Microsoft today laid off 1,400 workers, with another 3,600 on the block within 18 months. We asked Linux Foundation Director Jim Zemlin what if any role Linux played in Microsoft's misfortunes, how Microsoft will react, and what it could mean for Linux and the open source community. Enjoy . . . !
UPDATE: A technology vendor who saw Koss' post on the Seattle startup list now is joining the effort, offering free access to 512 MB linux servers to those who join the incubator. "Our Virtual Servers aren't a MS platform, but it provides a good opportunity to use your skills in a new arena and build something great," writes Jesse Proudman of Blue Box Group.
"According to Russian media, the Russian Government is going to develop a National Operating System (Google translation; Russian original) to lower its dependencies on foreign software technology licensing. The Russian plan will base its efforts on Linux and expects a worldwide impact. Microsoft is also involved in the roundtable process that led to the recommendation. The Chinese government successfully lowered its Microsoft licensing costs through an early investment in a national Linux distribution. I wonder if other large markets, such as the European Union, will also develop their own Linux distributions or join in the Russian initiative."
Being absolutely terrified by this course of action I check out what other advice is available. Someone else mentions that they got Java working with Firefox by downloading a file-package from the Synaptic application after they installed the Java Runtime, so I go for it too.
If it is not the end for live CDs , nor even the beginning of the end, perhaps then it is the end of the beginning. They braced themselves and did their duty, introducing a new generation of users to the genius of GNU/Linux and extracting impetuous users from bricked machines—especially me. When they eventually recede into the mists of fond memory we will remember them. Hail Klaus. Bless you.
Back in 2002, as Roy Schestowitz calls out, Microsoft was desperately trying to figure out a response to Linux. The problem wasn't Linux as a product-level competitor. The problem, as its Windows chief, Jim Allchin, told a small gathering of Microsoft partners (PDF), is that Linux changes the nature of software competition with odd things like "community" and "GPL licensing," the latter of which Microsoft didn't like one bit :
We feel a huge threat from Linux. Maybe we shouldn't, which is a question you could answer from your perspective...There's Linux the community. We're going to learn from Linux the community. Incredible what they did...We're going to practice and practice and practice (to learn how to respond to Linux)...
GPL is the licensing model. We thlnk it's very bad...We don't think it's the same as public domain. Somebody wants to put in a free DSB(?), we don't have a problem with that, at least on licensing. But GPL, we think it's very bad basically for the world, but especially for the United States.
This is not surprising, given that Allchin had earlier deprecated Linux as "an intellectual-property destroyer" in 2001.
But name-calling was proving not to be enough, and for a reason that Allchin and Microsoft struggled to grasp, but one that its partners, which distribute the bulk of Microsoft's software, felt first-hand on the front lines. When Allchin later asked the participants what the biggest driver of Linux is, they didn't mention its modularity, high performance, or other characteristics. Back in 2002 (and, indeed, today, in many instances), one thing mattered...
What's more stable than a rock, faster than a spinning disk, more powerful than a Windows system twice its size, and able to leap platforms like no other operating system? Surprise! It's Linux.
It's also recession proof.
Can that be true? Yes, and here are the 5 reasons why:
1. Not Corporate Bound - Linux is developed worldwide by volunteers. It isn't owned by a single company. No one person or entity really owns Linux, the operating system.
2. Free - Several companies create their own distributions and market them commercially but the underlying system is still, and will always be, free.
Do you use both Windows and Linux? Wish you could remote into Windows from Linux (Ubuntu or other distributions) or into Linux from Windows? Well, you can. Just like when using a Remote Desktop Connection between Microsoft platforms (or remoting between Linux machines), you can bring up the desktop of the other platform. You can click around the desktop and run applications just as if you were sitting in front of the computer.
eyeon Fusion on Linux is proving itself in high-end feature film work on box office successes such as Twilight, Changeling, and Inkheart, as well as Terry Gilliam's upcoming film, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, starring the late Heath Ledger.
Running Fusion on Linux provides a seamless workflow for facilities who have invested in the platform, for example for their render farms.
At IBM's Lotusphere Conference the company announced an update of its Lotus Foundations line of Linux-based software for midmarket companies, as well as new Web 2.0 tools.
If you need the advantages of Ext4, your existing Ext3 can be easily “upgraded” to Ext4 without the need to format. This means that all your data will stay intact once you upgrade (though I would highly recommend backing up).
If the Linux virtualisation space wasn't heated enough, the open source hypervisors Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) and Xen are now duking it out for independent developer interest, according to Xen hacker Simon "Horms" Horman.
Horman is attending this year's linux.conf.au conference in Hobart while remaining close to his day job as a senior Linux developer at VA Linux Systems Japan K. K, but based in the Sydney office.
CohesiveFT (http://www.cohesiveft.com), the leader in automated software assembly, today announced it has partnered with ElasticHosts Ltd. (http://www.elastichosts.com), the second European cloud infrastructure and the world's first public cloud based upon KVM (the native Linux virtualization platform). As a result, users are now able to deploy virtual servers to ElasticHosts' cloud infrastructure via CohesiveFT's Elastic Server on-demand service. Elastic Server is an automated "factory" that allows IT professionals to assemble, deploy, and manage virtual servers using a simple point-and-click interface. Beginning today, customers can assemble custom Enterprise-class servers for deployment to ElasticHosts' European cloud computing infrastructure. Free trials are available for both ElasticHosts cloud infrastructure and CohesiveFT's Elastic Server factory, allowing customers to test drive the joint solution.
The frequency of words in texts, the size of companies and the linking together of components in Linux software distributions show approximately the same mathematical distribution: they obey Zipf’s law. ETH Zurich researchers tested how this happens in Linux programs.
Four months after Mesa 7.2 was released, Mesa 7.3 has now officially surfaced. Mesa 7.3 has been in testing since earlier this month with it having gone through three release candidates. The new features found in this latest version of the standard Open-Source OpenGL stack is proper support for GLSL 1.20 and the Intel DRI driver now supports the Graphics Execution Manager and Direct Rendering Infrastructure 2.
I caught up with one of the event's organizers, Gareth Greenaway, to find get the inside scoop on what's new, what's different, and what they've learned from past events.
OStatic: How many people make up the various organizing committees? How do you decide how to divide up responsibilities?
We have the work load divided up among roughly 7 committees, each committee has varying numbers of committee members. At some point early on we decided what committees would be responsible for what task; over the years as the show grows, we've refined the tasks a bit and moved some tasks around. We've also added new committees to better handle various tasks and divide the load. Everyone knows what they have to do to make sure the show goes off without a hitch.
Exhausted but overjoyed with the outcome, the co-organisers of the 10th Australian national Linux conference say they would be willing to play host again - but certainly not for a couple of years.
Open source has reached the third wave of its evolution and those who have been using the older models which were procurement-driven need to adapt.
That's the message which Simon Phipps, the chief open source and standards officer from Sun Microsystems, brought to the Australian national Linux conference this morning.
One doubts whether there have ever been more people watching a man's beard being clinically removed, first by trimmer and then by razor, than there were at the Australian national Linux conference today.
But this wasn't just any man and any beard - this was HP's chief open source and Linux technologist Bdale Garbee. And the barber was a man by the name of Linus Benedict Torvalds.
The reason for this hair-raising episode was pledges made by people at the conference's penguin dinner on Wednesday when a painting was being auctioned to raise money for research into saving the Tasmanian devil.
The final sum is expected to be in the region of $40,000.
I didn't really anticipate finishing my evening by hearing Linus Torvalds promise to shave off another man's beard.
[...]
A consortium, spoken for by the extremely handsome Matthew Garrett of power management fame, offered $7500 if Linus would himself wield the razor. When asked if he was happy with this plan, Linus replied "Why stop at the beard? I will do his whole head."
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/linuxconfau-penguin-dinner
Torvalds shaves Garbee's beard: Photos
In these photos, Linux founder Linus Torvalds shaves Hewlett-Packard Linux CTO and open-source luminary Bdale Garbee's beard to raise money for the endangered Tasmanian Devil species.
The annual Linux conference, Linux.conf.au, is on at Hobart this week and we kept you informed about the activities with our Twitter feed. A speaker predicting cloud computing will replace system administrator tasks and Wikipedia's plan to release a new mobile platform later in the year were some of the event's highlights.
The program for the first two days at the Camp KDE meeting in Jamaica provided the attendants with a series of talks. In time, these will be available in video from but for now we have these short summaries of the talks. Read on for details.
While writing this review I caught myself repeating the same things about every KDE application, namely excellent performance, usability and great features.
It is so good to see that a lot of work during KDE4 development went into improving the quality of the user experience. Unlike their KDE3 counterparts, the best KDE4 applications are definitely more user-oriented. Despite being a developer, I enjoy this as much as every other person would.
It is equally good to see almost all KDE4 applications being fast. The optimizations behind the scene in Qt and KDE frameworks already showed up, but I think that this is only a start. We will definitely see even more performance improvements in the future.
The KDE "Gang of Five" (Dolphin, KMail, Konsole, Gwenview and Okular) sets the new standards of performance, look, and usability without sacrificing essential features of file manager, mail client, terminal and viewer. If you aren't convinced by the bare KDE desktop, please take a look at these applications, let them speak for themselves!
KDE comes with a lot of good applications and I barely scratched the surface this time again. I haven't said a word about KWrite/Kate - an excellent text editor, Digikam - the ultimate digital photo processing software, Kaffeine - the video player and of course Amarok - my beloved music player. Looks like I have to write yet another part or two :) Come back again!
The Ubuntu team has released Ubuntu 8.04.2, the second maintenance update to the "long term support" (LTS) version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, released in April 2008. The new release includes over two hundred updates, covering a range of bugs and security issues. The LTS updates focus on improving stability and compatibility.
Amarok - in my opinion, this is the greatest music player and collection management for the Linux platform. I think it's also a killer application for Linux with all the features it has.
SMPlayer - one of the most powerful video players for Linux using the mplayer engine, and including support for DVDs, DVD ISO images, Matroska video files and much, much more. A must-have.
KTorrent - for me this is the BitTorrent client of choice. It has all the features I need, including the possibility to only download certain files in torrents, a feature which some other clients lack.
Sony's Cybershot DSC-G3 was announced earlier this month, and is one of the first consumer products shipping in with the Access Linux Platform (ALP), the successor to the original Palm OS/Garnet OS which was used in Palm, Handspring, and Sony PDAs and smartphones.
Blusens Technologies has announced a combination set-top box, digital video recorder, network-attached storage device, and media server that runs Linux on a Sigma SMP8634 SoC. The "BlueBrain" offers dual DVB-T tuners, removable storage, WiFi, and optional HomePlugAV networking, says the Spanish consumer electronics company.
Phillipines-based Neugent Technologies is shipping a compact, multi-channel surveillance DVR (digital video recorder) that can optionally overlay cash register output on surveillance videos. The SP-2000 Hawkeye Desktop DVR runs Linux 2.6.16 on an ARM9 SoC (system-on-chip), supports standalone or network modes, and boasts hardware MPEG-4 coprocessing.
Innova Card has indeed developed an integrated, secure 32-bit MIPS microcontroller and a precertified POS terminal reference design. In addition, the company supplies advanced customer support tools, including secure software libraries and a secure implementation of the Linux operating system.
Free music service Last.fm announced today that it's now available for handheld devices that use the Android platform. Like the Web-based version, users can stream radio stations, track listening habits, and get personal music recommendations. Last.fm users can also get artist information, view their personal music files, and access event and tour information.
According to Last.fm co-founder Martin Stiksel, the mobile app essentially replicates the online user experience. "The Last.fm service on Android enables our listeners to use virtually every Last.fm feature on their mobiles," he said in a prepared statement.
The Android open-source mobile platform is moving to Europe as the World Mobile Congress draws near. Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile will soon sell its G1 Android phone in several European countries, with the price set $1.33 in Germany. An analyst said all the big companies except Apple, Nokia and Research in Motion will have Android phones.
Mobile application development projects bring in more money than other types of open source software development, a study found. The survey was based on "extensive interviews" of 380 developers involved in open source Linux projects, says Dublin, Ireland, based research firm Research and Markets.
Sony has brought a new mini-notebook to the market that is small, light, stylish and with Windows Vista, although its instant-on feature is Linux-powered.
Why don't PC makers sell more Linux netbooks? Maybe because they simply aren't making enough of them.
Jay Lyman is an analyst for The 451 Group who focuses on enterprise open-source software issues. He recently posted a blog entry describing the difficulty he had finding an Acer Aspire One netbook with a pre-installed copy of Linux. According to Lyman, the problem was that while loads of Aspire One models running Windows XP were in-stock and available, the models running Linux were in many cases simply sold out:
"The message for Acer and other manufacturers: up your ratio of Linux netbooks. While North America seems to be the main market for these machines, about 30% of which run Linux by most accounts, among my dwindling options for obtaining the right Linux netbook were in Canada and the UK. However, the shipping costs added onto my minimal netbook expense of ~$350. While there were a number of online outlets that were sold out of the Linpus version, most of these same places had hundreds, sometimes thousands of XP netbooks in stock."
Netvibes founder Tariq Krim sent me a new screenshot of Jolicloud, the Linux-based Netbook-optimized operating system he's building (we first covered Jolicloud last December).
Montreal - Identi.ca, the developer of an open-source alternative to the Twitter microblogging service, has raised an undisclosed sum of angel funding from Montreal Start Up, according to published reports.
Jitterbit is an open source integration platform that gives end users a cost-effective way to connect with data in different sources, such as ERP and CRM systems, as well as with Web services and other applications. The company helps enterprises overcome the huge costs and complexities often associated with connecting data in different applications and systems, especially in large enterprises.
Its official. Those prevalent Blackberry devices will support ODF natively mid 2009, as announced by RIM's co-CEO Jim Balsillie, during IBM's Lotusphere conference...
Last I checked in June, Zimbra, Yahoo's open-source e-mail and calendar software, was at 11 million paid mailboxes. This was a healthy jump from 8 million paid mailboxes in May 2007 and the 4 million paid mailboxes TechCrunch reported back in October 2006.
With the final release of Alfresco Labs officially available, Alfresco believes they have an enterprise content management solution that can easily compete in today's tough economic market. With this release comes Alfresco's first solution for the presentation tier of website development - the new Web Studio.
The open-source g-Eclipse project has had it's first major release. It started over two years ago with the support of the European Union initiative; with further development now under the umbrella of the Eclipse foundation and other European projects. Version 1.0 of g-Eclipse has been released with support for grid middleware solutions g-Lite, GRIA and Amazon's Cloud storage platforms, EC2 and S3.
Parts-supplier Ogihara America, savaged by the automotive downturn, presses on with a key PLM initiative thanks to flexible pricing from its software vendor.
If it's good enough for Facebook and it's good enough for Google, maybe it's good enough for the corporates. Of the MIS Top 100 in Australia [the 100 organisations spending the most on IT], 18 have stated they're using MySQL. They don't need to sign up for support with Sun, but we're finding increasingly they are. We see that transition being quite exciting.
Sun Tech Days is part of Sun Microsystems' commitment to foster open source technology, which they say 'enables developer communities to collaborate and innovate without barriers, and for enterprises to reduce costs'.
That’s not to say that applying open source and open standards to the healthcare industry is impossible and isn’t already gaining traction in some areas. For example, the Veterans Administration clinical information system software (VistA) is open source and, by all accounts, an incredible success: “VistA saves lives and money.”
Lunch talks at the Berkman Center usually promise a challenging room, filled with smart people asking tough questions. But it’s rare that speakers have as tough an act to follow as Peter Semmelhack of Bug Labs whose lunch talk fell directly on the tail of President Obama’s inaugural address, watched on lossy streaming video by a room full of Berkfolk.
Aiming to showcase its cost-saving technologies at an increasingly popular event, an Israel-based maker of open source software-based business telephony products announced today that it’s participating in the 2009 Digium Asterisk World at the Internet Telephony Conference and Expo East. Officials at Xorcom, a private manufacturer of Asterisk-based telephony interfaces and appliances, say they’ll exhibit new PBX (News - Alert) solutions and services at the ITEXPO, to be held Feb. 2 to 4 at the Miami Beach Convention Center.
PrismTech is all set to release its OpenSplice DDS data distribution software as open source. This open source software will be licensed under LGPL licensing. Optional subscription packages consisting of professional support, productivity and optimization tools will also be provided along with the code base.
Chicago's Museum of Broadcast Communications (MBC) collects, preserves, and presents historic and contemporary radio and television content with the purpose of educating, informing, and entertaining the public through its archives, public programs, screenings, exhibits, publications and online access to its resources.
MBC also runs Museum.tv--which stores and delivers terabytes of digitized radio and television content. Currently, they are featuring a 1984 senatorial debate including Roland Burris--whom you may recognize as the senator just appointed to fill Barack Obama's vacancy (check out the protests at the start of the debate and how the moderator handles it).
For OrangeHRM accomplishing 200,000 downloads of the Open Source Human Resource Management System since its first release in February 2006 to SourceForge is a great start for the year 2009 and we hope for a continuous exciting year ahead.
The Veneto Region, around the Italian city of Venice, has decided to move to open source software and open standards, the Italian Internet news site Zeus reports.
According to the report, the regional Council of Veneto passed a resolution to adopt to open digital formats and open standards, in November last year.
The PHP community is finally getting an update to the Eclipse Foundation's PHP Developer Tools (PDT) project, an important set of tools for developers that has not been update since the initial 1.0 release in 2007.
Development to be integrated into open source MediaWiki package
The proliferation of standards-based video sharing and collaboration is set to take off with a $US100,000 grant from the Mozilla Foundation to fund the development of the Ogg Theora video codec and server-side streaming software.
26 years after GSM was created to design a pan-European mobile technology, Mobile World Congress number 13 is set to take place in Barcelona in February. This time around, as they did when GSM World Congress was first held in Madrid in 1995, mobile network operators will dominate the scene.
Next month, however, the topic of discussion will not be new network deployments, or the latest traunch of jazzy new devices, or the next best application. Rather, Open Source will be topic Number 1 on the operator agenda in 2009. As changing operator strategies include the need for a strategic terminal platform that they can influence, the tectonic plates that once defined how a device was created and deployed are shifting and fueling significant change in the value chain.
The Google Desktop team has been steadily releasing our Desktop gadget (widget) creations as Open Source for the past few years. If you check out this list, you can see most of the official Google created gadgets are actively maintained by the Google Desktop developer community. We had many good reasons for opening this code for the community:
* Source code can be a valuable learning tool. The gadgets not only show you how to develop Desktop gadgets, integrate with Google APIs, but also provide other tidbits of knowledge such as how to calculate phases of the moon or StarDates.
How has open-source changed our space and what more can it do for us? I think there has been a lot of good innovation and freedom from open source, and I expect that to continue. But I think we are starting to see the model evolve, where commercial companies need some assurances and support around open source. I think a model similar to eclipse will emerge where it is somewhere between full open source and commercial applications. In that way, you have the freedoms and no vendor lock-in, but you still have feature development and support.
According to a Nabble post from an OpenStreetMap (OSM) community member the French Minister of the Economy, and the Direction Générale des Finances publiques (DGFiP) in charge of the French cadastre have allowed the OSM project access to vectorised geo-data from the French land registry.
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) and the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) have announced a Climate Change Integration Plugfest (CCIP) to be launched at the FOSS4G conference, 20-23 October 2009, http://2009.foss4g.org.
OSBC 2009 will tackle the biggest issue in open source today: "Open Sourcing the Enterprise." Over the course of two days, top IT executive keynotes will preview the future of open source by revealing how it is already being used by the industry's top enterprises and vendors to push the envelope on innovation while coming in under budget.
Does open source play a role in your company? Whether you use or produce open source software, understanding the business and legal ramifications behind open source is critical.
Akaza Research announces the first annual OpenClinica European Summit. The event will be held on April 14, 2009 in Brussels, Belgium and bring together users, developers, and leading service providers of the OpenClinica open source electronic data capture (EDC) software.
In the light of Gordon's recent wobbly over our Freedom of Information Act, lets hope he reads carefully the following memo from his new mate Obama:
A democracy requires accountability, and accountability requires transparency. As Justice Louis Brandeis wrote, "sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants." In our democracy, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which encourages accountability through transparency, is the most prominent expression of a profound national commitment to ensuring an open Government. At the heart of that commitment is the idea that accountability is in the interest of the Government and the citizenry alike.
You would have thought the smack across the knuckles delivered by the public over their attempt to hide MP's expenses from scrutiny would be enough for the UK government's ministers, but oh no, they're up to their old tricks:
Hidden in the new Coroners and Justice Bill [2] is one clause (cl.152) amending the Data Protection Act. It would allow ministers to make 'Information Sharing Orders', that can alter any Act of Parliament and cancel all rules of confidentiality in order to use information obtained for one purpose to be used for another.
This single clause is as grave a threat to privacy as the entire ID Scheme. Combine it with the index to your life formed by the planned National Identity Register [3] and everything recorded about you anywhere could be accessible to any official body.
Big label pressure has forced British cable ISP Virgin Media to suspend plans to introduce a legal music sharing service for its subscribers, just weeks ahead of its launch, The Register has learned.
The BSA sure does love to use bogus numbers. Usually, it's with its stats on "piracy" that are so ridiculously misleading it's amazing that the press reports them as fact so often.
