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Links 16/9/2011: Boeing Goes With Android, Oracle Splits MySQL





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Contents





GNU/Linux



Free Software/Open Source



  • A Bushel of Tools for Business and Personal Financial Management
    While they don't get written about as frequently as other types of open source applications, there actually are many good FOSS applications for business and personal financial management. Historically, some of the best ones have been targeted at computer users, but with the rise of mobile applications, you can get your hands on many good financial apps that you can keep in your pocket. Here is a grab bag of good resources on this front, and you should find some applications here that can help you manage your money.


  • Tools to Help You Nurture Your Open Source Project
    If you've given some thought to launching an open source project, or you're in the process of delivering one, some up-front footwork and howework can help things go smoothly, and even keep you out of trouble. Issues pertaining to licensing, distribution, support options and even branding require thinking ahead if you want your project to flourish, and to stay safe. Fortunately, there are many free, helpful resources that can help you ramp your project up. In this post, you'll find our updated collection of good, free resources to pay attention to.


  • Open source tool enables security tests for chip cards
    At this year's Black Hat Conference, crypto expert Karsten Nohl of SRLabs demonstrated the degate tool that can be used to take a closer look at applications stored on smartcards, such as credit cards and SIM cards.


  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla co-founder quits Firefox veep role
      A longtime Mozilla Corporation VP has quit the open source outfit he co-founded in 1998.

      Mike Shaver, who oversaw technical strategy for the past six years at the Firefox maker, confirmed he was hanging up his hot foxy boots in a blog post. Shaver was among those who founded the Mozilla Organization following the release of Netscape's web browser source code.




  • SaaS

    • Memset takes open source to cloud storage market
      Memset has drawn specific attention to its added security features – knowing full well it is still the issue holding many customers back from putting their data into the public cloud – as well as touting its simplicity.




  • Databases

    • Oracle adds commercial extensions to MySQL
      Oracle has announced the availability of commercial extensions for the MySQL database. These new extensions are only being added to the Enterprise Edition and will further differentiate the commercial edition from the community edition. Previously, the Enterprise Edition only included external tools, MySQL Enterprise Monitor and MySQL Enterprise Backup, as part of its package, but the new extensions are much more deeply integral to MySQL.




  • CMS



  • Business

    • Free Software versus Open Source: Tryton vs OpenERP
      When I talk about Free Software, I talk about not only about freedom, but also community and good will from the software author. The latter probably is the most important one.

      You write Free Software because you want to contribute to the community. It’s an act of social activism. It’s about sharing and helping out.





  • BSD

    • PC-BSD 9.0 on its Way
      PC-BSD is the Ubuntu of the free BSD world. It features an easy install (similar to Anaconda), with a nice default system, and usually gives no reason to fiddle under the bonnet. Version 9.0 is currently in development and Beta 2 was recently released.




  • Project Releases

    • Omaha 3: Updating Google style
      Google's latest update to its Omaha update system, also known as Google Update, brings a range of enhancements to the open source background update engine. Google introduced its update mechanism for Windows applications, code-named Omaha, in 2007 and, in 2009, the technology became freely available as open source code under the Apache licence. The company has been modernising the update engine and has now made version 3 of Omaha available at Google Code.




  • Licensing

    • Spring Roo to be up to 10 times faster and without GPL
      A completely different change concerns the licensing for Spring Roo. Up until now, a large part of the code has been under GPLv3, which is controversial among some members of the community; annotations and associated code are under a mixture of GPLv3 and Apache Software Licence version 2 (ASLv2). In the future, Spring Roo will completely be under ASLv2 in order to make the development environment more interesting for commercial projects as well.


    • How NOT to Push a New Open Source License, Part 2
      To those who whine "I don't want Google/Microsoft/Apple/whoever to use my code!" -- why not? Really, if you think they're evil because they close off code, how are you any better by doing the same to them? (plus, whining is for kids). "But it conflicts with our anti-copyright anti-business agenda." Put down the bong, grab a bar of soap, and stop acting like a freetard. You're giving the rest of us a bad name.




  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open-source policy formulation for Sri Lanka's capital


    • Qualcomm goes open source with AllJoyn
      Qualcomm's desire to drive the Internet of Things starts with a little-known open-source project called AllJoyn, and it could easily prove one of the most important things the company has ever done. We got talking to Rob Chandhok, Qualcomm's senior vice president of software strategy and the president of the Qualcomm Innovation Centre, to find out what's going on.


    • Open Hardware

      • A brief introduction to Arduino
        If you’ve heard the term “Arduino” but never quite known what people were talking about, then this is your lucky day. An excellent primer has been posted, which might sound like nothing new for the popular open-source microcontroller, but know this: this primer is in comic book form.






  • Programming

    • IT-centric GCSE on way to boost kids' coding skills
      The new IT GCSE, which does not yet have an official name, will be additional to the current ICT GCSE, which IT industry experts have long attacked for putting kids off careers in IT and failing to excite them about technology.






Leftovers

  • Putting the C-I-O Back into “Commission”
    How can we get better at promoting the benefits of ICT? By asking the people who do it every day.

    Yesterday I had a fascinating meeting with people from CIONet – a network for Chief Information Officers and IT managers, with over 3000 members from 7 EU Member States.

    Among other things they organise CIOCity – at which I had the pleasure to speak back in March, and where I presented awards to some top-performing CIOs.

    Yesterday was a fascinating insight from a mixture of academics and those in the industry – including some of the award-winners themselves.

    They explained the changes in the role of CIOs. Once they were seen predominantly as an administrative function given the sole job making sure everyone’s email worked, and maybe saving some cash while they were at it. Now they are increasingly seen as major strategic players in company development. Because these days, ICT isn’t just something that adds value to a product – it’s essential to getting a product to market.


  • Joyent upgrades cloud service to compete with Amazon
    Joyent is upgrading its public cloud service with better analytics and the ability to run Linux and Windows, as it hopes to persuade CIOs to move more applications to the company's cloud, it said on Thursday.


  • Health/Nutrition

    • Call: using ICT to save lives
      Every year in Europe, about 35,000 people are killed in road accidents, and about 1.5 million people are injured. That’s a death toll close to 100 per day.




  • Security



  • Cablegate

    • 2011-09-10 The Vatican cables revisited. Just a matter of procedure?
      There is no obvious reason to redact these passages. No informants are named. Cardinal Keeler is a public figure, and it is not conceivable why his position in this very important matter should be kept secret. The cable does not name the Jewish members of the committee that allegedly insulted Gumpel. Overall, the only effect of these redactions is that they downplay the conflicts within the commission.






  • Finance

    • What Wall Street doesn’t want us to know about oil prices


      The top six financial institutions in this country own assets equal to more than 60 percent of our gross domestic product and possess enormous economic and political power. One of the great questions of our time is whether the American people, through Congress, will control the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street, or whether Wall Street will continue to wreak havoc on our economy and the lives of working families.


    • What Wall Street doesn’t want us to know about oil prices
      The top six financial institutions in this country own assets equal to more than 60 percent of our gross domestic product and possess enormous economic and political power. One of the great questions of our time is whether the American people, through Congress, will control the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street, or whether Wall Street will continue to wreak havoc on our economy and the lives of working families.


    • I Failed… and I’m So Very Sorry
      Today, another victim of the foreclosure crisis took her own life. She was a disabled American veteran and her family was counting on me to help. And I let them down.


    • Goldman Sachs should consider its own breakup
      Goldman Sachs has often helped chief executives boost their companies’ shares by breaking them into pieces. The U.S. bank run by Lloyd Blankfein is currently advising Kraft Foods on its split and counseling McGraw-Hill on whether it should do the same. So it’s logical that some inside Goldman have run the numbers on their employer. The results are compelling. Should the firm’s stock linger below its book value, or assets less liabilities, of about $130 a share for much longer, a breakup could be hard for the firm’s board to resist.


    • The Limits of Meritocracy
      The 2010 Educational Attainment data from the US Census Bureau shows that close to 90 percent of the population now finishes high school, and of those, about 57 percent go on to post-secondary study. Roughly 27 percent get community college and vocational degrees or attend college but do not graduate and 30 percent finish college. The college graduation rate was only 13 percent in 1970 and 25 percent in 1995, and is projected to grow to 34 percent by 2020.




  • Privacy

    • Green leader slams Harper's proposed internet spying laws
      Prime Minister Stephen Harper's proposed electronic surveillance laws will act as "an infringement on civil liberties," Green Party leader Elizabeth May said in a press release today.

      The "Investigative Powers for the 21st Century Act," which Prime Minister Harper has vowed to pass as part of a larger omnibus crime bill within 100 sitting days of convening parliament, would expand the federal government's internet surveillance powers.


    • Congress Debating If Putting A Fake Name On Facebook Should Be A Felony
      On Wednesday, George Washington Law professor and former federal prosecutor Orin Kerr authored an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, posing the question "Should faking a name on Facebook be a felony?" He was, of course, talking about the infamous Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), which Congress is preparing to update. The CFAA, as has been noted here many times, is a federal law passed in the '80s and initially designed to combat malicious computer hacking, but which has become bloated, stretched and over-applied in the years since.




  • Civil Rights



  • Intellectual Monopolies



    • Copyrights

      • Anti-Piracy Group Will Sue Pay Processors If They Don’t Name Site Admins
        Hollywood-funded anti-piracy group BREIN says it will pursue a similar strategy to its counterparts in the United States and UK by pressuring payment processors like PayPal to stop doing business with file-sharing sites. But BREIN says the processors must go further. Either they can voluntarily hand over the names of the admins behind the site accounts, or they will go to court and sue them into submission.


      • Lib Dems get a chance to vote on copyright reform
        This weekend's Lib Dem conference will feature a debate and vote on a new IT policy paper. Getting IT policy right is hard, because technology is a moving target; but getting IT policy right is vital, because today there's virtually nothing we do that doesn't touch on IT, and tomorrow there'll be practically nothing that doesn't require it.








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