Showing all newswire headlines

Alternative Ruby implementations seem to be on the move throughout the Ruby community.JRuby is the furthest along at this point, so I decided to talk to Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo, two of the principal programmers on the project. Read on to hear what they have to say about Ruby, JRuby, and the art of re-implementing Ruby.

Wellingborough, UK – The use of Linux as a mobile operating system (OS) has been steadily growing, with an increasing number of companies announcing plans to develop Linux platforms.

Linux World is hosting a Health Care day organized by OSDL.org on August 15. This is shaping up to be a key event on open source and health care -- a focused opportunity to absorb the latest info on this wave of the future, a less expensive and safer way to go. See CC730223

Jigsaw Data Corp., the online global marketplace for buying and trading business contact information, announced that it has selected MySQL, the world's most popular open source database software, to power its popular online user-generated database of over 3.3 million business contacts at more than 360,000 companies.

[I'm sure the PostgreSQL folks will find plenty to groan about on this one. - dpcarris]

Start-up Hyperic launched an open-source project on Monday around its namesake software, looking to shake up enterprise management software with a low-cost product and an open-source business model.

Emerson Network Power, a division of Emerson Electric, will demonstrate MontaVista's Carrier Grade Linux distribution at the Freescale Technology Forum next week in Orlando Fla. MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition (CGE) will be shown running on Emerson's KatanaQP ATCA blades and PmPPC7448 ProcessorPMC modules.

Both developers and business managers need to know open-source options and limitations.

New central open source business intelligence site offers free collaboration tools to enterprise developers, open source developers, and partners

Smart Collaboration™ improves Ketchikan Gateway Borough’s efficiency

The strength of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is its openness and transparency, and community support. Anyone can contribute, not just elite coders with lush geekbeards and ratty sandals. So what can a non-coder do?

Serendipity is a PHP-based content management system (CMS) for powering blogs and other sites, and has a feature set that should make any blogger happy. After several years in development, the Serendipity team hit the 1.0 mark on June 15. Let's see how the 1.0 release shakes out.

[Let's see, just because it uses the BSD license, it's supposed to be better for "commercial" sites? Bartender! I would like to try whatever these guys have been drinking. - dcparris]

The question of if and when Reiser4 will be merged into the mainline Linux kernel has been an on-going debate for a couple of years [story]. The filesystem was described as being "fairly stable for average users" by Hans Reiser [interview] over two years ago, in March of 2004 [story]. It has been merged into Andrew Morton [interview]'s -mm kernel [story], though issues such as Reiser4 plugins [story] and coding style [story] caused lengthy discussions last year. Two recent threads on thelkml raised the question again, asking at a non-technical level why Reiser 4 has not been included in the Linux kernel. Some have offered theories that Reiser4 is being blocked for political reasons, others because of concerns that once Reiser4 is included Namesys might forget it and move onto another filesystem. Responses to these theories point out that in reality there are technical issues that must be resolved before the filesystem will be merged, and that much progress has been made toward this end. Additional discussion can be found on a relevant and recently createdkernel newbies wiki page.Hans Reiser posted a "short term task list for Reiser4" to address the remaining technical issues. The todo list included getting batch_write merged into the -mm kernel [story], getting read optimization code merged into the -mm kernel, documenting everything in theNamesys wiki, exploring and addressing reports of system pauses when using Reiser4, a complete review of the crypt-compress code, a large effort in optimizing fsync, a review of installation instructions, and a review of the kernel documentation. Hans explains, "unfortunately, our code stability is going to decrease for a bit due to all these changes to the read and write code --- no way to cure that but passage of time. On the other hand, our CPU usage went way down. Reiser4's only performance weakness now is fsync. Once the crypt-compress code is ready, we will release Reiser4.1-beta (with plugins, releasing a beta means telling users that if they mount -o reiser4.1-beta then cryptcompress will be their default plugin, and if they don't, then they are using Reiser4.0 still). Doubling our performance and halving our disk usage is going to be fun."

HP points to a Forrester Research study in 2005 that showed lack of support, immaturity of products and the lack of applications at the top of the list of problems.

(Fortune International) -- Francisco Mingorance was on vacation in Spain last winter when he logged on to an Internet webcast and heard French politicians debating how to require Apple Computer to disclose its secret underlying code for iTunes software - a move that would allow millions of music lovers to play downloaded music and video on any device they chose.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has revoked certification of the open-source encryption tool OpenSSL under the Federal Information Processing Standard.

[Hmmm... One wonders at just how the re-evaluation process, which should have noted corrections to the original problem, wound up leading to a revocation. One assumes that the problems will be made known to the OpenSSL folks - if it's so proprietary that even they can't find out what's wrong, someone needs to examine the process. - dcparris]

In their recent plenary session, EU parliamentarians have voiced their support for an open information society. A text adopted by a majority of the EU parliament to implement the Lisbon program of the European Community under the motto "More research and innovation - investing for growth and employment" aims, among other things, to send a signal to the EU commission, which is constantly expanding intellectual property rights to the benefit of rights holders. The parliamentarians countered that the concept of "Open Innovation" is the best way to increase investments in research and development and attain the Lisbon goals. In these goals, the EU Plans to become the most competitive, dynamic economic area in the world by 2010. [Is it possible that Europe could become more "free" than the U.S.? - dcparris]

Douglas Goldstein and Peter Groen have an informativearticle with a wide ranging perspective of FOSS in medicine.'...It is important to recognize that a wide range of OSS solutions are already in use in health care, generally consisting of technical tools and business applications - Linux, Apache, Open Office, mySQL, FireFox, and other fairly well known products. In addition, there are a large number of health care specific OSS solutions that have also been developed and are being widely deployed, such as OSCAR, FreeMed, MedLine, BLAST, Epi-X, SaTScan, VistA, and many more...'

Feather Linux is a Knoppix-based Linux distribution that can run from a CD or a USB pen drive in under 128MB of space. According to its Web site, it "tries to include software which most people would use every day on their desktop."

Welcome to our issue number 55 of Fedora Weekly News. http://fedoranews.org/wiki/Fedora_Weekly_News_Issue_55 In this issue, we have following articles: 1 FC6 test2 freeze slipping by a week 2 Packaging Committee Information 3 How was NECC 2006? 4 SELinux blocks local privilege escalation vulnerability 5 Linux Magazine: AppArmor vs SELinux 6 New Linux Hardware Compatibility List Launches 7 Fedora Weekly Reports 2006-07-10 8 Fedora Core 4 and 5 Updates 9 Contributing to Fedora Weekly News 10 Editor's Blog

Hackers are taking a page from the open-source playbook, using the same techniques that made Linux and Apache successes to improve their malicious software, according to McAfee.
[This is a different take on an earlier article posted here at LXer. - dcparris]