Showing headlines posted by Herschel_Cohen

A new website is boldly proclaiming that they are close to providing "The best thing to happen to Firefox... since Firefox." Allpeers is a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing application that is apparently integrated directly into the popular web browser as a downloadable plugin.

[ED: A large dose of skepticism might also be in order, which is a heavy subtext of this short article - HC]

How might it have gone if SCO had stayed with Linux?

You know what the sad thing about this whole affair has been?

If SCO has only stuck to doing Linux, they'd be a winner.

They, and not Red Hat, might have been the ones reporting great financial results. They, and not SUSE, would likely have been the company that Novell picked up to jump-start its operating system business.

Sound unlikely? I don't think so.

The Mozilla Foundation has initiated phase two of its user-created advertising campaign. When Firefox 1.5 was released last month, the Mozilla Foundation started a contest, promising nifty prizes to the Firefox users that submit the best homemade 30-second Firefox advertisements. In addition to the advertising contest, the Firefox Flicks campaign also promised Amazon.com gift certificates and cool Firefox swag from the Mozilla store to users and developers that submit the most creative testimonial videos. The Mozilla foundation invites enthusiasts to participate:

Quoting: Last year at Spread Firefox we launched community marketing into the mainstream with written testimonials. This year we're taking it "live" with video testimonials and ads. From the casual user to the creative professional, Firefox Flicks is your opportunity to speak out for Firefox and express yourself in front of a worldwide audience.

[ED: I know it's probably a near duplicate, but I always liked ars technica and on a day when even the 24 hour grocery chains are closed the question becomes: "What are you doing here?". In any case, the best to all whatever you are celebrating this time of year - HC]

If digital-music veteran Rob Lord wanted to court controversy with his new open-source start-up, he probably couldn't have done much better than to compare Apple Computer's iTunes software to Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser.

Lord's new five-person company, the ambitiously named Pioneers of the Inevitable, is building a piece of digital-music software called "Songbird," based on much of the same underlying open-source technology as the Firefox Web browser.

[ED: Personally I am not a fan of mp3 nor of Apple iPods or music offerings. However, I have three kids running around carrying one version or another. Let's see if a bit of real competition makes Jobs compete harder - HC]

Though this has been mentioned several times recently, Nessus 3.0 is out and its closed source.

Tenable's Nessus license flip flop has raised the ire of many in the open source community and has even led to a fork of the project that is backed by an influential community based open source organization, Software in the Public Interest (SPI).

[ED: Here even in the worst case, GPL tops most OSS due to the certainty that if the interest exists the last free version with be the basis of a new product line - HC]

Incompatibilities among "copyleft" licenses meant to promote the sharing of creative work could end up preventing it, says cyber-law expert Lawrence Lessig. The problem is that the copyleft licenses, like the "free software" licenses from which they're drawn, require that derivative works be licensed under identical terms. And those terms differ from license to license.

[ED: Lessig is someone I take seriously, hence, this is a disturbing problem. Nonetheless, not one that cannot be resolved (perhaps with fewer, simplier licensing conditions?). These are important issues when trying to match dissimilar content, e.g. text and audio/visual becomes contentious. - HC]