Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

At Computex, Shenzhen-based Joyplus announced four tablets that run Android, only two of which use the same CPU. The five-inch Joyplus M508 and seven-inch 5701 both tap the 624MHz Marvell PXA303, while the seven-inch M702 runs on a 600MHz WonderMedia Prizm MW8505, and the seven-inch M703 uses a 600MHz ARM926 CPU paired with a 600MHz DSP, says Joyplus.

Google is adopting the BSD license for WebM in order to address a licensing conflict. When Google opened up the VP8 codec and announced the launch of the WebM project during the Google I/O conference last month, the actual license under which the code was distributed was not an official open source software license. It was a custom license that had not yet been approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), the organization responsible for maintaining the open source definition and validating licenses.

Open source development can appear to be a very practical magic, and where better to bring its community leaders together with academics and businesses than a conference at Oxford's Keble College whose Hall provided the inspiration for Hogwarts hall in the Harry Potter films.

As an update to my story from last week about the WebM CODEC project started by Google, I am pleased to say that the project is now fully open source, with the copyright licensed under the BSD licence. Many thanks to Google for addressing the concerns that I and many other members of the community expressed over the licence under which the project was initially announced. We are spared yet another open source licence, something I welcome as an OSI director.

You'll see on the WebM license page and in our source code repositories that we've made a small change to our open source license. There were a couple of issues that popped up after we released WebM at Google I/O a couple weeks ago, specifically around how the patent clause was written. As it was originally written, if a patent action was brought against Google, the patent license terminated. This provision itself is not unusual in an OSS license, and similar provisions exist in the 2nd Apache License and in version 3 of the GPL. The twist was that ours terminated "any" rights and not just rights to the patents, which made our license GPLv3 and GPLv2 incompatible. Also, in doing this, we effectively created a potentially new open source copyright license, something we are loath to do.

I received an email overnight that has me re-evaluating what my smart phone will be. But the email also raised a number of other questions in my mind that are more diverse and apply to more than just the decision of what smart phone to upgrade to.

Last month we reported on four indie games going open-source that were part of the pay-what-you-want "Humble Indie Bundle" after the developers experienced very favorable returns. The source-code to Aquaria has now been published with the source-code to the three other titles (Lugaru, Gish, and Penumbra Overture) already being available.

The ARM platform has historically been superspecialized and hence fragmented - multiple different ARM-based CPU's from multiple different ARM silicon partners all behaved differently enough that one needed to develop different software for each of them. Boot loaders, toolchains, kernels, drivers and middleware are all fragmented today, and of course there's additional fragmentation associated with Android vs mainline on ARM, but Linaro will go a long way towards cleaning this up and making it possible to deliver a consistent platform experience across all of the major ARM hardware providers.

Google has added the newly open-sourced VP8 video codec to the latest developer-channel build of its Chrome browser. The codec is already part of developer builds from Mozilla and Opera, and it was rolled into Chromium, the open source incarnation of Chrome, in late May. But this marks its debut in Chrome itself. Version 6.0.422.0, available in the developer channel here, also includes various bug fixes.

Yesterday, Stephen Kelly wrote on the dot about the successful KDE PIM sprint. Today, you can read more about him and his role as KJots maintainer in this interview by Giovanni from our Italian KDE community. This continues a trend of recent interviews talking to members of the KDE PIM team - last time we heard from Thomas McGuire of KMail. For our Italian readers, there is also the original interview.

The MeeGo Linux operating system for mobile devices gained software support at the Computex show this week in Taiwan. Novell and Linpus both announced MeeGo-based netbook distributions, Movial announced a "MeeGo Services" development suite, and Telefonica has weighed in with support for the open source platform.

The first article in this series showed how to use Hadoop in a single-node cluster. This article continues with a more advanced setup that uses multiple nodes for parallel processing. It demonstrates the various node types required for multinode clusters and explores MapReduce functionality in a parallel environment. This article also digs into the management aspects of Hadoop -- both command line and Web based.

In my line of work I get to test, try and evaluate all kinds of new open source software and the occasional new distribution flavor of the month. Sometimes it's a smooth process but other times I find myself casting a line in the lake of forums hoping to get a bite. In a lot of ways, this is how it was when I was first introduced to Linux in the late 90's. When I look back and compare my experiences then with my experiences now I see the progress we've made in a number of areas but I am left with one conclusion: we're not quite there yet.

One of the original targets of Linux was the under-powered computer gathering dust in the closet destined for electronic disposal. While that sounds like a noble goal, it isn't reality for the majority of today's Linux distributions. Xubuntu says it's for the limited resource computer, but even it has a minimum memory requirement of 256 MB. You probably won't have a very pleasant experience running Firefox on a machine with less than 512 MB of memory.

With Facebook stomping all over users' privacy, there's been a lot of interest in open source and privacy friendly social network tools. The good news is that Mozilla is getting involved with a new platform called sudoSocial. The bad news is that sudoSocial is very new, and not quite sure what it wants to be when it grows up.

Microsoft and Intel are fighting for the affections of hardware makers as the PC industry tries to answer Apple's iPad. The world's biggest software company used the annual Computex show in Taiwan to release a preview of Windows Embedded Compact 7 — the latest rebranded version of Windows CE, which has been promised on tablets from Asus, LG, and MSI.

People sometimes ask which distribution to try if they want to learn how Linux works. Common answers are Gentoo, Arch, or Debian. However, I disagree. Each of these distros teach users their particular brand of Linux. There's only one truly pure Linux, and that is Slackware.

Google has confirmed that its upcoming lightweight, browser-centric Chrome OS operating system will launch in the late autumn. Speaking to the press at this year's Computex PC trade show in Taiwan, Google vice president of product management Sundar Pichai said, "We will be selective on how we come to market because we want to deliver a great user experience," adding that, "We're thinking on both the hardware and software levels."

Mozilla has announced plans to integrate cloud synchronization features into an upcoming major version of the Firefox Web browser. The functionality is based on Weave, an experimental add-on that was incubated in Mozilla Labs.

Intel has released more details and the deployment roadmap for the company's MeeGo operating system (OS), highlighting its desire for consumers to start utilizing the open source platform.