Showing all newswire headlines

Opinion: It's a big stretch to think that Oracle has ruthless plans to destroy MySQL.

I admittedly was caught off guard at Oracle's recent acquisition of Innobase, makers of a transactional storage engine that works under the covers of MySQL, the popular open source database.

For a long time, data warehousing on a terabyte scale has been the preserve of the largest and wealthiest corporations - retailers, telecoms companies, banks. The reason is simple - cost.

Customers of the high-end data warehousing vendors - NCR's Teradata, IBM and Oracle - typically spend more than $1 million a year with their supplier just on upgrades and maintenance. Initial purchase prices reaching into eight figures are not uncommon. The technolog- ists justify that not just by the value that their products deliver, but the cost of developing the algorithms, the parallel hardware and the proprietary database engines that drive the data analysis.

Earlier today we posted an article about the dispute between the Debian Project and the former Debian Common Core Alliance, now known as the DCC Alliance. Before press time we had not received a response from DCCA leader Ian Murdock, the founder of Progeny. Now we have.

Besides candidates for the FSF (Free Software Foundation) Award for the Advancement of Free Software, the FSF is now also asking for nominations for a new annual award: The FSF Award for Projects of Social Benefit. Whereas the first award recognizes the achievements of persons who have made a major contribution to the progress of free software, such as by developing, documenting or distributing the same, the new prize will highlight projects that use free software or ideas developed by the free software community in a socially beneficial fashion.

"We are not anti-open source," says Martin Taylor, Microsoft's general manager of competitive strategy. In fact, he makes a point of hiring people with Linux and open source skills for his R&D team and Linux lab.

Portable Firefox is a fully functional package of the Mozilla Firefox web browser optimised for use on a USB key drive so that you can keep your browser preferences with you on the go.

Portable Firefox has some specially-selected optimisations to make it perform faster as well as a launcher that allows most of your favourite extensions to work as you switch computers.

It also works from a CDRW drive (in packet mode), ZIP drives, external hard drives, some MP3 players, flash RAM cards and more It won't run from read-only media like a CD-R, though.

You can download it from their web site - Ed.

ORLANDO, Fla., EDUCAUSE Booth #903, Oct. 19 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- In a significant corporate move to bring the benefits of open source to education, Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) today announced it will spin off the Global Education and Learning Community (GELC) as a nonprofit organization serving the needs of the education community.

The OpenPKG project released version 2.5 of their unique RPM-based cross-platform multi-instance Unix software packaging facility.

One of the reasons why people switch to Firefox (also on the Linux platform) is the assumed security of the browser. Nonetheless, several vulnerabilities were found in Firefox the last few months, so the browser may be the weak spot in the security of your Linux-desktop.

Trying to address this problem, I researched two ways to make browsing under Firefox more secure: chrooting it, or making a seperate browse-only account. Both of them don't work. This article discusses why, and the possible solution.

A recent bus trip and tour of Oregon State University's Open Source Lab (OSL), and its cavernous collection of "the most important racks in open source," had political and technological progressives sitting side by side.

Lacking permission from the Debian project to call itself Debian anything, the Debian Common Core Alliance has agreed to change its name to the recursive DCC Alliance, but, according to Debian, has so far refused to remove Debian's logo from its own logo or issue any formal press release about the change or why it took place.

Nick Langley writes: "Linux is a freeware, Unix-type operating system that is distributed along with its source code so users can make changes and then redistribute it.

"There is a strange imbalance in the Linux world. At one end it is dependent on a handful of talented individuals, with constant speculation about overwork,...... burnout and slowing down of creative effort. At the other end, thousands of the world's best-paid IT staff are promoting and selling it, and repackaging it to meet the demands of corporations and governments."

Nick has written an introduction to the uninitiated it seems, which is something we see more of daily. These are the types of stories we saw in the mid-1990's as Microsoft began to conquer the mightly Novell with Redmond going from 5% of the market to its current position. - Ed.

- Multimedia Access Platform to Enable Profitable Delivery of High-bandwidth Video/IPTV, Multimedia and VoIP Services to the Mass Market

In just a year, Ubuntu has grown in to the most popular Linux distribution, and to prove it, the Readers of Linux Journal have voted Ubuntu as their "Favourite Distribution."

Replay Xcessory Automates Regression Testing, Making It Possible to Test More Often With Less Labor

This FAQ (frequently asked questions) was first published on the Ubuntu wiki. We thank Mark and his team for permission to republish it in Tectonic. Due to length, we have split the FAQ into multiple parts.

The OpenOffice.org community celebrates its fifth birthday this month, and to celebrate, open source software developer Meddal.com will release the Welsh version of the new OpenOffice.org 2.0 software package on Thursday, 20 October 2005.

atsec information security corporation, an independent, standards-based information technology security consulting and evaluation services company, is working with IBM to perform a Common Criteria evaluation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux v.5 on a broad range of IBM eServer systems. As sponsor of the certification, IBM chose atsec because of the company’s proven success in evaluating enterprise Linux products at progressive levels of assurance since 2003.

IBM’s developerWorks has just released the last of a three-part series designed to help you make better use of the grid resources available. Part 1 discusses the Ganglia tool kit to enhance the information services already present in the Globus environment. Part 2 covers meta-schedulers, or brokers, which take that data and make it easier to select the most appropriate and efficient resource for your job. Finally, part 3 focuses on security and how to use available security tools.

Poor communication and tension between information technology (IT) staff and its internal customers is a common problem for many organizations. In some instances, strained relationships keep IT from moving the organization forward. One possible approach to smoothing things out is to employ a neutral third party -- an IT ombudsman.