Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Simon Fraser University CIO Jim Cranston says software licensing fees are one impediment to using emerging technologies in areas such as e-learning.

Robert Scales of Raincity Studios, a small award-winning Drupal and Ruby development firm in Vancouver, Canada, is not your typical CEO. Grounded by a pride in the quality of the work that his team produces, Scales is so dedicated to openness in business that he publishes Raincity's finances on his blog, although the company is private and he has no legal obligation to do so. The result of such openness, in Scale's view, is a stable business capable of surviving the next economic downturn.

Forget Symbian! The "war of the OSes" in mobile phones looks rosy for Linux and Windows, according to a detailed, insightful, freely available whitepaper from ARCchart. Funded by Trolltech, the 27-page "independent" report overviews the entire cellphone software market, offering in-depth reviews of 15 software stacks.

Red Hat quietly released the first public beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for both clients and servers last Friday. Although a bit later than planned, Red Hat plans to cycle quickly through to release candidate, and ship version 5 by year end or, if need be, January 2007.

It's nice to see a yellow and black "For Dummies" book with "Linux" in the title -- namely Wiley's Linux Smart Homes for Dummies .

This year aKademy will continue with tradition created at aKademy 2005 of awarding the people that made an outstanding contribution to KDE in the last year. The award ceremony will be on Sunday, September 24th at 17:50-18:00.

Toradex is sampling what it calls the "world's first" embedded computer module based on Intel's new Monahans XScale processor. The SODIMM-sized Colibri PXA290 comes a Windows CE 5.0 BSP pre-installed, with a Linux BSP expected in November, a company spokesperson said.

The Cape Breton Regional Police are preparing to use an open source database tool to analyze information about their investigations - starting with a murder case that's already been solved.

Asterisk 1.2.12 includes a number of bug fixes, including fixes for two regressions that occurred in the 1.2.11 release. Specifically, the AGI 'GET VARIABLE' command has now gone back to its previous behavior, and CDR records now reflect the CallerID number instead of ANI in the situations that this was the case in earlier 1.2 releases.

The Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) has a project to educate the US Patent Office about ideas already known ("prior art") so as to prevent issuance of "poor quality" software patents which would cover those known ideas. It works by annotating free software packages in free software repositories so that ideas in them can be found more easily. It sounds like a good thing because the problems are hidden. The GNU Project does not participate in the project, and you should think twice about it too.

The Cape IT Initiative today announced its support for free and open source software saying they see huge opportunity in FOSS and do not believe that Africa can afford to pay billions of dollars into the coffers of offshore proprietary multinationals.

You might want to be very careful before entering your username and password on any "new" services from Google. Developer Eric Farraro has uncovered a potential hole in Google's Public Search Service that allows a malicious (or mischievous) person to put up a fake Google sign-in page to collect usernames and passwords for real Google services.

The software giant on Tuesday published the Microsoft Open Specification Promise, a document that says that Microsoft will not sue anyone who creates software based on Web services technology, a set of standardized communication protocols designed by Microsoft and other vendors. Reaction to the surprise news was favorable, even from some of Microsoft's rivals.

Some bugs have an additional set of tags indicating they only apply to a particular release: O for oldstable (woody), S for stable (sarge), T for testing (etch), U for unstable (sid) or E for experimental. X indicates that the package is not in testing.

Alfresco, provider of an open source enterprise content management solution, announced the availability of the Alfresco Records Manager preview release. This release offers an unobtrusive, simple to use, drag-and-drop approach to records management.

DM Solutions Group announced the launch of DMSG Premiere, the first commercial support service dedicated to open source Web Mapping technologies. For the first time, users of MapServer, MapGuide Open Source and related technologies can develop applications with the heightened assurance and technology backing that a commercial support service can provide.

Cell phone companies have been significantly over-exaggerating their user figures, leading to a drop in average revenue per user figures for both MTN and Vodacom, according to a report released yesterday by research house World Wide Worx.

With a new name and focus on the channel, Levanta is hoping to win over service providers looking for deployment tools and managed-services opportunities in the Linux space. Levanta, formerly Linuxcare, San Mateo, Calif., last month unveiled the North American Partner Program+, its new U.S. channel initiative, at LinuxWorld. Program+ opens up opportunity for VARs to resell Levanta's popular Intrepid M, a Linux server-management appliance.

The Idaho State Linux Users Group will host a Software Freedom Day celebration Saturday in Pocatello. There will be a presentation on open-source software, raffle prizes, free operating system CDs, and an "install-fest."

Following the trend of the nation's government agencies, universities and post offices, the South Korean military is considering jumping onto the open-source bandwagon.