Showing all newswire headlines

Why at Terracotta We Open-Sourced All Our Java Clustering Technology

Open source IP telephony got slightly less geeky today with Fonality's public release of trixbox 2.0. The new version of the free Asterisk-based IP PBX platform is a lot easier to install and use than its predecessor. That should increase its popularity as a foundation for small-business phone systems. But it's still not likely to steal customers from Fonality's PBXtra or similar turnkey products.

Qt community site Qt Centre is celebrating its first anniversary with a programming contest.

In an entry in his weblog, MySQL executive Kaj Arnö said that the free database is to remain under the current LGPL version 2 for the time being.

A substantial grant from Google has enabled notebook computers running Linux and a variety of open source software to be rolled out at rural schools in Fiji.

Open source database management systems vendor MySQL AB has changed the license it uses for its core product to avoid being forced to move to the forthcoming GNU General Public License version 3.

Both Internet Explorer and Firefox are vulnerable to an Adobe Acrobat Reader bug disclosed at a hacking conference over the holidays, according to various reports this morning.

Phishing schemes are proliferating, and this year may be the worst. Yet most companies remain in the dark about this threat, which can be squelched with encryption. One solution to the problem: TrueCrypt.

Developing with Legacy Systems Part 2. The most common applications sector where the integration of long-standing legacy applications is a still vital requirement is, of course, the broad reaches of the financial services community. When such an application has established itself and proved not just its capabilities but its reliability and overall efficiency to the business those businesses are loath to change it. In the finance market, "if it ain't broke don't fix it" is still a good maxim where changing an application, let alone conducting a rip and replace exercise just because there is a newer alternative, carries with it the significant risks that any change can induce.

In a few years time, it will be impossible to study the history of home computers since everything at the time was proprietary; both in terms of the physical hardware, and all the software that ran upon it since most of it is encumbered by software “protection” to prevent copying.

The tech giant on Wednesday reaffirmed its commitment to the open source developer community, in the wake of Red Hat's Fedora Legacy Project disbanding. In the past month, Novell's Open Suse supplanted Ubuntu as the No. 1 Linux choice, according to the download access-tracking DistroWatch.com. Fedora? It fell to No. 3.

Bug stamp-out list for January 5, 2007

Open source database company MySQL has decided to stick to the current General Public Licence (GPL) rather than move to an upcoming revision, pending broader industry acceptance. MySQL, one of the most successful commercial ventures to use the open source GPL, has modified its licence terms from "version 2 or later" to "version 2" only, according to Kaj Arno, the company's vice president of community.

Streamtuner is a point-and-click GUI browser for the thousands of Internet radio streams available today. It lets you play streams and manage your favorites in a single window -- like a Linux tuner for Internet radio.

Jeff Garzik noted that the hardware documentation for the Promise SX4 chipset is being opened up and therefor the sata_sx4 driver is a good candidate for improvements,"I would like to take this opportunity to point hackers looking for a project at this hardware. The Promise SX4 is pretty neat, and it needs more attention than I can give, to reach its full potential." He notes that it is an older chipset that's probably not sold anymore, that the ATA programming interface is similar to that in the sata_promise driver, and that it contains a fully programmable on board DIMM and on board RAID5 XOR. Jeff went on to explain:"A key problem is that, under Linux, sata_sx4 cannot fully exploit the RAID-centric power of this hardware by driving the hardware in'dumb ATA mode' as it does.

A 64-bit live CD version of Slackware-based Bluewhite64 Linux 11.0 was released this week by its project team, featuring a 2.6.17 kernel optimized for SMP and the KDE 3.5.4 desktop. Version 11.0 was released as a regular installation CD last October.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project will showcase its self-powered, low-cost, XO laptop computer at the 2007 Computer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week. The project aims to distribute -- free of charge -- millions of Linux-based laptops to needy children around the world.

Matt Asay, formerly the man in charge of Novell's Linux and open-source strategy, thinks that Novell may be getting ready to buy up Altiris or XenSource sometime soon. In his blog, AC/OS, Asay wrote on Jan. 3 that "Word on the street is that the company has $200M or so burning a hole in its pocket, with Altiris and XenSource as potential acquisition candidates."

Nearly half of all enterprises will be running mission-critical business applications on Linux in five years' time. That's according to survey of IT directors, VPs and CIOs carried out by Saugatuck Research, which questioned 133 businesses worldwide. The company predicts a steep rise: only 18 percent of businesses will be using Linux in business-critical roles by the end of 2007.

The KDE community is getting ready to set a major milestone for the free desktop with the upcoming release of KDE 4. This will mark a new level of user experience, technical excellence in the framework and opportunities for free software on the desktop. The KDE contributors conference, which is part of Akademy, the world summit of the KDE community, will be the place to present the newest developments, long-term strategies or interesting input from the surrounding communities, projects and societies. Be part of it, present your thoughts, ideas and work at Akademy 2007 in Glasgow, Scotland.