,000-plus meeting. Delegates were high on the back of Jeremy Corbyn’s stunning victory in the Labour leadership battle the day before.
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As we have reported, the most problematic aspect of the proposed TAFTA/TTIP trade agreement between the US and the EU has been the proposed corporate sovereignty chapter, formally known as investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). The outcry over this was so great in Europe last year that the European Commission put negotiations of this topic on hold, while it carried out a public consultation on the matter — presumably assuming that the extremely technical questions about this complex issue would kill off any further interest by the public. Instead, an unprecedented 150,000 submissions were received, 145,000 of which said get rid of ISDS completely. In response, the European Commission merely promised to try to address the many concerns raised with a new and “improved” version.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The extent of BBC bias during the referendum campaign was breathtaking. I have worked, and specifically reported on the media, in dictatorships which had a less insidious and complete bias than the BBC has against Scottish independence. The relentless anti-Corbyn propaganda shows that the BBC exists to reinforce the neo-liberal narrative at all costs, both at home and abroad. Laura Kuenssberg achieved levels of disdain and ridicule in her report on Shadow Cabinet appointments this evening that ought to disqualify her forever from employment anywhere but Fox News. This was followed by ‘Reporting Scotland’ and a long propaganda piece against the idea of a second referendum, replete with lies about pledges of ‘once in a lifetime’.
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Former Foreign Secretaries Sir Malcolm Rifkind and Jack Straw were today cleared over lobbying allegations.
The pair, who both stood down at May’s general election, were apparently caught offering their services for cash in separate hidden camera stings by Channel 4’s Dispatches and the Telegraph.
Standards watchdog Kathryn Hudson investigated claims they had broken strict lobbying rules.
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Already we’re deep into September and Congress has reconvened in Washington, prompting many commentators to compare its return after summer’s recess to that of fresh-faced students coming back to school, sharpening their pencils, ready to learn, be cooperative and prepared for something new.
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Censorship
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Trade secrets are seeing a resurgence of attention by policymakers at home and around the world. While there can be legitimate reasons to keep commercially valuable information secret, particularly amongst those with whom it has been shared in confidence, the latest trade secrets push goes further, potentially entangling whistleblowers and journalists.
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Privacy
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Earlier this month, we discussed (or rather, ridiculed) a North Carolina’s law enforcement agency’s stupid and bizarre prosecution of two teens who consensually sent explicit photos to each other. There was the first (and most familiar) layer of stupidity: the charging of both with distributing explicit material to minors (both teens were 16 at the time of the sexting). Then there was the unexpected stupidity: the charging of both for sexually exploiting themselves. This gained an additional layer of stupidity when the law treated the teens as both minors (being exploited) and adults (doing the exploiting) when processing them.
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The UK’s National Crime Agency – Blighty’s equivalent of the FBI – wants its staff to “colocate” with private-sector IT security companies around the world. In other words, investigators and infosec employees placed alongside each other to sniff out cyber-criminals.
This will apparently help the agency reach across jurisdictions, and bust underworld gangs around the planet. This is according to a keynote address delivered on Thursday at the Cloudsec event in London – a presentation the media was banned from attending.
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The New Hampshire library, which last week took down a Tor relay after federal authorities read about it on Ars, has finally restored its important link in the anonymizing network.
The node was turned back on Tuesday evening immediately after the board of the Kilton Public Library in Lebanon voted to do so.
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Civil Rights
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Further, what does it say about the GOP that their front-runner for candidacy has no conscience? This latest gaffe is not the only indicator. Trump also thinks it would be a good idea to just round up ~11million “illegal immigrants”. How many Jews/communists/opponents did the Nazis have to round up before they committed a crime against humanity? Trump also holds that being born in USA should not convey citizenship… Trump is insane and the GOP is either insane or about to fragment to avoid schizophrenia. That a huge fraction of USAian citizens might vote for this guy is frightening. It’s like 1930s Germany/Italy all over again. Whether Trump could make political deals or get the trains to run on time, he should be shunned in the political arena. If, in our worst nightmare, Trump should be elected, the world should immediately sever all relations with USA to keep him in check.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Lessig: The question isn’t just what policies a candidate supports. If that were the question, we’d have climate change, a public option for health care, immigration reform, background checks on guns, etc., etc., etc. The question instead is also: What is the plan to get that policy enacted?
What every presidency since Clinton teaches us is that presidents promise reform, and then fail to act on it. That’s not weakness. It’s structural. A regular president cannot take on Congress. It will take a president with a super-mandate. That’s what the referendum presidency is meant to achieve.
Ars: Campaign finance reform clearly is not a bipartisan issue. How are you going to get the GOP interested in this issue? And is this why you are running as a Democrat? In fact, given your platform, why have you chosen a party?
Lessig: Two words: Donald Trump. Until Donald Trump, it’s true that among GOP insiders in DC, corruption wasn’t an issue. After Donald Trump, it is as much a question for Republicans as Democrats: How can we have a Congress free to lead?
I wish there were a way to run as an independent. But the two parties have made that essentially impossible—at least to win. No doubt I could split the vote of the Democratic Party, but I have no desire to Nader this election.
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