Showing all newswire headlines

Novell has open-sourced the commercial AppArmor security tool for Linux, first developed by Immunix. The release brings application security features with high transparency and low overhead to the enterprise Linux community.

[ED: Repeat, yes but it's Novell and they are so much better than I expected - HC]

More than 40% of organizations in Ireland will use some form of open-source software in 2006, according to a study by iReach, a research company in Dublin.

[ED: Much less significant than the raw numbers might seem to imply. Within the EU Ireland is a friend of patents and MS goals. Hence, I would bet many of the companies and entities just do not carry the clout of 40% usage should imply due to many being small or not politically well connected. - HC]

Last month VMware released a free product called VMware Player. With the Player and one of the free images that run within it, users can explore new operating systems and environments without going through the inconvenience of formatting or partitioning a hard drive or configuring unfamiliar software. I tested the player by running Ubuntu Linux on a Windows host, and got good results with only a few glitches.

Once upon a time, somewhere in post-war Eastern Europe, there was a great famine in which people jealously hoarded whatever food they could find, hiding it even from their friends and neighbors. One day a wandering soldier came into a village and began asking questions as if he planned to stay for the night.

"There's not a bite to eat in the whole province," he was told. "Better keep moving on."

The 2006 Novell BrainShare session catalog has been posted, and I'm in it.

Longtime HP employee Christine Martino brings a more business and operational focus to the role than did her predecessor.

ROCHESTER, N.Y., Jan. 13 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Performance Technologies (Nasdaq: PTIX), a leading developer of integrated systems, platforms, components and software, today announced the company's NexusWare(TM) Linux-based software suite was named Product of the Year for 2005 by INTERNET TELEPHONY(R) magazine.

China has long been seen as a fertile ground for Linux and other open source software. In a country where more than 90% of software in use is pirated, it seems like a natural fit. Chinese entrepreneurs can use open source as a foundation for a new generation of home grown applications and services. Yet the proliferation of Chinese Linux distributions was a worry. If they weren't compatible with each other, the opportunity could be lost to create a rich open source ecosystem.

Well, that worry seems to have been resolved. On Jan. 13 in Beijing (still the 12th in NYC, where I am), the government and the Free Standards Group--an open-source outfit from San Francisco--announced an initiative to get all Chinese Linux distributions to comply with the Linux Standards Base. That's a core set of common elements that assures that a Linux application will run on multiple versions of Linux.

What would you get if you were to combine good graphic programs such as the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), Inkscape, and CinePaint with other open source biggies such as Scribus and Nvu? The answer: Grafpup Linux, a live CD heaven for all graphic designers.

This week, perhaps the most interesting articles include hylafax, hal, poppler, pdftohtml, libpaperl, xpdf, gpdf, and apache2. The distributors include Gentoo and Mandriva.

Best know for its beaches and tourists Durban has been quietly building its Internet and Intranet services using open source tools including Plone and Zope. Now that the project is done developers and managers say it was a challenging task but one well worth the effort.

The US Patent Office is working with open source developers to improve the way patents are applied to software. The US Patent Office is working with open source developers to improve the way patents are applied to software, reports The Register.

This Firefox extension called View Rendered Source Chart will graphically show you sections of defined code in a web page. Really an advanced form of syntax highlighting or intellegent indenting might be a way to think of this extension.

Twelve years of civil war has left the tiny east African country of Burundi with practically no ICT infrastructure. Open source pioneer and chairperson of the East African Center for Open Source Software, Victor van Reijswoud, intends to set up a branch in the capital, Bujumbura, to encourage OSS use in business, government and education.

Jens Axboe began anlkml thread saying, "it does annoy me that any 1G i386 machine will end up with 1/8th of the memory as highmem." He then provided a patch that adds a kernel configuration option to control how memory is divided among kernel space and user space

Oracle has bundled a set of its web-service-enabled middleware to help customers deploy the infrastructure needed for service-oriented architectures (SOAs). The company's SOA Suite consists of Oracle's Fusion Middleware and is designed to support IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic and JBoss application servers and messaging buses in addition to its own Oracle application and messaging software.

Buffalo Technology used embedded Linux to build a compact network attached storage device with a capacity of 160 to 450 gigabytes. The LinkStation Home Server features gigabit Ethernet connectivity and the capability of streaming multimedia content to media players that comply with DLNA

The first Technical Working Group for KDE is now being formed, with elections due over the next few weeks. The Group will help the hundreds of KDE contributors come to technical decisions and smooth processes such as major releases. It will also provide technical guidance to KDE contributors. Seven members of the KDE e.V. will be elected for an initial six months. After this period the Group will be evaluated, and if it proves successful elections will take place once every year. All members of the KDE e.V. are invited to take part in the election. If you are a contributor to KDE and you would like to take part in the decision making process, you are welcome to apply for membership. Further details can be found in the Technical Working Group's charter. Read on for a little more background.

Steve Gibson has alleged that the recent WMF vulnerability was not mearly a vulnerability, or even an accident, but a case of malicious software design by a person or persons unknown at some level within Microsoft designed to allow the running of code on machines with security levels set to full.

Conventional wisdom says that powerful individuals drive open source by working against the grain to institute a methodology of sharing that would balance the power between software vendors and users.

While this makes for an entertaining narrative, there is quantitative evidence to the contrary. The reality is that placing too much emphasis on individual players in the open source movement ignores overarching economic trends that drove open source development and adoption.