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Live Audio Broadcast from Ohio Linuxfest

There has been a lot of hoo-hah recently regarding the pros and cons of certain aspects of the drafts of Version 3 of the GNU General Public License from the Free Software Foundation. The originator of the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds himself, is playing a role here. Unfortunately, each side has taken to the ploy of misrepresenting the other’s points. Arguments are getting heated to such an extent that you need to wear an asbestos suit just to look at the issues.

A browser-based visual editor and run-time environment similar to Dreamweaver, which lets developers visually assemble, code, test, and debug enterprise-quality Web applications in the visual editor.

Last Wednesday the KDE regional groups Birds of a Feather session took place at Akademy 2006, Dublin. The focus of this BoF session was to share experiences that regional KDE-groups have had in building a community. A regional group is generally country based, e.g. KDE-IT for Italy and KDE-NL for Netherlands.

Native Object Persistence Solution Eliminates Object-relational Mismatch with Higher Performance in 19 of 20 Test Cases

A free script is now available to help Linux users install and run Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Offered by the U.K.-based team behind "IEs 4 Linux," the script can aid web developers who need to fine-tune sites for IE, or Linux users who want to visit websites designed specifically for IE.

The Kommander team is proud to announce a new development release which has some bug fixes but most importantly a new text editor. Along with this we are releasing two new plugins for databases and HTTP forms. We have also updated our site with an article and tutorial section starting out with an Introduction to Kommander.

Gone are the days when "full disclosure" meant the immediate public release of information about vulnerabilities or exploits uncovered by security researchers. Whatever it means today is the result of a collaboration -- some might call it collusion -- between the researcher or firm finding the flaw and the vendor or project responsible for the code. Recent patches from Apple illustrate the dangers of this practice when proprietary software is involved.

A new embedded Linux book is out. Embedded Linux Primer: A Practical Real-World Approach, by Christopher Hallinan, aims to help solve specific technical issues product designers are likely to face when using Linux, says publisher Prentice Hall.

This week on Linux.com we reviewed Scalix, Open-Xchange, and Zimbra, three of the highest-profile open source alternatives to Microsoft Exchange. All of them have their defects, and all three offer commercial versions that make installation and maintenance easier than it is for their open source versions. We've also talked to marketing people from all three companies, and while they all talk about growing sales and a rosy future, it's obvious from the reader comments attached to the reviews of their products that none of them is an immediate threat to Microsoft's domination of the corporate messaging server market.

This book is aimed at practising Java and .NET developers, at a fairly novice level, who want to take advantage of the strong points of each of the two platforms in a single applications environment. It also aims to be suitable for IT architects and managers needing an overview of what Java and .NET integration technologies are available. It is not a detailed programmer’s cookbook, nor a collection of interoperability design patterns.

Running Internet Explorer in Debian and ubuntu Linux

After the GNU General Public License (GPL), the Creative Commons License (CCL) is probably the most popular open source license now in use. Yet, while the writing of version 3.0 of the GPL has been widely covered in the media, the current revisions to the CCL have received little attention from the press -- nor have the drafters of the two licenses consulted each other. All the same, the CCL 3.0 revision has many of the same priorities as GPL 3.0, including increasing the clarity of the language, internationalizing the language, and addressing issues about digital rights management (DRM).

Is a glass half full or half empty? This eternal question sums up the challenge of interpreting a software license. So how does one avoid the pitfall of a wrong interpretation? Here is my thumb rule — never ignore the spirit in which the software license was created in the first place.

Some say "if you don't like the fact you can't run a modified version of TiVo linux on a TiVo, then don't buy a TiVo, you're still free to take your modified version and install it on something else". This is very flawed reasoning. Hardware and software are not separate. TiVo linux is meant for running on a TiVo.

In this week's entry we'll look at two more"live" CDs of Linux systems optimized for multimedia creation and performance. I've been having a great time with these systems, and I hope that my mini-profiles inspire you to try them all. They're a great way to introduce someone to Linux, they show off the system optimized for multimedia performance and they provide a wealth of high-quality sound and music software to exploit that system. They all include the standard cornucopia of applications for the mundane tasks, word processing, text editing, graphics, networking, and so on. All that, for the cost of a download and a disc.

I have been very busy recently and have not updated the site with anything interesting or new - ironically I have not really done anything interesting or new in the last month or so. I have been getting ready for this year's Ohio Linuxfest conference (see their website for details). This year I will attending as an Open Source vendor. Steve Dickinson and I will be at the NetBSD booth (table) with flyers and a small system with NetBSD installed on it. Pics and comments to follow of course.

One of the key developers for the GNU Image Manipulation Program, Dave Neary has walked off the project. Writing in his bog, Neary said he has had a gutsful of the abusive behaviour in the GIMP community.

Okay, non-interview stuff first. I've recently picked up several'shortcuts' fromO'Reilly andAddison-Weseley. I love this format. For about 10 bucks, you can get a PDF only copy of a 50-100 page"book". The shortcuts (so far at least) have been very focused, which allows them to cover a reasonable topic in sufficient depth without creating a monstrous 600+ page tome. The shortcuts I've looked at so far have been timely, useful, and a great value. October marks the beginning ofApress' push into Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Apress also hasPractical OCaml coming out soon to help soothe your inner functional programmer. Now, on to interview news!

Create secure server applications with OpenSSL; its documentation makes it look intimidating, but it's actually rather simple. In Part 3 of this three-part series learn how to build a secure server app by building on the concepts from Part 1 for creating a basic secure client, and by going in depth in Part 2 about digital certificates.