Showing headlines posted by glynmoody

Sony has never been much of a friend to open source, and its famous rootkit showed what it thought of end users. But by omitting the option to install GNU/Linux from its new PS3, it has removed the final reason for the open source world to care about Sony.

Not many people know that it was an obscure battle between Richard Stallman and a company called Symbolics that led directly to the creation of the GNU project - and hence free software. As well as losing to RMS, Symbolics has another claim to fame: it was the first doman name registered. And now, after all these years, that name is finally being sold.

Remember Mindcraft back in 1999? Not many people do. It was when Microsoft "proved" Windows NT was faster than GNU/Linux. That backfired, and so has Microsoft's latest paid benchmarking: this time of Internet Explorer 8 vs. Firefox, by NSS Labs. It just goes to show that Microsoft is now officially worried about Firefox in the browser sector.

Microsoft is at it again: trying to redefine what "open" means. This time they want open standards to be "balanced" - for them to include patent-encumbered technologies. Which just happens to be incompatible with free software licensed under the GNU GPL.

The achievements of free software are already extraordinary. As well as running most of the Internet's infrastructure, and powering many of its leading companies, free software is beginning to find wide use in the server rooms of enterprises and on the desktops of general users. It is also increasingly deployed in embedded systems, and for mobile phones. But that's just the start: inspired by the ideas of free software, and building on its innovations, a wide range of other movements have been founded that aim to introduce freedom, openness and transparency to some of the most important areas of human activity. This keynote talk, given at the recent Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, explores their impact [.ogg video].

Why isn't local government using more free software in the UK? Could it be that local authorities are faced by a kind of Prisoner's Dilemma that means that they don't end up with the best solution?

They might be, if a new European Commission consumer protection proposal becomes law. Although the idea of Microsoft paying billions of dollars might sound an appealing prospect, one knock-on consequence might be that open source coders would also be liable for any damage that errors in their software caused.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, celebrating "women excelling in technology." There are plenty of women contributing to free software, but where are the well-known ones that code at a high level, rather than run foundations like Mozilla's Mitchell Baker or GNOME's Stormy Peters? And what can we do to nurture more of them?

One of the hottest open source startups is Cloudera, which is based on the clustering/cloud computing software Hadoop. Here's an interview with one of its founders, Mike Olson, formerly of Sleepycat, about Hadoop, his new company, and why cloud computing is neither a threat nor an opportunity for open source.

Microsoft organised a competition "to get competitive LAMP engineers to increase the volume of technical information around PHP/IIS and application compatibility." The result? A total of 71 applications out of the targeted 75 were ported onto IIS, of which 47 were newly ported to IIS. But isn't that weakening LAMP by boosting the Windows stack? So why are open source coders taking part in this kind of thing?

Russia is rapidly turning into open source's best-kept secret. A little while back I wrote about plans to roll out free software to all schools; more recently, there has been talk about creating a Russian operating system based on Fedora. And now there's this: A plan which foresee all Russian government departments using free software, and civil servants being trained in its use.

As Microsoft's TomTom lawsuit takes off, so SCO's winds down. But at least SCO did one good thing: it showed there were no copyright infringements in Linux - if there had been any, it would have used them. That's why Microsoft went after TomTom claiming patent infringement, which is quite different. That's also why we need patent law to be reformed.

The UK Government's new “Open Source, Open Standards and Re–Use: Government Action Plan” sounds impressive. But what's the reality? Here's a detailed analysis of what's good and what's not so good.

You don't have to be in Silicon Valley to write code - just ask Linus. But Bolivia may not be the obvious place to look for a thriving free software community. Here's an interview with Brian Reale, founder and CEO of the open source company Colosa, based in La Paz.

A little while ago, there was a rumour about Russia developing its own operating system, based on GNU/Linux. Now, some more details have emerged, following a meeting between Red Hat and the Russian communications ministry. The idea is to use the Russian Fedora project as a step towards the creation of the national operating system.

It's not the redundancies, it's the terrible figures driving the redundancies and their cause that are bad news for Microsoft. Now the deep cracks in the Redmond juggernaut have reached the surface for everyone to see.

The OSA was set up to improve interoperability between open source programs. Now it plans to work on interoperability between open source and closed source apps too: will this help or harm free software?

The European Patent Office is confused by all the contradictory court rulings on software patents, so it's decided to ask its “Enlarged Board of Appeal” for some advice on how to reconcile them. But it's overlooking the most obvious conclusion: that software patents simply don't make sense.

After running some successful pilots, the Russian government has decided to make open source the standard for *all* schools. Depending on the uptake, that could be up to one million more machines running free software by 2010.

A recent court decision in the UK seems likely to make software patentable there for the first time, with terrible knock-on consequences for free software in Europe and elsewhere. Ironically, the "winner" of the case was Symbian, which has announced its intention to open source its operating system for mobile phones.