“I think he [Bill Gates] has a Napoleonic concept of himself and his company, an arrogance that derives from power and unalloyed success, with no leavening hard experience, no reverses [...] They don’t act like grown-ups!”
Summary: The world’s richest person (on and off) is trying to portray himself as the person who fights against rich people and greed; A look at other PR-imposed inversions
SOME truly unbelievable spin has come out of the Gates Foundation recently. For those who read this site regularly it ought to be known that the foundation pays many journalists to worship Gates’ agenda in the press. No wonder a lot of people are unable to critically assess this agenda, which revolves around patents, publicity, control, and monopolisation. But today’s post is about a different type of spin we have covered here before [1, 2, 3, 4]. It is basically the spin which would have the gullible believe that the world’s richest man is in fact the enemy of rich people and the only one who can help fair distribution of wealth. Yes, no kidding, that’s what readers are occasionally begged to believe. A good example of this storyline is those recent trips to China’s rich men, who are far less wealthy than Bill and Warren who daemonise and pressure them (Bill and Warren have a shared tax haven). But wait, it gets worse.
This newer bits of spin dissociates Microsoft’s greed (which is how Gates made all his fortune) from Gates himself. Are people truly expected to absorb the spin that “Microsoft Hates Bill Gates’ Rich People Tax” (as the headline puts it)?
That’s just not the story at all. The main story is that this “Rich People Tax” has loopholes which Gates exploited because it does not apply to him. The father of Bill (with identical name) is lumped in even though he too appears to be enjoying those same tax exemptions. Well, the corporate press cannot possibly miss those simple facts, maybe it is just not interested in investigating and reporting accurately. It’s really quite striking. See a related and very informal discussion in IRC where Facebook’s actions are shown to be similar. Therein too there is the schools PR (“think about the children!”) and as Dr. Ravitch has warned [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], danger lurks as it’s a strategic move. Gates continues to exploit the government for education that’s actually his indoctrination and based on this new report, Steve Jobs wants a piece of the pie too:
The White House says President Barack Obama has discussed American competitiveness and education with Apple Co. co-founder Steve Jobs.
It helps show that fortune holders continue to act as somewhat of a shadow government and we wrote about it a week ago.
Apple and education don’t mix. It’s quite an oxymoron to them. In fact, Apple encourages ignorance in some ways.
A day or so ago we also noticed that the Gates PR team is busy advertising the “Bill Gates” brand in some articles regarding action against global warming. It is problematic when Gates talks about climate danger while his own advancement of patents and investments in large oil-producing companies not just make matters worse emissions-wise; it gives money to sponsor global warming denial, which two firms Gates gives money to are confirmed to be doing.
Most people know about Gates only what PR agents are telling them (or paying journalists to recite). █
“As we sat down in our Menlo Park conference room, Bill skipped the small talk, and went straight to the point, “Microsoft owns the office productivity market, and our patents read all over OpenOffice.””
Summary: Bar/excepting disc space constraints, Canonical intends to replace Rhythmbox in the next version of the very ubiquitous “Ubuntu” distribution, adding to it components that are explicitly excluded from Microsoft’s Community Promise
THE ROCKY LOVE affair of Banshee and Ubuntu goes a long way back and we wrote about it in posts such as:
“So much for the vote they had yesterday,” wrote gnubie in our main IRC channel as s/he pointed to this news from the same site which says that “Banshee becomes Ubuntu 11.04 default music player” (the comments talk about Mono).
- Banshee might be included by default in Ubuntu 11.04 (and thus replace Rhythmbox) if it can be slimmed down to fit on the CD
Compare this to the statement from OMG!Ubuntu, which says: “Banshee is to be the default music player in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal – providing issues with disc space can be overcome.”
By making Mono unavailable by default in Ubuntu a lot of disc space would be saved. But there are other issues or noteworthy factors here, notably the Microsoft APIs and the fact that Banshee contains parts of Mono that we know for a fact based on the Microsoft Community Promise (MCP) to be a patent trap.
Why does Canonical add software which Novell totally controls and Microsoft has power over? There are still some people out there who thank Novell for such gifts and even call Mono “great”:
The Great
Mono -
I know Mono isn’t the most popular project in the open source community but working in the real world mono is one of the most important project Novell backs. The need to have C# programs work across multiple platforms has become very important. It finally blurs what operating system you need to run a program and given the choice of SUSE with Mono vs Microsoft Server with .Net from a cost prospective SUSE is the best route. Porting .NET applications to Mono isn’t that hard and any new applications written in Mono will work perfectly on Windows so there really is no reason not to use Mono to develop your .NET applications
The main goal here is to develop with Microsoft’s API what could otherwise be achieved with Java for example. Mono is not a GNU/Linux project (it is about .NET) and it’s risky. Now that the SCO-esque Microsoft sues many companies without prior provocation, Canonical would be wise to stay with Rhythmbox. █
“I saw that internally inside Microsoft many times when I was told to stay away from supporting Mono in public. They reserve the right to sue”
Following a New York Times story (subscription required) from a couple months ago, Russia announced this week it would reduce its dependence on Windows and work toward a national Linux-based operating system. As Katherine Noyes points out on NetworkWorld, we’ll have to wait to see how this unfolds given that this isn’t the first time Russia has said this. Noyes’ story includes some good information on what businesses can learn from this.
Welcome to the 2010 Linux Journal Readers’ Choice Awards. We love doing these awards because we get to interact with you, our readers, more than usual. This year, more than 12,000 of you generously took time to participate and share your perspectives on what tools are helping you work and play. We always are fascinated by your preferences and how your usage patterns change over time. This year, we have more categories than ever, so let’s get right to the results. Here, ladies and gentlemen, Linux geeks of all kinds, are the winners of your 2010 Linux Journal Readers’ Choice Awards.
In response to this high profile case, many Russian schools started to switch to Linux, and in response to that, Russia apparently declared that all schools should switch to Linux-based software by 2008.
However, apparently that didn’t actually happen. Glyn Moody points us to the news that another Russian school teacher has been fired for complaining that his school still used Microsoft software. Even though the 2007 order required schools to switch to Linux, apparently a training system the government is making the school use requires Microsoft Office. So the teacher filed a complaint, pointing out the contradiction in orders… and for his efforts he was fired.
With penetration of Android will come mobile developers and with them will come a large application suite. Those applications will automatically run on an Android desktop.
[...]
It is for this reason that I think it’s too early to write off Linux on the Desktop.
Linux is my sandbox. It is where I go to play. It is also where many people go to be productive. Desktop Linux has many millions of users. You probably have not heard much about it because of the way that it is developed and promoted.
For this Halloween season, I decided to post a few old but entertaining and somewhat educational Linux/Unix horror stories that were compiled by Anatoly Ivasyuk. Actually, Anatoly has created an entire page filled with Unix-related horror stories and I just picked a few interesting entries to share with you all. Don’t worry, I will provide you the link to the complete horror stories page right after my choices. Enjoy!
It’s Halloween and nothing scares proprietary companies more than the cute little Linux Tux. Our Editor set out to a mission to carve a Linux Penguin on our pumpkin and scare some non-free companies. Here is the step by step creation. The process has not been patented, you are free to copy, modify and distribute it, as long as you maintain the attribution.
Yes. We actually watched these movies. We suffered through them for you. We tracked them down in video stores and on Netflix, and sorted through piles of rubbish and even the Youtubes. We watched them all, and this is what we have gleaned: technology, guys, is scary. It causes addiction, it connects us with weirdos, and it is responsible, we suppose, for Emmerich-style mass destruction. Yet, Hollywood seems to be most fascinated with that last bit — and when it comes to attempting to scare the bejeezus out of its horror-loving public, current tech trends are unfortunately ripe for the picking.
I couldn’t make this up if I tried: The Linux Foundation is offering a platinum rewards Visa credit card. There is no annual fee, a low introductory APR — in fact, it’s a normal credit card with Tux on the front.
If you want a really, really fast computer, there are all kind of ways to build the hardware architecture, but one thing that almost all of them have in common is that they run Linux. The top spot now appears to belong to the Tianhe-1A , which means “Milky Way,” at a research center at the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in Tianjin, China.
Topics for this podcast
*Latest release and support for OpenStack, Austin code release
*Development and devops consolidation continue with CollabNet-Codesion
*Funding for a number of open-source-focused players
*Open core, Canonical and the ongoing discussion
*OTRS provides open source helpdesk and service management
Samsung today launched its much anticipated Android 2.2 tablet Galaxy Tab in India. Samsung Galaxy Tab will be available in India from November 10, right right after Diwali festivities, but if you are too excited, you can pre-book one now. It is available for pre-order on Samsung website as well as on Flipkart and Future Bazaar.
The WiFi-only version of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab has shown up in the FCC’s testing database, complete with the model number GT-P1010. The Froyo slate differs from its GT-P1000 sibling by omitting the 3G chipset and instead relying on WiFi b/g/n and Bluetooth 3.0 for its connectivity; otherwise it has the same 7-inch 1024 x 600 capacitive touchscreen, the 3-megapixel rear camera and front-facing 1.3-megapixel webcam.
Greg Kroah-Hartman has released three stable kernel updates: 2.6.27.55, 2.6.32.25, and 2.6.35.8. Users of these kernel series “must upgrade”. Also there will be only one more update for the 2.6.35 series, “so you should be using .36 instead.”
The integration of the TILE architecture in the Linux kernel enables many open source projects to support Tilera natively and start optimizing their code for many-core. It also allows Tilera customers across embedded and cloud markets to run their Linux applications on Tilera’s technology without software change.
Kernel 2.4 was revolutionary because it was the first kernel release that was truly embraced by enterprise users for use in their operations. Linux had had support for SMP (symmetric multiprocessing – another term for multiple CPUs) since 2.0, but the improvements in 2.4 driven by the newly involved big players (such as IBM) brought improved scalability, stability and new features that finally pushed it over the edge as a serious contender to proprietary UNIX systems of old.
Chia-I Wu, the open-source developer who previously worked to bring Mesa to Android devices and worked on the new EGL state tracker, is now working for LunarG and has just published a patch-set that enables the Nouveau graphics driver to run the Wayland Display Server.
Just earlier today we reported that Wayland is becoming compatible with Nouveau so that users of this open-source NVIDIA driver can begin using this alternative, lightweight display server that leverages the latest Linux graphics technologies. About the only caveat right now is the needed Nouveau page-flipping support, which is here for some hardware but not in the mainline Linux kernel yet and the page-flipping hook-up for the newer NVIDIA GPUs is coming soon. Kristian Høgsberg, the creator of Wayland, also made another announcement today.
In this day of heavy eye candy and all point ‘n click desktops, the command-line seems to be falling further and further into disuse – at least by regular desktop users. The command-line and its power can perform everyday tasks faster and easier than a bunch of clicking around, yet new users are still intimidated by the prospect. But there really is nothing to fear. To help prove its usefulness, here are my top 15 used commands (from a fairly fresh install).
This is an open source clone of Evernote designed to run on Linux. It is written in Java so it will also run on Windows & OS-X, but the primary focus has been to try and get a usable environment for Linux. While this is designed to work with Evernote, it is in no way connected with or supported by Evernote. Any problems you encounter will not be corrected by them and, since this is GPL software, you are using this software at your own risk.
Many hard-core Linux users will tell those who have yet to adopt it to use Wine or Crossover Office to get their favorite application running on Linux. This, of course, is simply not a solution for the new user just trying to get accustomed to an entirely new operating system. These applications need to be ported over so they can run natively. When/if that should happen, Linux adoption will be rampant.
What’s new in this release (see below for details):
– Support for GStreamer filters.
– Mapping of standard cursors to native desktop cursors.
– Improved support for installers with services.
– Many MSXML improvements.
– Decoder for TGA-format images.
– Translation updates.
– Various bug fixes.
Wine 1.3.5 came two weeks ago with better Shader Model 4.0 support for Windows applications/games and the ability to use the CUPS print server directly, among other features, while today Wine 1.3.6 has been released with support for more features.
In order to promote the GNOME 3.0 launch and spread the idea amongst the GNOME community members, I’m sharing the following message! Please translate it and share it with your friends and help us organize the biggest GNOME Launch ever!
The GNOME Project has received two grants for a total of $15,000 from Mozilla and from the F123.org-Mais Diferenças partnership for accessibility work.
Pardus have its own package management system: PiSi (For more information about pisi you can checkout development page). Package-manager uses its backend. As you may remember from my previous posts, we are using an infrastructrure for managing operations called Çomar. Package-manager calls Çomar where it can check that if the user have necessary priveleges to use PiSi by using PolicyKit (which calls PolicyKitKde on KDE). You may see that this operation resembles KAuth. One can ask why we are using this method, instead of KAuth. Well, the simple answer is that this infrastructure is nearly 4 years old.
Tiny Core Linux 3.2 is truly the polar opposite of Ultimate Edition 2.8; it provides the absolute minimum necessary to get you going and from there it’s really up to you to decide what you want to do with it. You’ll need to have a clear understanding of exactly what you want to use it for before it has the possibility of creating real value for you. So it’s definitely helpful if you know in advance what you want to get out of it before you attempt an install.
I suggest that intermediate and advanced Linux users use Tiny Core Linux 3.2. Beginners can certainly give it a whirl in a virtual machine, but the install might prove to be a bit overwhelming to those who are completely new to Linux.
Click to the next page to view the full image gallery (9 screenshots) of Tiny Core Linux 3.2 screenshots.
To hear that charge made about something as fundamental as the way enterprise software is currently sold, however, is rare. That, however, is just what Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) CEO Jim Whitehurst asserted last week in a speech at Interop in New York.
As I’ve written more times than most any of you would probably care to read, the six or so months during which I ran Debian Lenny as my main desktop were some of the smoothest months I’ve experienced in my FOSS-running life. That’s because Debian releases are conservatively built and never change. Security updates are pretty much it; the kernel stays the same, with patches backported into the same version and then pushed to users via apt/Aptitude. I’m sure the occasional critical bug-fix comes through as well, but often a broken piece of a stable Debian release stays broken (e.g. the Ted RTF word processor in Etch, thankfully fixed in Lenny).
But if your particular Debian setup (system and applications) is running well, you’re good for at least two and maybe even three years if you don’t want or need newer versions of your applications. I have yet to explore Debian Backports or pinning apps to Testing or Unstable. I might need to do that to get a 2.11/2.12 version of gThumb (I could also just install a .deb package with dpkg or gDebi).
Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) is awesome! Based on Debian Testing it is a rolling distro. That means if you are running LMDE you will always have an up-to-date system running, and as the saying and experiences go, Debian testing base is more stable than the so called final/stable releases of most other distros. But if you are a stability freak like me, you can make your Linux Mint Debian stable by pointing the apt sources.lst to squeeze. This ways you won’t have to install point updates of applications every now and then. You will always have the most stable and workable system for quite a long period, till squeeze becomes obsolete. Here is how I did it.
Widgets on the desktop; some people can be quite snooty about them but there is a reason they are available by default on two of the most popular Operating Systems.
As if it were a Christmas gift to all ubuntu users, it has been announced at the UDS that a development version of Ubuntu Software Center with ‘Ratings and Reviews’ feature will arrive by Christmas.
“I’m interested in Ubuntu and the cloud, how do I get involved” is a question I got a few times already. I thought it would be a good idea to answer this as a blog post. I believe one of the very first things you’d want to do, is to make sure you’re on the main communication channels, talking to the community, asking questions, seeing other questions being answered, trying to answer some yourself, sharing opinions and generally “connecting” with the rest of the community. That is a great first step. So I’ll highlight the main communication venues for the Ubuntu cloud community, as well as way to get kick-started.
Translators, educators, school children and students all have a natural home in Ubuntu too, I believe, and Edubuntu and a bunch of other efforts will continue to try and reach out to them.
There are many many, more, I don’t doubt.
A further benefit of reaching out to groups who tend to be more mixed in gender and background than the Linux community is that it brings that diversity into the Ubuntu community. It will be interesting to watch these efforts develop.
Tonight I will concentrate on answering your questions about Unity on Ask Ubuntu. Questions will be answered based on the number of votes they receive and ones that I can answer.
Unity developers will be advising me best on how to answer your questions and we can continue to develop the answers based on feedback. If you’ve already asked then we’ll keep working on our answers to be better.
Ask many Linux users about the concept of “fragmentation,” and they’ll pooh-pooh the very concept. They’ll argue that the beauty of open source is the rich array of software flavors that open platform components give rise to. Canonical is a business, though, and at a certain point it has to evaluate whether a “rich array” of desktop interface flavors is necessarily in Ubuntu’s best interests. Yes, Unity is new, and will have to go through bug testing and other challenges, but it is also a standardized desktop that Canonical can command control of.
One thing that I have noticed with Unity so far, is that heavy usage seems to have a greater impact on the performance of Unity than with Gnome or KDE.
RAM wise Unity is awesome, but the spikes in CPU usage tends to kill the interface, and often you need to wait for ten or more seconds between clicking a launcher and actual response. But there is hope…
This day is starting early. We are going to a family get together in a few hours (why is the end of the year always to crazy!?) and I want to get something readable for you guys who are following this series before I am Internetless for a few hours.
I have something interesting for you folks – a custom unity launcher…
So what if Ubuntu does not have the user interface you want. You don’t have to use it. You can change it. You can do anything you want with it. You can even release your own distribution based on Ubuntu with your changes. Waaaiiit a minute….hasn’t that already happened? Something Minty I believe?
If this Unity is more popular than Gnome then it will succeed. If not, well then back to the Gnome board. If the Ubuntu distributions users like what Canonical will do then Ubuntu will be more popular than ever before. If not then some other distribution will.
But while the decision may be in keeping with the times, it’s still every bit the ‘risky step’ that Mark Shuttleworth described it as when he made the announcement earlier this week.
It is an interesting viewpoint from Mr. Des Ligneris. I don’t see the Unity plans as a blessing though. There is no point in turning a full fledged desktop machine into a “Mobile Internet Device”. Their use cases do not overlap. While a desktop is certainly capable of performing MID tasks, it is not the intended operating area of a desktop machine.
To celebrate the 500th member of the Ubuntu DeviantArt group. I’ve put together some stats for Operating System Use based on self stated use on profile pages:
Windows 7/Vista/XP – 410,000 (76.9%)
Mac – 87,700 (16.3%)
Ubuntu – 20,300 (3.7%)
Linux – 16,000 (3%)
Total: 533,300
You may have heard this before, but the latest release of Ubuntu – Maverick Meerkat – shows that Linux is ready for the prime time. The reason? The unifying nature of the web.
Learning a new operating system can be difficult, but is also really fun. If you’ve recently installed Ubuntu 10.10 on your computer and want to explore what this operating system is capable of, don’t panic: you’ll enjoy it.
It has often been said that the vibrant community of users and developers surrounding each distribution is Linux’s “killer app,” and I think in many ways that is true. Ubuntu is no exception. Not only is there free documentation and live support chat for help with the distribution, but there are also Web forums, mailing lists and a Launchpad-based Q&A system, among other resources.
Even before you have any specific questions, it’s a good idea to begin to explore this community so that you know what’s out there when you need it. The resources available far outshine what any proprietary vendor’s 800-number could ever provide.
After reviewing Ubuntu 10.10 and Kubuntu 10.10, the next logical Ubuntu edition to review I think should be the Ubuntu Netbook Edition, or UNE. As the name implies, UNE is the edition of Ubuntu optimized for small screens, such as you will find on netbooks and tablet computers.
Released at ten past ten on the 10th October 2010 (all the tens – get it?), Ubuntu 10.10 is the latest version of the popular Linux distro to hit the streets. If you were expecting a slew of new features and functionality, however, disappointment beckons. New features there are, but the expected headliners didn’t quite make it. Indeed, Ubuntu 10.10, or Maverick Meerkat as it’s known, is more about polishing the big changes of the last release, Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx), than adding much that’s new.
See, 42 really is the answer to everything. We’ve got issue #42 out for all of our readers and it’s packed with all the goodness you’ve come to expect from a FCM issue. This month, we’ve got an exciting new feature called Linux Lab. Take a look!
Sony Ericsson on Friday confirmed that it will begin releasing the Android 2.1 update for its flagship Xperia X10, X10 mini and X10 mini pro smartphones on Sunday. This makes good on a promise made back in May. European X10 owners will start receiving the update during the evening of October 31.
We at litl had to skip last year’s GNOME Summit in Boston because we were too busy releasing our first product, the webbook. But we wanted to contribute with something this year. So, we’ll doing something similar than we did in 2008.
Nifty, low-cost netbooks hit the scene in late 2008 and sold over 36 million units in 2009, according to ABI Research. Even with projected sales of 35-43 million units this year, the future of these diminutive laptop-like computers is being pulled under a dark cloud of doubt as new tablets grab the limelight and spare cash from consumers.
While most ARM chips are running low-level smart-thingies like controllers, smartphones have really taken off. Total growth is around 30% year over year. News this year:
Asustek will also launch two 7-inch models and two 9-inch models in March 2011. One of the 7-inch models will feature support for Wi-Fi and the other 3.5G, while the later one will also feature phone functions. As for the 9-inch models, Asustek will have one model adopt the ARM-based Nvidia Tegra 2 platform with Google’s Android operating system and the other the Wintel platform. The two 9-inch models will have a price gap of about US$100, Shen noted.
Most IT managers are well aware of the LAMP stack, which includes the Linux operating system, an Apache Web server, a MySQL database and a dynamic programming language such as Perl, PHP or Python. But other open-source system groups are growing rapidly. Some obvious examples are the JBoss Application Server with a JAX-WS Web services stack, the Zope object-oriented Web application server — written in Python — and the Plone open-source content management system that works with Zope.
Are you interested in Open Source? At the exhibition, you will find several companies and parties who have specialized in or work with Open Source software and/or applications. Not only in the field of data security, but also storage. The seminar programme also contains sessions specifically dealing with Open Source.
We also want to especially encourage open source software companies to provide some insights in their open source based business model, offered services and products.
The ApacheCon conference–dedicated to all of the influential Apache-backed platforms and applications, ranging from Hadoop to Cassandra–is coming up Nov. 1st through 5th in Atlanta, Georgia, and we’ve been doing a series of guest posts in conjunction with it. Members of the Apache Software Foundation have weighed in on the foundation’s approach to open source projects, and now, Sally Khudairi, a VP at the foundation, has written a guest post focused on servers, innovation and the cloud. Here it is.
As you can see from the list of participants, yours truly will also be attending. Apparently, there will be a live video stream of some of the sessions: not sure whether mine will be one of them. If it is, you can see me spouting my common commons nonsense around 11am CEST, 10am GMT.
WoMoz internal survey results and conclusions are now available. The blog post says that the main purpose of the survey was to “… detect areas of improvement related to gender issues in Mozilla and FLOSS communities,” but also notes that finding women who are active contributors to Mozilla was a challenge. Only 18 of the 30 women contacted responded to the survey. From these responses, the survey team concluded that many of the women have experience with the Ubuntu project, so reaching out to Ubuntu Women might help attract more contributors. Some of the women who are contributing to Mozilla are doing so as a result of being contacted from somebody already involved with the Mozilla project. Also, “lack of time” seems to hold women back from contributing to Mozilla.
As noted on Slashdot, which also has an interesting discussion from readers about Rainbow, support for live streaming and WebM are planned as additions.
# Boggled at Oracle’s amended complaint against Google. Havn’t investigated the verbatim code copying claims in detail – which are of course fair game for copyright enforcement – but what interests me -far- more are the API copyright claims:
# As I wrote before, I believe that Java has rather weak patent protection, not being particularly innovative or novel really – rather a collection of existing techniques packed together into one (useful) package. With a load of design artefacts in the API that can be claimed as in some sense ‘novel’ though of little intrinsic technical merit. I wrote a long screed on the background to this: Why Oracle’s Java Copyrights Might Matter in August. As I also wrote before: I am not a Lawyer, and have no very deep understanding of the Java situation.
My first question would be, why is the majority of council members stacked with Oracle employees in the first place? It is a community council, not the project steering board, it should represent the mostly volunteer community, which has certainly different interests than the a for profit corporation. Hence, the people with a conflict of interest all along have never stepped down in the first place.
I would like to discuss a bit the position of the Document Foundationwith respect to copyright assignments. I understand there have been questions here and there about this topic, and it’s perhaps necessary to explain our position.
The problem is that most of the people who are looking at the “line by line” example don’t actually understand code. SCO did this, through the same legal team (Boies Schiller) with its claims that Linux had direct copied code from UnixWare. That was debunked pretty quickly. The only thing missing here is Larry Ellison running around issuing open letters or ranting about Google to anyone who will listen. Never let it be said that Ellison isn’t classier than Darl McBride.
Within hours Groklaw has an update that shows the “example” is from OpenJDK and was released under the GPL. Further, the “example” is not a copy but a derived work. This is like SCOG v World in fast motion.
Diaspora is getting better every day. Here are some of the features we’ve added over the last month:
* Public messages are can now be posted to Twitter and Facebook
* Friends can now be in multiple aspects
* Re-sharing of status messages to aspects other than the one originally posted to
* An invite system for inviting your friends not hip to Diaspora yet
* Email notifications on new friend request and acceptance
* Account data is exportable
* A more friendly “getting started” experience
What is anything but inevitable is the adoption of any of these open educational resources. As a thought experiment, pick your favorite institution you believe is committed to open education. Have they ever adopted an open education resource produced at another institution for in-class use? If they have an open courseware collection, can you find a single third-party OER in the collection? If even the institutions that claim to be committed to open educational resources aren’t reusing them, who will?
Last Friday, I had a heart attack. As I was rushed to the hospital by the superb ambulance crews and through the operating theatre and onwards to the recovery room by the skilled surgeons, one thing stuck in my mind; how badly open source, and software development in general, has let down health care professionals, who I watched handle bundles of notes and forms which contained the crucial patient care information.
[..]
It’s not just a software problem though; we need to come up with new ways of rapidly capturing the health care professionals thoughts and information, ones which are as fast as handwriting, with devices which aren’t going to act as a vector for infection. To create those devices and the software, we, as an open source and IT community, need to create the framework and intelligence pool so that we can approach the severely time constrained doctors, nurses and other professionals, and find out what they need and how we can build it.
Through the efforts of the FreeMED Software Foundation, many generous donors and help from the Pop-Wuj Spanish Language School, we were able to install an advanced electronic medical record, somewhat customized, for the a clinic in Quezeltenagno, Guatemala.
MacArthur is one of the nation’s largest independent foundations. The MacArthur Foundation supports creative people and effective institutions committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. In addition to selecting the MacArthur Fellows, the Foundation works to defend human rights, advance global conservation and security, make cities better places, and understand how technology is affecting children and society.
With assets over $5 billion, MacArthur will award approximately $230 million in grants this year. Through the support it provides, the Foundation fosters the development of knowledge, nurtures individual creativity, strengthens institutions, helps improve public policy, and provides information to the public, primarily through support for public interest media.
For those interested in compilers, particularly GCC, or are interested in some technical slides to look over this weekend, the presentations from the 2010 GNU Compiler Collection Summit are now available online.
Some of the potential papers/slides that may be of interest are on GRAPHITE-OpenCL to generate OpenCL code from parallel loops, optimizing real-world applications with GCC LTO, real-time debugging with GDB trace-points, improving GCC’s auto-vectorization, the Google Go front-end to GCC, enabling more optimizations in GCC Graphite, GNU Tools for ARM, and the issues of supporting GCC on Microsoft Windows.
Award winners were announced during the Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON) 2010, in Portland, Oregon today. Winners include:
Open Source Deployment in Government: honors a U.S. government agency or body that has shown commitment to the use of open sourcee, through policy and/or adoption. The 2010 winner is Whitehouse.gov and the Executive Office for their deployment of Drupal open source content management system in October 2009.
On Twitter, Eduardo Romero, involved in the city of Zaragoza’s move to an open source desktop, was one of those who quoted the Secretary General: “Free software is in the heart of policy and strategies of Andalusia.”
Germany’s Competence Centre for Open Source Software’ (Ccoss), part of the country’s Federal Office for Information Technology, helps public authorities implement open source. The Ccoss website was renewed this summer and unveiled at the Linux Tag conference, which took place in Berlin last June.
Sharing and the Creative Economy: Culture in the Internet Age builds upon “Internet & Creation : how to recognize non-market exchanges over the internet while funding creation” published in French in October 2008 by InLibroVeritas. See the French page for details on Internet & Création. Sharing and the Creative Economy has now found a publisher, and we are proceeding with finalizing the manuscript as soon as possible. The book is likely to be out in early 2011.
Open means different things to different people. To some, open source and open innovation mean free access and a requirement to return enhancements back to a broader community. But businesses ask: where’s the competitive advantage? How can the two paradigms co-exist, for mutual benefit?
This week I attended a panel session on open data and mobile government. In simple terms, open data is about governments making public data available in a way that lets clever people do useful things with it, such as an iPhone app that tells you when your bus will arrive.
A good panel had been pulled together. Chaired by Daniel Appelquist of Vodafone R&D and Mobile Monday London, it comprised David Mann from the DirectGov innovation team, Phil Archer of Talis, and Kenton Price of Little Fluffy Toys (makers of a Boris Bikes app). Broadly speaking they represented the owners, providers and developers
Though anecdotal in many ways, Where’s My Villo?’s experiment shows that open- data allowing citizens to monitor the performance of a service of which they are the final users should be required in all public-private partnership contracts. Down the line, this may even play an ex-ante role by discouraging companies who intend to deliver frivolous services from chasing public-private contracts, as well as allowing citizens to demand better service ex-post.
Programming languages are unnecessarily difficult to work with because they rely on the artificial constraint of using only ASCII characters, a noted programmer argues in the November issue of the flagship publication of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM).
The Chinese Internet has been abuzz over a hit-and-run incident involving the young son of a high-level security official in Hebei Province, outside Beijing.
The episode shows how quickly outrage over abuses by privileged Chinese officials can come to a boil, as well as the power of Internet-fueled popular pressure in today’s China.
Still, many experts caution that while the Internet has become an outlet for anger against local officials, it is not a significant threat to the Chinese Communist Party’s grip on power.
What sparked the uproar was not only the hit-and-run itself, but the young man’s lack of remorse and high-handed attitude. “Go ahead and sue me, I’m Li Gang’s son,” he reportedly said, just after the accident.
A WORLD-FIRST trial of a personal carbon trading scheme that will also target obesity, is to be conducted by Southern Cross University on Norfolk Island.
The three-year project will involve giving everyone on the island a card loaded with carbon units, according to the man leading it, Garry Egger.
Now, this is a weird one. A team of Irish engineers says it could be possible to minimise the need for mobile base stations by getting phone users to act as base stations themselves.
An “internet troll” who posted obscene messages on Facebook sites set up in memory of dead people has been jailed.
Colm Coss, of Ardwick, Manchester, posted on a memorial page for Big Brother star Jade Goody and a tribute site to John Paul Massey, a Liverpool boy mauled to death by a dog.
FEMA exists to help after a disaster. And when disasters strike, over and over again, we see communities working together to help within themselves and to help each other. But FEMA is hoping that people who are willing to help after a disaster are also willing to help before one. Those are the ideas they’re looking for. You might have an emergency kit if you live in a hurricane- or earthquake-prone area. But what else could we proactively do to help each other and ourselves on a larger scale before the need arises?
Tim Profitt — the former Rand Paul volunteer who stomped on the head of a MoveOn activist — told told local CBS station WKYT that he wants an apology from the woman he stomped and that she started the whole thing.
“I don’t think it’s that big of a deal,” Profitt said. “I would like for her to apologize to me to be honest with you.”..
Profitt also blamed the incident on his back pain.
The topic of the panel was “Cultural Leadership: Forging a Shared Kernel While Preserving Individual Differences.” In other words, how can leaders inspire today’s workforces across geographical and cultural boundaries and through times of uncertainty.
China’s Premier Wen Jiabao really has been on a roll in the past 8 months, seemingly mentioning the need for political reform and the importance of universal values like human rights, freedom and democracy on every possible occasion, starting with his prominently featured article about his former mentor Hu Yaobang in March.
What does that mean? “Web linking is the most fundamental web building block,” says Yahoo! standards wonk Eran Hammer-Lahav. “Typed links – links with a clear semantic meaning – existed on the web since the very beginning, but for the most part lacked any generally acceptable definition… Agreeing on what a link type means across formats is critical for a semantically rich web, in which links are used to provide a richer user experience, as well as better search and automation features.”
Pressure flaking is a retouching technique that was used by prehistoric toolmakers to shape stone tips. They pressed the narrow end of a tool close to the edge of a piece they were working on to create rectangular, parallel marks; these are considered the hallmark of pressure flaking. This technique allowed them to more finely control the final shape and thinness of the tool edge than direct percussion could, and yielded sharp, thin, V-shaped tips with straight edges. The earliest evidence for pressure flaking came from the Upper Paleolithic Solutrean industry of Western Europe, and dates from around 20,000 years ago.
Environment ministers from almost 200 nations agreed late tonight to adopt a new United Nations strategy that aims to stem the worst loss of life on earth since the demise of the dinosaurs.
With a typhoon looming outside and cheering inside the Nagoya conference hall, the Japanese chair of the UN biodiversity talks gavelled into effect the Aichi Targets, set to at least halve the loss of natural habitats and expand nature reserves to 17% of the world’s land area by 2020 up from less than 10% today.
Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said the country’s central bank followed conflict of interest guidelines when it hired an adviser from Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
Bloc Quebecois lawmaker Daniel Paille and Thomas Mulcair of the New Democratic Party both asked about the hiring of Timothy Hodgson for an 18-month term. Flaherty said in response that the bank makes its own staffing decisions and that Hodgson has “severed” his ties to the private sector.
Prosecutors asked a federal judge to seal the courtroom for part of the upcoming criminal trial of a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc computer programer, an effort to protect the secrecy of the bank’s high-frequency trading platform.
Most accounts of the ministerial meeting last weekend of the Group of 20 — 19 nations plus the European Union that represent the world’s wealthiest economies —implied that it continued to perform sterling service – heading off currency wars, keeping explicit protectionism under control and deftly managing the process of reforming governance at the International Monetary Fund.
Post-financial crisis, middle-income countries continue to rise in economic importance, and the recent shift in global leadership from the Group of 7 (the United States, Canada, Britain, Italy, France, Germany and Japan) to the G-20 is commonly supposed to accommodate the growing claims of “emerging markets” on the world stage.
U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk has been a genial caretaker for an Obama administration trade agenda mostly aimed at placating labor unions and their Democratic allies by erecting barriers to imports.
With the public more opposed to free trade than ever, and Democrats running hard against it this fall, the White House has shown no interest in the issue. Completed trade deals with other countries haven’t been sent to Congress, leaving U.S. allies hanging. Obama hasn’t even sought congressional authority for new agreements, a foreign policy tool presidents have cherished for 30 years.
Life has been so dull since the nation’s major banks had their last existential crisis a year or so ago. Right now, it’s like watching a beloved rerun.
We know how the story is most likely to end. The banks will lose billions. It will take a decade or so to drain the swamps — also known as the balance sheets of institutions like the Bank of America and Citigroup — of overvalued and underperforming assets. In the meantime, however, the government will probably jump in and save the banks from themselves once again.
Here’s the crucial thing to remember about financial reform: the status quo previous to the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act financial reform bill was entirely favorable to Wall Street and the largest banks.
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They have already signaled to Wall Street that, starting the morning of November 3rd, 2010, the GOP will be the party that fights sensible Wall Street reform and returns us to the world of 2009, the world most favorable to Wall Street.
This is the lowest level for weekly claims and the 4-week average since July, however the 4-week moving average has been moving sideways at an elevated level for almost a year – and that suggests a weak job market.
The foreclosure crisis intensified across a majority of large U.S. metropolitan areas this summer, with Chicago and Seattle – cities outside of the states that have shouldered the worst of the housing downturn – seeing a sharp increase in foreclosure warnings.
For all the scandalous news about systemically sloppy foreclosure documentation, bankers are trying to reassure the public that no undeserved evictions resulted.
“At the end of the day, the underlying substance was accurate,” JPMorgan Chase Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon told reporters on a conference call this week. “There’s almost no chance that we’ve made a mistake”
That misses a key point, which I’ll get to shortly.
There is a ripple of rage spreading across Britain. It is clearer every day that the people of this country have been colossally scammed. The bankers who crashed the economy are richer and fatter than ever, on our cash. The Prime Minister who promised us before the election “we’re not talking about swingeing cuts” just imposed the worst cuts since the 1920s, condemning another million people to the dole queue. Yet the rage is matched by a flailing sense of impotence. We are furious, but we feel there is nothing we can do. There’s a mood that we have been stitched up by forces more powerful and devious than us, and all we can do is sit back and be shafted.
The minister responsible for internet regulation is planning a new mediation service to encourage ISPs and websites to censor material in response to public complaints.
Ed Vaizey said internet users could use the service to ask for material that is “inaccurate” or infringes their privacy to be removed. It would offer a low cost alternative to court action, he suggested, and be modelled on Nominet’s mediation service for domain disputes.
This means Usage Based Billing could begin implementation as early as January 2011. This will be a truly rude awakening for the many Canadians who are unaware that this is coming. Imaging getting an Internet bill for double what you are used to paying for monthly access. Just at the time Canadians are digging their way out of the seasonal spending chasm.
Rémi Denis-Courmont is one of the primary developers of the VLC media player, which is free software and distributed under the GPL. Earlier this week, he wrote to Apple to complain that his work was being distributed through their App Store, under terms that contradict the GPL’s conditions and prohibit users from sharing the program.
Open standards for file formats ensure portability of the content artifact (often with relevant metadata or context) across authoring or viewing applications. The emergence of the PDF/A standard, for example, as an ISO-managed specification outside the corporate control of a sole vendor happened because of the reluctance of many public sector agencies to accept a proprietary format and risk losing the opportunity to preserve essential content for the long term.
Limewire is probably more popular with the casual downloader who has maybe had use of the Limewire client for a number a years. Its certainly a simple application to use. The problem with Limewire seemed to me that the average user was not tech savvy and so Limewire became a haven for malware and all other sorts of nastiness. Its not a p2p Client I would have ever considered using nor would I have recommended it to anyone else.
For me the loss (in respect of the “service”) is no loss. On 26th October 2010 when Judge Wood served an injunction on Limewire, I saw no loss (from a contributory point of view) but what was worrying were the implications it could have for other p2p services in the future.
Whatever your views on copyright infringement, the technology behind it is not designed to infringe anything. As a user in a BT swarm for example, the sensible position is to give responsibility of any alleged infringement to the users engaging in it not a provider of a tracker or service where users frequent. If we look at this in the real world, it would be like holding a bus driver responsible for a robbery on his vehicle, a landlord responsible for their tenants behavior whilst renting his/her property. The idea that Limewire can be held responsible is to me as inconceivable as any of the above examples I have given.
I’m getting more questions about my latest book than about any other I’ve written. And this is before the book is even out—before anyone has even read the galleys.
That’s because the questions aren’t about what I wrote, but about how I ended up publishing it: with an independent publisher, for very little money, and through a distribution model that makes it available on only one website. Could I be doing this of sound mind and my own volition? Why would a bestselling author, capable of garnering a six-figure advance on a book, forgo the money, the media, and the mojo associated with a big publishing house?
To many people the movie piracy Scene is something mythical or at least hard to comprehend. Who are these people who are the source for the majority of the pirated movies online? In a rare conversation, TorrentFreak had the chance to pick the brain of a former member of one of the world’s largest movie piracy groups, who speaks out about pride, ego, money and the changes that the Scene has gone through in recent years.
When a Universal Music Group employee sent a routine notice to a San Francisco Bay Area mother back in 2007 ordering her to take down a grainy YouTube video of her son dancing, there’s no way he could have known what he was about to stir up.
Governmental bodies around the world are adopting Creative Commons licenses and signaling to their constituencies that these works can be shared in simple, interoperable ways. Just this week, the current Portuguese President Aníbal Cavaco Silva released his official photostream under CC BY, while also posting a CC BY-licensed announcement to run for re-election on SoundCloud.
As academics dedicated to promoting robust public debate on the laws and public policies affecting the Internet, intellectual property, global innovation policy and the worldwide trade in knowledge goods and services, we write to express our grave concern that your Administration is negotiating a far-reaching international intellectual property agreement behind a shroud of secrecy, with little opportunity for public input, and with active participation by special interests who stand to gain from restrictive new international rules that may harm the public interest.
Funny, even though consensus couldn’t be reached, the ACTA countries have each taken the agreement back to their respective governments to try and get it signed. They have all agreed that there will be no further rounds of negotiation.
Apparently though, changes can still be made to the text. Since I am a citizen, not a diplomat, I have to wonder if this means that each country can sign a version of ACTA that they are comfortable with, respective of the wants and needs of the others? If so, it would detract from the point of having one universal treaty.
In the midst of increasing controversy on the extent to which ACTA would alter current or proposed changes to U.S. law, over 75 law professors sent a sharply worded letter to President Obama asking him to “direct the USTR [US Trade Representative] to halt its public endorsement of ACTA and subject the text to a meaningful participation process that can influence the shape of the agreement going forward.” The letter comes as U.S. government officials having been informing public interest advocates that this is last week of consideration of the text, even while reports are increasing that the text as written conflicts with current and proposed US intellectual property law.
However, some are noticing that it’s actually even worse than that. While I already disagree with the court’s interpretation of various forms of secondary liability, at least they’ve included some safeguards in terms of what standards need to be met before secondary liability might apply by looking at things like whether or not there are substantial non-infringing uses and whether or not there’s intent or knowledge. Unfortunately, it looks like ACTA partly seeks to wipe these out by changing these more nuanced standards into a simple “aiding and abetting” standard, which could lead to criminal infringement claims. As we’ve already noted, ACTA has already broadened the definition of “commercial scale” in order to increase criminal liability for infringement, but law professor Michael Carrier’s analysis suggests the “aiding and abetting” language also greatly broadens the liability for secondary liability as well
Many interesting things come from Sweden whether it is Tunnbrödsrulle to Glögg to IKEA, but how well are these wonderful people able to create compact, home servers? After reviewing the CodeLathe TonidoPlug and PogoPlug, Excito, a company from Limhamn asked if we would be interested in checking out their new Linux-based home server, the B3. With that said, here is the review of the Excito B3 home server, which is actually a rather exciting device with its capabilities ranging from being a Bit Torrent download server to a home router with web serving capabilities.
Lately there’s been a lot of talk about Gallium3D’s IR known as TGSI, or Tokenized Gallium Shader Instructions, and attempts by some to replace this intermediate representation. Efforts toward improving TGSI are not particularly new, but it’s been going on for a while and then just earlier this month a new shader and compiler stack was proposed by LunarG. As part of the LunarGLASS proposal, the LLVM IR would be used as a replacement to TGSI.
Music loving Linux users take note: Though Amazon hasn’t updated its Linux downloader for Amazon MP3 in ages, you can still get your MP3 fix off Amazon using clamz.
Amazon MP3 offers a really good selection of DRM-free music, including a fairly hefty selection of free songs and sampler albums. But Linux users have been getting the short end of the stick from Amazon lately, because the retail giant rarely updates the MP3 download client for Linux. That’s not a big deal if you’re just buying a single song, but it’s a prerequisite for downloading Amazon albums.
The Ubuntu Developer Summit is in full swing here in Florida. There have been a load of important decisions taken. For example today I dropped KDE from our desktop. I know this may be controvertial with some parts of the community but we can have unity in our new desktop.. Plasma. Of course we’re Kubuntu so we did it upstream.
Martin and the X.org packagers had a face off about X drivers. Kubuntu Mobile has plans to make it more useful next round. We found problems that need fixed like KDE’s system localisation support. We reviewed all the patches Kubuntu and Debian has for Qt and found a load that can be dropped or moved upstream. Canonical decided it loves Qt and Qt asked what Canonical wants (accessibility was mentioned a lot).
The report from the October 26 FESCO meeting (click below for the whole thing) includes the news that the remove setuid feature has been approved for the Fedora 15 release.
Each release of Fedora offers new features to improve functionality for different audiences. One of those audiences is software developers, some of whose goals are being able to more effectively enhance performance and squash bugs in the software they write. Fedora 14 is expected to include some exciting innovations that allow developers to better achieve these goals.
One of the tools developers use frequently is the GNU debugger, or GDB. In the past, when a developer started up the debugger, it would load a variety of information about the program to be debugged. This information was stored in indexes which had to be calculated each time GDB was launched. These indexes contain data that help the developer locate which part of their source code is being executed in a program. They similarly come in handy for reporting bugs, since a bug reporting tool like ABRT can use the indexes to report more detailed information to the developer.
If you’re currently using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx and everything works, it might be a good idea to leave your install alone. After running it for six months, we can tell you that Lucid is rock-solid. Only time will tell if 10.10 is as good, and we only had a week with it. So, if reliability is ranked highly on your OS wish list, go with the LTS. But if you’re experienced with Linux, or just the type who must have the very latest, there is nothing wrong with choosing Ubuntu 10.10, either. It all comes down to the type of user you are.
Two days ago we reported on what the graphics stack should look like for Ubuntu 11.04 in terms of its X.Org Server, Mesa / Gallium3D, and the open-source graphics driver versions to be deployed in this next Linux operating system release codenamed the Natty Narwhal. This though wasn’t the only X-related discussion to take place at the Ubuntu 11.04 developer summit in Orlando this week, but there were other related topics discussed such as KMS configuration / quirk handling, the multi-monitor experience on the Ubuntu desktop, and multi-touch support. There were also talks aimed at Linaro / embedded Ubuntu on ARM platforms with regards to embedded GPU drivers and OpenGL ES support.
Now that Unity will be used by default in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, it’s been getting a lot of attention and there are discussions going on about if and how the Global Menu (AppMenu) will behave on the desktop, a better way of managing multiple desktops and many other subjects. One such discussion drew my attention and I though I’d share it with you.
Altera announced that it has licensed ARM’s Cortex-A9 core, and will incorporate it into a 28nm chip integrating FPGA (field programmable gate array) technology during 2011. Meanwhile, a soft processor core based on MIPS Technologies MIPS32 architecture will be released earlier in the year, the company added.
The only problem is that when HP realized that its future depended — at least in part — on creating a tablet that could go toe-to-toe with the iPad it probably didn’t take them long to survey the OS landscape and find themselves lacking any good options. This is important. It’s not that HP didn’t think it could come out with a decent tablet — I’m sure they stand behind the Slate 500. It’s that they didn’t think they could come out with an AMAZING mass market tablet with a user experience that would rival the iPad’s.
The developers behind the MeeGo operating system, the Linux-based distribution that married Moblin and Maemo, have just released version 1.1. MeeGo 1.1 is available for Intel Atom and ARMv7 architectures and comes in the netbook, IVI (in-vehicle information/entertainment systems), and handset editions. Besides the core MeeGo OS hitting 1.1, the MeeGo SDK 1.1 has reached beta and will be released before the MeeGo Summit next month in Dublin.
Today we are announcing the project release of MeeGo 1.1. It provides a solid baseline for device vendors and developers to start creating software for various device categories on Intel Atom* and ARMv7 architectures.
Toys R Us is now going to be equipping children with the technology of the future. The retailer will be selling the Elonex Etouch tablet, which was displayed at IFA in Germany. The tablet will come with a 7 inch or 10 inch screen.
On the other hand, it is clear that OOo is – from the point of view of the user – not lowering the productivity of employees, and can perform the necessary tasks without impacting the municipality operations.
- Hospital:
The migration was done in two steps; a first one (groupware, content management, openoffice) and a second one (ERP, medical image management).
In the first, the Initial acquisition cost was: proprietary 735K€, OSS 68K€
The hospital does have a much larger saving percentage when compared with other comparable cases because they were quite more mature in terms of OSS adoption; thus, most of the external, paid consulting was not necessary for their larger migration.
Nokia hoped to revive Symbian’s importance, which once dominated more than 50 percent of the mobile market, by reinvigorating its developer base in light of a rush of Linux-based operating platforms like Android and LiMo. It hoped in vain.
Related Research
* Privacy: How to Avoid the Third Rail of Online Services
* Navigating Google Instant – Tips for Search Marketers
* Four Reasons to Watch for Power Line Communications
* Social and Online Media Need Privacy Plan Now
For years, companies have looked to open source to salvage dying products, and each time these efforts have failed. Often dismally.
We earlier covered the made for India browser, Epic Browser, which is specifically targeted towards Indians keeping their browsing habits in context.
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Epic Browser, a derivative of Firefox offers a few great localized features that makes it an interesting product. We earlier shared some of the useful features of the browser – for example Built-in Antivirus (that scans documents automatically), ToDo (good implementation), snippets, social network integration etc.
At Mozilla Labs, we’re constantly trying to push the boundaries with respect to what the browser can do. We’ve experimented with audio recording in the browser as part of the Jetpack prototype earlier, and want to revisit the idea. There have been great strides on video playback recently, but there’s still some work to be done before users can create multimedia content for the web, on the web.
I strongly believe that in the end, it’s how we will shape the very fabric of our community -which today mostly amounts to the OpenOffice.org project volunteers- that will allow us to progress and innovate together. After a month, I am cautiously optimistic, but it seems we’re on the right track to do something extraordinary. Thank you everyone, looking forward to a great Document Foundation!
But the relevant point is different: the PolicyNodeImpl.java that is presented comes from the OpenJDK distribution, and was as such released under the GPL+ClassPath exception (something that is not mentioned anywhere within the complaint, by the way). Here, the claims are two and different: the first is that Android (actually, Harmony) copied its API that Oracle claims is copyrighted. The second claim is that the actual source code of the PolicyNodeImpl.java file has been copied verbatim.
Let’s start with the first one: the claim that Oracle Java APIs are protected and copyrighted. On this, it seem to me that the interface definition themselves (not the actual source code) as a mere interface does not fall within the copyright provisions, unless the actual names are trademarked, and thus its implementation requires the actual copying of a protected name in a way that is deemed incompatible by its licensee (something similar was done by Autodesk, embedding a copyrighted phrase that if not included in the file prevented the application from opening it directly).
But there’s more. The code indeed looks copied, but is it, really? Carlo Daffara generated a diff of the two files, which paints a slightly different picture. According to a comment over at Groklaw (I know, I know, but he makes a good point), any similarities can easily be explained by “using the same naming convention for variables and the widespread use of automatic code generation in the Java community”.
This is not as clear-cut a matter as it seems, but I’m sure the usual suspects will rail on Google anyway. Surely more to follow.
Today we’re making available “Aylesbury,” our first named release of libvpx, the VP8 codec SDK. VP8 is the video codec used in WebM. Note that the VP8 specification has not changed, only the SDK.
Godwin Caruana, MITA’s CTO, explained in the Times of Malta newspaper last month that open source will be considered wherever it is cost-effective, and without disrupting business processes. “The approach is to ensure that we identify the prospective areas as we go along.”
Germany’s Competence Centre for Open Source Software’ (Ccoss), part of the country’s Federal Office for Information Technology, helps public authorities implement open source. The Ccoss website was renewed this summer and unveiled at the Linux Tag conference, which took place in Berlin last June.
Recently I came across an article by Roy Luebke at Blogging Innovation that asked the rather interesting question, “Is Management by Consensus Killing Innovation?” While I’ve (thankfully!) never had a manager whose decision-making was contingent upon the agreement of a team, I have spoken with many people who confuse the concept of collaboration with consensus.
Aside from their aesthetic value, what’s interesting about these films is that the content is released under a cc licence.
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Those are reasonable, if not killer, arguments. But his last point is pretty inarguable:
One last thing on the “open svn” point: in theory it could work, if we would open up everything 100% from scratch. That then will give an audience a better picture of progress and growth. We did that for our game project and it was suited quite well for it. For film… most of our audience wants to get surprised more, not know the script, the dialogs, the twists. Film is more ‘art’ than games, in that respect.
That’s fair: there’s no real element of suspense for code, or even games, as he points out. So this suggest for certain projects like these free content films, openness may be something that needs limiting in this way, purely for the end-users’ benefit.
Latitude and Shareable Magazine recently released the findings of The New Sharing Economy study, which uncovered new opportunities for entrepreneurs, investors, and established companies in the emerging sharing economy.
A new study in Science magazine* provides additional evidence for group genius. My own research with collaborating groups has repeatedly demonstrated that groups manifest emergent properties, that are not reducible to the individual characteristics of the group members; this new study confirms my own findings, using a novel qualitative approach combined with “smart badges” designed by MIT’s Alex “Sandy” Pentland.
Last summer, I met Pedro Markun and Daniela Silva at the Mozilla Summit. During the conversation – feeling the drumbeat vibe of the conference – we agreed it would be fun to do an international event. Something that could draw attention to open data.
A few weeks before I’d met Edward Ocampo-Gooding, Mary Beth Baker and Daniel Beauchamp at GovCamp Ottawa. Fresh from the success of getting the City of Ottawa to see the wisdom of open data and hosting a huge open data hackathon at city hall they were thinking “let’s do something international.” Yesterday, I tested the idea on the Open Knowledge Foundation’s listserve and a number of great people from around the world wrote back right away and said… “We’re interested.”
Early voting in New Mexico was temporarily disrupted when a voter-registration computer system was made inaccessible due to an expired license, officials said.
The secretary of state’s office, responsible for maintaining the license, said the Tuesday night problem was fixed within an hour.
Denton’s Gawker, Huffington Post, and similar-scale ventures won’t “become dominant players.” But those that husband their resources and play their cards smartly will survive, continuing to grow and to figure out the contours of the new media we are all building. They’ll be active, important players, without “dominating” the way the winners of previous era’s media wars did.
Move over, touchpad screens: New research funded in part by the National Institutes of Health shows that it is possible to manipulate complex visual images on a computer screen using only the mind.
The study, published in Nature, found that when research subjects had their brains connected to a computer displaying two merged images, they could force the computer to display one of the images and discard the other. The signals transmitted from each subject’s brain to the computer were derived from just a handful of brain cells.
Joe Romm, climate activist extraordinaire, is upset at Scientific American for featuring a dumb online poll on global warming.
Online polls are notoriously amenable to manipulation, and it seems pretty clear that climate skeptics organized in force to skew the results. Like Romm, I have a hard time believing that anything close to 56.1 percent of Scientific American readers believe that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is “a corrupt organization, prone to groupthink, with a political agenda.”
But even if you grant that the poll was the victim of an organized attack, I’m still amazed by what we can learn from it. In response to the question “Which policy options do you support?” 42 percent of the respondents chose the answer “keeping science out of the political process.”
Say what?
Keep science out of the political process? Science? I thought it was supposed to be the other way around; that the goal was the keep politics out of science. I can understand, albeit disagree with, categorizations of anthropogenic global warming as bad science, but I’m afraid I just can’t come to grips with the notion that we should keep “science” from influencing politics at all. What is the point of civilization in the first place if we don’t use our hard-won understanding of how the universe works to influence our decisions on how to organize ourselves?
A Policy Forum in today’s issue of Science takes a look at what’s become a significant problem in the sciences: enabling and maintaing unfettered access to large collections of scientific data. Although the report focuses on the biosciences, many of the problems it describes apply to other areas of research as well. The biggest problem, however, is fairly simple: there’s no good mechanism for determining who pays for maintaining large amounts of data, which leaves existing repositories at risk of either duplicating efforts or losing funding entirely, with a resulting loss of data.
The applet is dropped inside the user’s home directory and stops running at computer reboot. This means that on Linux, unlike on Windows, the Koobface infections are temporary. Which means if you happen to get that infection, reboot immidiately.
Things could be going from really bad to even worse around the Gulf of Mexico, for residents and for BP. An investigation by Al Jazeera reveals that the dispersants BP is using to treat the spill are making people sick.
On stage at a private event in Silicon Valley last night, legendary director James Cameron and Google CEO Eric Schmidt held a fascinating two hour conversation that touched on everything from the technology needs of the upcoming Avatar 2 film to the perils that face the environment if action isn’t taken.
Eric Schmidt, acting as moderator, questioned Cameron on a plethora of topics in front of an audience of Silicon Valley movers and shakers for the Churchill Club Premiere Event. The conversation started with a video highlighting Cameron’s decades of accomplishments, including Terminator, Rambo, Alien, Total Recall, Titanic and of course Avatar. It quickly moved into a conversation about how he created the most expensive and most profitable film in human history.
As mentioned before, we have been using AdBard on Identi.ca for almost 8 months. Although we support what AdBard is doing, we haven’t been getting the kind of ad rates that we expected. AdBard is covering about 5-7% of the hosting costs of running identi.ca, with nothing left over to cover any percentage of the salaries of the people who support the site.
Facebook is rolling out a new breed of Pages called Friendship Pages that pull together the public wall posts, comments, photos (based on tags) and events that two friends have in common.
In order to detect any infringement of their database right, Binley’s include in their database a number of what they call “seeds”. These are bogus entries, giving the address of Binley’s staff. When any post is received addressed to a seed address, Binley’s can then presumably check the source against their list of clients to check that the marketing comes from someone authorised to use their database.
Students at the Ohio State University Open Source Club have made some excellent and much-needed upgrades to EFF’s MyTube software.
Real privacy risks are presented by all of the Web’s solutions for embedded video — from user-generated-content sites like YouTube to proprietary sites like MSNBC and Comedy Central. When you visit a site with embedded video, you’re not only sending your information to your destination site, but also to the website which hosts that video. In addition, you’re allowing the video-host to place cookies and other tracking devices onto your computer. This means that loading an embedded video from within a blog could enable the video hosting site (and, in some cases, its advertising partners) to compile a history of which blog entries you were reading and when — even if you didn’t try to play the video.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed suit against three agencies of the Department of Justice (DOJ) today, demanding records about problems or limitations that hamper electronic surveillance and potentially justify or undermine the Administration’s new calls for expanded surveillance powers.
The issue has been in the headlines for more than a month, kicked off by a New York Times report that the government was seeking to require “back doors” in all communications systems — from email and webmail to Skype, Facebook and even Xboxes — to ease its ability to spy on Americans. The head of the FBI publicly claimed that these “back doors” are needed because advances in technology are eroding agents’ ability to intercept information. EFF filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), and the DOJ Criminal Division to see if that claim is backed up by specific incidents where these agencies encountered obstacles in conducting electronic surveillance.
Bloody ethnic riots in the far-western region of Xinjiang in July last year sealed the fate of Twitter and its domestic clones. The government, observing their growing popularity, feared that troublemakers in Xinjiang could use them to foment unrest. Since then Twitter has been available in China only to those with the skills to penetrate the Chinese internet’s “great firewall”. But the authorities quickly gave approval to new China-based microblogging services, or weibo, which employ armies of censors. In February even the Communist Party’s own mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, opened one.
Domestic blasphemy laws, far beyond their clear violation of freedom of expression, are responsible for broad violations of human rights, particularly when applied in weak democracies and authoritarian systems, according to a study released by Freedom House today.
An interesting decision on damages in cases of copyright infringing file-sharing has been handed down by the Regional Court Hamburg (LG Hamburg, decision of 8 October 2010, case reference 308 O 710/09).
In a press release the Hamburg court informs that it decided that a 16 year old file-sharer was only liable to pay damages of 15 Euros for each title he had illegally shared online. In this case the overall damages amounted to 30 Euros for two songs he had offered illegally on an Internet file sharing site. The claimant, who owned the distribution rights for these songs, had asked for damages of 300 Euros per title, which appears to be a fairly common amount usually awarded for such damages.
[...]
…German courts appear to adopt a rather pragmatic real life approach when assessing the level of damages to be awarded.
A young man, who as a teenager file-shared two music tracks, has finally discovered his fate. After rightsholders demanded damages of 600 euros ($828) the case dragged through the legal system. After nearly five years a court in Germany has just published its decision. It ruled that the damages demands of the rightsholders were excessive and instead ordered the defendant to pay 30 euros ($41.00) damages.
Do you need to access the fan webring for Boy Meets World’s Rider Strong, but can’t now that Geocities has been shut down? Fret not! The “Archive Team” is putting all 900 GB of Geocities into a publicly-available torrent.
I wanted to write about an incident which just happened on Facebook. One of my “friends”, a classmate from high school, wrote some comment about Facebook doing something for not being at its “beck and call”. I interpreted his remark that somehow Facebook deleted something and I commented that Facebook does censor comments without going into the types of comments which they censor. One of my friend’s other friends replied “huh?” and another responce came that “this is generally a blessing.” Now I don’t need to explain anything because now it seems that the whole thread, starting with my friend’s original comment, has been deleted.
I also have another prior experience with this. I used to have a friend on Facebook who is Palestinian and he started a group supporting the Palestinian cause. His group was not extremist, but it was nonetheless shut down for no reason. My friend decided to delete his Facebook account (or perhaps they deleted his account too?). This incident is what I referred to in my recent Facebook posting, which was deleted even though I made no attempt there to clarify my assertion. Facebook did it for me. Thanks, Facebook!
My best explanation would be that, in the United States, they have the 1st Amendment. However, this only applies to prevent government prior restraint to speech. Private entities like Facebook are free to use censorship as they wish.
Perhaps it is time to try some other social network.
Yesterday we recommended Identi.ca, which is a good host for people who promote and understand freedom. It has many of the same features as Facebook (picture upload, groups, ‘friends’, private messaging, etc.) although there are substitutions for facilities. █
Summary: A story of tyranny and monopoly abuse in Russia (courtesy of Microsoft Office lock-in), news about OOXML in Malaysia, and a quick word about Microsoft’s results, which lag behind Apple’s
Vladimir Sorokin, a Russian teacher who stood up for his students’ rights, has just been sacked. His only alleged misdeed is that he did not accept the illegally-obtained monopoly of Microsoft, which nobody has an excuse for being a prisoner to anymore.
A battle over whether open-source or proprietary software should be used in Moscow’s public schools spilled into the open Wednesday when a schoolteacher said he was forced to quit for complaining about being forced to use Microsoft programs.
Vladimir Sorokin, deputy director at School No. 572 in southeastern Moscow who teaches computer science, said by telephone that education officials had pressured him into resigning after he complained to President Dmitry Medvedev about an online training system for students that requires Microsoft Office to run properly.
The federal government decreed in 2007 that all schools nationwide have to switch to software based on the free operational system Linux by next year. Sorokin said the training system Moscow schools are forced to use defies this order.
“The education directorate is giving preference to Microsoft,” Sorokin said.
“There has to be freedom of choice,” he added.
The British press has covered this too and this story seems likely to go viral.
A Russian teacher claims he was forced to quit his job after he complained about being made to use Microsoft software.
Computer science teacher Vladimir Sorokin, who was deputy director of School No. 572 in southeastern Moscow, told the Moscow Times that education officials had pressured him into resigning after he complained to president Dmitry Medvedev about an online training system that required students to use Microsoft Office.
“The education directorate is giving preference to Microsoft,” Sorokin complained. “There has to be freedom of choice.”
Sorokin claims the training system forces Moscow schools to defy a government directive originally issued in 2007, which requires schools to use the open source operating system Linux, as part of a drive towards a ‘national OS’.
Recall the very recent Microsoft NGO spin [1, 2, 3]. A few years ago a Russian teacher was sentenced to prison for the same reason those NGOs were. Microsoft provides ammunition and supports actions that put those people in jail. And it actually gets worse in Russia because to name some related posts:
Microsoft and Office are far from benign, but as we pointed out earlier, even the Gates Foundation is pushing if not imposing its use by people who cannot afford it. That’s lock-in and it must not be tolerated in schools whose burden parents are taxpayers are taking. In a private business it’s another story, just not in the public sector. When will Russia abandon Microsoft at the federal level? This might happen soon. The relevant couple of links from yesterday's news are:
The Russian government has decided it is going to develop its own operating system as an alternative to using Microsoft Windows.
Rather than opting for an existing Linux distribution instead, Russia will invest $4.9 million creating its own OS based on Linux for use across all government departments.
A meeting is planned in December where vice-prime minister Sergei Ivanov will discuss the details and plan of action for the development. The key aims are to remove the dependence on Windows and allow for better security, while at the same time not becoming just another Linux distribution.
The Russian state plans to revamp its computer services with a Windows rival to reduce its dependence on US giant Microsoft and better monitor computer security, a lawmaker said Wednesday.
Moscow will earmark 150 million rubles (3.5 million euros, 4.9 million dollars) to develop a national software system based on the Linux operating system, Russian deputy Ilia Ponomarev told AFP, confirming an earlier report in the Vedomosti daily.
It is encouraging to see that the state tries to distance itself from proprietary software.
Yoon Kit, who was among those who stood up against OOXML in Malaysia, now says that “the OXML beast is finally dead in Malaysia as a National Standard. Approval by ISC-G to kill the project was agreed today.” For some background about OOXML in Malaysia see posts such as:
Standards are important, they avoid duplication of effort and increase interactivity between various different devices. Imagine if every TV network broadcast it’s own standard of TV signal, so you’d need a different TV for each network, or cars were made with their own standard of petrol so you had to fill up at a petrol station who sold fuel for your brand of car. This is the retarded world of vendor lock-in, it’s what happens when companies put their own profits above the needs of their customers.
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One of the “reasons” Microsoft often give in their attacks / smears on their competition is that they “don’t work right with standard formats”. Of course by “standard formats” they mean “Microsoft created, patented, licensed and undocumented formats”. So of course any office application has to try and reverse engineer .doc and .xls to get them to work. Microsoft were heavily fined for ignoring a court order to release (in this case smb / Samba) documentation to allow others to make their software compatible with Microsoft’s own. Again vendor lock-in in full effect.
ODF has hurt Microsoft’s cash cow and it shows. Microsoft’s results are out (shortly within the results of Apple, which easily advanced beyond Microsoft’s), but it reshuffled the chairs on the deck a few weeks ago (divisions merging, bucket games, etc.), so if one looks beyond the expected spin in the corporate press it is evident that Microsoft just beat expectations that simply did not exist after it had been downgraded repeatedly. As Joe Wilcox puts it, “For more than 18 months, Microsoft has provided no guidance to Wall Street analysts, in a move that is highly unusual for so large and so successful a public company. As such, Wall Street analysts had to rely solely on their wits to call the quarter. Average consensus was $15.8 billion revenue and 55 cents earnings per share. Revenue estimates ranged from $15.32 billion to $16.18 billion. So Microsoft topped the Street.” Do not forget that Microsoft has just taken more debt. Why would a profitable company keep borrowing money and pay interest on that? █
Summary: OpenSUSE Conference largely fails to attract press coverage, which may show that Novell no longer cares so much now that it negotiates selling SUSE to VMB_ware
EARLIER TODAY we wrote about the expectation that VMB_ware will take over OpenSUSE, which is currently a Novell product/project. A key member of SUSE who is also a Novell employee did not want to talk about it and shown above is a very recent video we found of VMB_ware and Novell chatting about their relationship. The talk is focused on virtualising SUSE and it ends with Studio, which is also a virtual appliance paradigm. OpenSUSE is not mentioned.
As stated earlier in our audiocast, a lot of people did not know about an OpenSUSE Conference (OSC) which took place this week [1, 2, 3]. Novell hardly advertised this. Brian Proffitt too has realised that something is amiss. As an OpenSUSE user he stated that it’s time for “introspection” at OpenSUSE:
I don’t want to be rude, but could somebody tell me what happened at the openSUSE Conference last week?
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I think it’s a confluence of reasons, really. First, Novell, the platinum sponsor of the event, did not seem to put a lot of PR effort into the conference. This might be because Novell is supposed to be the acquistion target of VMware. “Supposed” to be because just because the media reports it doesn’t mean it’s a done deal yet. Presuming this goes forward, though, I can see why folks at Novell might be distracted.
I would also speculate that perhaps the openSUSE community didn’t want a big fuss about this conference.
[...]
Even more recently, a survey of the openSUSE community produced a SWOT document that displays two sides still trying to figure out their relationship.
With its new Community Manager Jos Poortvliet and renewed calls for finding a direction for openSUSE, I have a strong feeling that the openSUSE Conference was not about making headlines or generating a big splash within the Linux community. Rather, I believe it was used as a chance for introspection.
Jos Poortvliet, the community manager of OpenSUSE, responded in the comments and also published impressions from the conference. Pascal Bleser too responded to Proffitt. People from OpenSUSE generally took offence in it. Thinq.co.uk was apparently there at OSC for interviews, but more examples of media coverage from OSC is generally scarce. Here is some OSC coverage of KDE:
THINQ cornered Will Stephenson, an OpenSuSE developer working on KDE, at this year’s OpenSuSE Developers Conference to find out what’s in store for the future of the project.
Stephenson, who is employed by principle OpenSuSE sponsor Novell but who works full-time on the KDE project, explained that KDE is a major focus for the OpenSuSE community with around 68 per cent to 72 per cent of all downloads of the platform shipping with the K Desktop Environment.
Another SUSE blogger had these comments to make; it’s a point about making OpenSUSE look different:
So, I just saw how OSX Lion has the new features showing up and I couldn’t help but notice that their idea about launching apps looks a lot like their way of launching apps on an iPhone. The other thing I noticed is that it looks a lot like my idea of switching desktops, especially about the dots at the bottom of the screen. Who would have thought? Are we all in the end making the same resolutions about desktop interoperability?
The problem is not that OpenSUSE lacks ideas. The problem is that Novell appears to be neglecting it and VMB_ware would not be a better steward. OpenSUSE ought to fork and make its escape route from being associated with Microsoft through Novell. █
A potpourri of reports about some of the world’s worst patent trolls and their highly damaging enablers/facilitators, including Microsoft which claims that it “loves Linux” whilst attacking it with patents by proxy
Some of the patent microcosm, or those who profit from the bureaucracy associated with patents, responds to claims made by Techrights (that software patents are a dying breed in the US)
Firms that are profiting from patents (without actually producing or inventing anything) want us to obsess over and think about the rare and few cases (some very old) where judges deny Alice and honour patents on software
The issues associated with the UPC, especially in light of ongoing negotiations of Britain's exit from the EU, remain too big a barrier to any implementation this year (and probably future years too)
India's resilience in the face of incredible pressure to allow software patents is essential for the success of India's growing software industry and more effort is needed to thwart corporate colonisation through patents in India itself
A look at some of the latest spin and the latest shaming courtesy of the patent microcosm, which behaves so poorly that one has to wonder if its objective is to alienate everyone
In defiance of common sense and everything that public officials or academics keep saying (European, Australian, American), China's SIPO and Europe's EPO want us to believe that when it comes to patents it's "the more, the merrier"
The problem associated with Battistelli's strategy of increasing so-called 'production' by granting in haste everything on the shelf is quickly being grasped by patent professionals (outside EPO), not just patent examiners (inside EPO)
Free/Open Source software in the currency and trading world promised to emancipate us from the yoke of banking conglomerates, but a gold rush for software patents threatens to jeopardise any meaningful change or progress
To nobody's surprise, the past half a decade saw accelerating demise in quality of European Patents (EPs) and it is the fault of Battistelli's notorious policies
New trouble for Željko Topić in Strasbourg, making it yet another EPO Vice-President who is on shaky grounds and paving the way to managerial collapse/avalanche at the EPO
The utter lack of participation, involvement or even intervention by German authorities serve to confirm that the government of Germany is very much complicit in the EPO's abuses, by refusing to do anything to stop them
Another example of UPC promotion from within the EPO (a committee dedicated to UPC promotion), in spite of everything we know about opposition to the UPC from small businesses (not the imaginary ones which Team UPC claims to speak 'on behalf' of)
Uploaded by SUEPO earlier today was the above video, which shows how last year's party (actually 2015) was spoiled for Battistelli by the French State Secretary for Digital Economy, Axelle Lemaire, echoing the French government's concern about union busting etc. at the EPO (only to be rudely censored by Battistelli's 'media partner')
In violation of international labour laws, Team Battistelli marches on and engages in a union-busting race against the clock, relying on immunity to keep this gravy train rolling before an inevitable crash
A new year's reminder that the EPO has only one legitimate union, the Staff Union of the EPO (SUEPO), whereas FFPE-EPO serves virtually no purpose other than to attack SUEPO, more so after signing a deal with the devil (Battistelli)
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