Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

The Ubuntu community is seeking to get approved Local Community (LoCo) teams in all 50 states in the US by the end of this year, and it's making impressive progress. A LoCo team is a local group of Ubuntu users who help promote the operating system in their local community. Activities might include educating users, translating Ubuntu into the local language, or just raising Ubuntu's visibility. Ubuntu LoCo teams are spread out all over the world, but Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon noticed last year that the US just didn't have much going on in the way of LoCo teams.

On June 15, the New York Law School's Institute for Information Law and Policy, in cooperation with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), launched the Peer-to-Patent community patent review pilot program. While some sections of the free and open source community show little interest in the program, program leader Beth Noveck of the NYLC is upbeat, thanks to the interest shown by federal agencies including the Department of Commerce and software companies like Red Hat and Microsoft, and the prospect of replicating the program in other countries.

In an overwhelmingly large series of 556 patches, Joe Perches attempted to track down maintainers for a significant number of files within the Linux kernel source tree. He explained,"I grew weary of looking up the appropriate maintainer email address(es) to CC: for a patch", adding a new line format to the kernel MAINTAINERS file parsed by a newget_maintainer.pl script.Much of the feedback was criticism of the large number of patches that flooded the inboxes of all subscribers to the Linux Kernel Mailing List. Others suggested that the information would be better extracted from Git than from source files.

Oracle has finally unveiled pricing for its long-awaited next database running on Linux, and it's mixed news for users. The Oracle Database 11g price will remain the same as its predecessor, 10g: expensive. Unless, of course, you want to use some of that new functionality Oracle has been promising, in which case Oracle Database 11g becomes even more expensive.

ZENworks Configuration Management provides advanced policy-based management while reducing IT cost and complexity for Windows environments. The first management solution on the market to natively support both Microsoft* Active Directory* and Novell eDirectory(TM), ZENworks Configuration Management enables identity-based systems management. The product runs on Microsoft Windows*, Linux* and Novell Open Enterprise Server for Linux.

One of the challenges open source companies have is that you serve two distinct markets: your customers as well as non-paying community users. Paradoxically, the non-paying users can be the most vocal and demanding. Matt Asay blogs about this as the "Open Source Community's Double Standard on MySQL." I had not thought about it quite the way Matt has framed the discussion, but his observations ring true to me.

Durban's drive to improve its support for ICT businesses will see it backing the upcoming SmartXchange ICT Awards ceremony. The second of this event, it is billed as the biggest event on Durban's ICT calendar and will be held on September 27. Entrance is open to any small medium or micro enterprise (SMME) operating in KwaZulu-Natal in the ICT sector.

DELL'S chief technology officer sees a huge future in Linux virtualisation for the once-dominant PC manufacturer. Kevin Kettler told an audience at LinuxWorld that virtualisation and Linux was no longer such an odd combination. "The two play to one another very strongly, particularly in the re-emerging trend of virtualisation." Researchers at Dell Labs are working on embedding the hypervisor, a virtualisation platform that allows multiple operating systems to run on a host computer at the same time.

Prior to SCO, open source and Linux were still something that, even in the software community, a minority of largely UNIX people spoke about. However, the threats of violence against SCO, the massive denial-of-service attacks got a lot of folks looking at open source who otherwise probably wouldn’t. But I think it burned much of the behavior out, and major Linux players moved to stop it. Now I see most people viewing open source as a means to an end. As we go into next decade I doubt we’ll even talk about open source that much. It will be everywhere.

[So, first Open Source is losing momentum, and now it's everywhere. Somebody hook a dynamo to the man. The spinning could keep a small country powered.—Sander]

I still continue to find articles on the internet downplaying the seemingly normal and sweeping adoption and acceptance of the GPLv3 license. This should point out a few things that indicate that GPLv3 is "here to stay". We have quietly passed 5000 GPLv3 projects.

Citrix will announce its acquisition of XenSource tomorrow, The Register has learned. In a bid to expand its software management play, Citrix will grab the developer of the open source Xen hypervisor. The deal will give XenSource heftier corporate backing needed to compete against VMware. Meanwhile, Citrix will be able to expand its own virtual desktop effort revealed in April and its flagship software streaming service.

Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian is calling for a standardized way to develop Linux applications across multiple distributions (Novell, Red Hat, etc.). Hmmm. Hovsepian’s motivations are easy to understand — Novell badly trails Red Hat when it comes to Linux application support. But will anybody answer his call for help?

I wanted to write 5 reasons to dump windows over linux, but soon I was so overwhelmed by rush of reasons that I could find, that I ended up making a list of 50 reasons. So here it goes...

Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Red Hat's operations in Japan has been named the number one vendor that customers intend to conduct business with in the future by Nikkei Market Access' "Industry Trends in Intended Use of Products/Services of Major Vendors" study. This accolade adds to Red Hat's already-robust list of vendor awards including recognition from CIO Insight Magazine as the number one vendor delivering value in its annual Vendor Value study for three consecutive years.

John Carmack, during the Q&A session: "I won't commit to a date, but the Doom 3 stuff will be open source. We still make those decisions even today when we're doing the Rage code when we have decisions about "do we want to integrate some other vendor's solution, some proprietary code into this". And the answer's usually no, because eventually id Tech 5 is going to be open source also. This is still the law of the land at id, that the policy is that we're not going to integrate stuff that's going to make it impossible for us to do an eventual open source release."

The Malaysian Administration Modernization and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU) last week issued a tender for a nine-month study to evaluate the usage of open standards in its information communications technology (ICT) deployment. The study will also look into how the Malaysian public sector should migrate to open standards and the ODF, according to the Malaysia Open Source Software Alliance (MOSSA).

According to Ditesh Kumar, OSS developer evangelist for Malaysia's Free and Open Source (FOSS) Foundation, OSS is being widely adopted across all the major verticals including public, technical, educational, financial and services sectors, and even within small and midsize enterprises (SMEs), Ditesh said. "On a scale of one to 10, I would give it a healthy seven," he told ZDNet Asia in an e-mail interview, as he described the state of open source adoption in the country.

Bloomberg believe VMware’s IPO today may the largest technology offering since Google. But doubts have been cast over the company’s supposedly proprietary ESX product, which may be derived from Linux. Linux acts as the bootstrap for the VMkernel. When ESX boots, Linux is ESXs kernel: vmkmod is a driver, and vmkernel a large piece of software loaded by that driver that functions in kernelspace. After that, vmkernel takes over and hosts Linux as a VM. The only way to load vmkernel is by vmkmod, a driver that requires Linux. Proprietary kernel modules for Linux do exist and according to Torvalds, that’s fine - as long as a driver clearly doesn’t need Linux to start it - as is the case with Nvidia's kernel modules. But this doesn't appear to be so in VMWare's case.

Deciding whether a particular computer is a good candidate for installing GNU/Linux can involve a nightmare of details about hardware compatibility. Nor is assembling a custom computer on which to run GNU/Linux any easier. In both cases, you need to evaluate video cards, sound cards, printers, scanners, digital camera, wireless cards, and mobile devices for compatibility with the operating system. Fortunately, help is available.

I am pleased to announce you that I just released the Release Candidate of what it will be Custom NimbleX 2. It allows you to generate your customized Linux distribution by choosing what packages you want to have and it also allows you to configure several other stuff like the default wallpaper, volumes, sounds, greetings, passwords and the language of the interface. Now there are over 150 packages to choose from and more than a dozen languages.