Showing all newswire headlines

Can open source developers create software that directly benefit people, instead of wait for either implementers or the likes of Apple, Google, not to mention Microsoft and Oracle, to do it with our code?

We recently learned that because of the complexities of software licensing, it isn't clear to small business leaders just how straightforward it is to integrate proprietary code and applications with FOSS. None of the main documents on FOSS licensing explain the issues in the kind of clear high-level terms that can guide business people. Hopefully this article can help fill the gap.

Stephen Spector writes, "I am in the process of finalizing a new trademark and legal policy for the OpenStack community and I have been working on the rules that allow anyone to take the software from our open source project and distribute, resell, etc using our OpenStack trademark." He's discovered that the only item a community can own in a legal sense is the trademark, but it gets tricky. What usage of open source software should require the trademark -- and at what point is the code so modified that it shouldn't carry the mark?

Earlier this week I reviewed the Antec 300 case that houses my new home fileserver. Now it's time to talk about what's inside. It's rather minimalistic right now, running headless and using a single 2-terabyte SATA hard drive. There are three desktop PCs and one laptop that will backup to this machine. I don't need a big RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) array, though one of these days I'll move up to a RAID 1 array, using Linux software RAID. Nice simple mirroring with no parity or striping complications. This doesn't need to be complicated because all I want are plain, easily-recoverable copies of the data on all of my home computers.

The Russian government recently made a surprising decision: to create a national operating system based on GNU/Linux. The motivation for this development is crystal clear: escaping the Microsoft Windows monopoly. Russia will gain two other huge advantages due to the shift: lower software expenditures and full access to the operating system's source code. The source code access will allow any discovered security flaws to be quickly fixed. Russia appears to be following China's lead. A few years ago, China also decided to shift to a Linux-based operating system known as Red Flag Linux. In this article, I will discuss some of the underlying issues that are causing countries, institutions, individuals, and governments to defect to GNU/Linux.

The S7 is the first ‘true’ Android tablet finally touches down in the UK, but does it live up to the promise of a bright future for the platform? Russell Barnes investigates…

This tutorial explains the installation of a Samba fileserver on OpenSUSE 11.3 and how to configure it to share files over the SMB protocol as well as how to add users. Samba is configured as a standalone server, not as a domain controller. In the resulting setup, every user has his own home directory accessible via the SMB protocol and all users have a shared directory with read-/write access.

Now that I have a laptop that boots from USB, I've been using IMG images instead of ISOs when they're available to test new Linux and BSD systems because they're so easy to deal with.

The problem in Dijkstra's shunting yard algorithm has traditionally always been the issue of validation of the source code and expressions being parsed. The problem can be solved, however.

Here I am at around 12:30 AM local time running updates on a client's PC that was just reinstalled with Microsoft XP Media Center Edition 2005. This reinstall was done to clean up the registry and get rid of the "sluggishness" that had set in over the past 4 years of continual use. While the interminable Microsoft updates ran on that PC sitting next to my desk, I watched a movie on my personal business tower computer that is running Mandriva 2010.1 Linux. The same computer which was also downloading files in the background, periodically checking my e-mail and keeping several other software applications going simultaneously.

October 28, 2010 -- BOSTON, Mass. -- The GNOME Project has received two grants for a total of $15,000 from Mozilla and from the F123.org-Mais Diferenças partnership for accessibility work. Mozilla has once again stepped up to support GNOME accessibility (a11y) work with a $10,000 grant. The F123-Mais Diferenças partnership has awarded a grant of $5,000 in total. This is the second accessibility grant that GNOME has received from Mozilla in the 2010 calendar year.

Robert Strohmeyer has recently proclaimed the death of the dream of Desktop Linux, after himself being an author of one of those infamous "This is The Year of Linux Desktop" articles in 2008. Frankly, I wouldn't quite say that the dream is dead, since many people can and probably still do keep on dreaming about it, but as far as the reality goes, it probably is dead, and I wouldn't quite argue otherwise.

The results of the Eclipse Community Survey 2010 are now available. Thank you to everyone, all 1696 people, that took the time to give us your feedback. A challenge for lots of open source communities is understanding the dynamics in the community, so these results provide a useful data point.

A couple of weeks ago I was in Brussels to particpate in the 4th ODF Plugfest. I planned on writing up a nice long post about it. But right when I started to draft this blog post, I came across an excellent article in LWN.net by Koen Vervloesem (Twitter @koenvervloesem): ODF Plugfest: Making office tools interoperable. Since his article is far better than what I would have written, I recommend that you go and read that article first, and then come back here for what meager additional scraps of insight I can add. . - Rob Weir

Now that Unity will be used by default in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, it's been getting a lot of attention and there are discussions going on about if and how the Global Menu (AppMenu) will behave on the desktop, a better way of managing multiple desktops and many other subjects. One such discussion drew my attention and I though I'd share it with you.

Link: http://tech.shantanugoel.com/2010/10/29/the-real-threat-of-w... Lead: Many say that Windows Phone 7 is a threat to iPhone and many also say that Windows Phone 7 is a threat to Android but I say that Windows Phone 7 is a threat to the world wide web and web apps. It plans to help the developers and users by going one up on fragmentation of Android but in the process will fragment the web app world itself.

China has unveiled the world's fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A, at a high-performance computing conference in Beijing. The Tianhe-1A has a Linpack benchmark performance of 2.507 petaflops, according to Nvidia (Nasdaq: NVDA), whose Tesla M2050 graphics processing units (GPUs) were used in the supercomputer.

LXer Feature: 29-Oct-2010

Mr. Des Ligneris wrote that the adoption of Unity is a bold move and a good one for Canonical and Ubuntu, as the focus of computing is shifting wholesale to the internet and "The Cloud". It is an interesting viewpoint from Mr. Des Ligneris. I don't see the Unity plans as a blessing though. There is no point in turning a full fledged desktop machine into a "Mobile Internet Device". Their use cases don't overlap. While a desktop is certainly capable of performing MID tasks, it is not the intended operating area of a desktop machine.

Jon McCann, lead designer for GNOME Shell, shares his thoughts on Ubuntu's decision to replace GNOME with Unity. He is not happy.

Perhaps as important as the ability to properly and effectively scale hybrid clustered CPU environment (in this case over 6144 Intel Xeon CPUs and 5120 AMD GPUs), is the fact that the underlying operating system is entirely Linux.