Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Copyright law is "interesting" to say the least — and incredibly contentious. For some, it is an evil that stifles progress. For others, it is all that stands between them and bankruptcy. As with anything, the nature of copyright is not black and white — there are not just shades of gray, but a whole rainbow of copyright colors.

If there's an upside to the Debian community's recent attacks on Ubuntu and Mark Shuttleworth it's that there'll be more conversation between engineers on the two distros. That's according to Ubuntu founder Shuttlworth, who believes engineers on major subsystems are now in a better position to talk, which will lead to greater co-ordination in the long term - if not in time for the next releases of Debian and Ubuntu.

The Arora developers have announced the release of version 0.10.0 of their lightweight, cross-platform, web browser. Arora uses the QtWebKit port of the WebKit layout engine and is intended to be compact, fast and full featured. The latest release of the browser includes a number of bug fixes, performance improvements and new features.

The Linux-based Palm Pre is a sleek smartphone full of features-- but is it feature-ful enough? Gerry Blackwell gives a detailed report on this new entry in the smartphone marketplace.

Four months have gone by since Google announced their new, innovative communication solution, Wave. Last week was the beginning of its test phase.

My friend Ellie Tomlinson and I introduced ten XO laptops at the first Lubuto Library in Lusaka, Zambia in February, 2009, during our school's two-week winter internship. We went to Zambia with very little of an idea of what we were going to do when we got there.

Dirk Hohndel has been a member of our community since the earliest days. In recent years, he has helped direct Intel's (very friendly) strategy toward Linux - a job which has required, one assumes, a great deal of educational work inside the company. Dirk also spends a fair amount of time outside of Intel, advising the community on how it can work better with vendors, with customers, and with itself. His thoughtful talks on the topic are usually well worth hearing. In two separate talks on the first day of the first LinuxCon, Dirk had some fairly general thoughts on how the next steps toward world domination can be taken.

The FreeBSD developers have released new updates to their operating system to close three vulnerabilities. Users with restricted privileges can reportedly exploit all three holes to elevate their privileges. One of the vulnerabilities is caused by a design flaw recently also discovered and fixed in the kernel. It allows programming flaws to cause a NULL pointer dereference. A function pointer will in this case point to the (virtual) address 0, which is allocated to userland. This enables users to execute code at kernel privilege level.

NetGear announced a Wireless-N (802.11n) router supported by its open source Linux development platform and "MyOpenRouter.com" community. The NetGear RangeMax Wireless-N Gigabit Router with USB (WNR3500L) offers an 802.11n WiFi access point, boasting up to 300Mbps bandwidth, five gigabit Ethernet ports and USB storage access, says the company.

The U.S. is known for its patent friendliness. But a Supreme Court decision in 2008 overturned a patent application by Bernard L. Bilski and Rand A. Warsaw for a risk mitigation process. Now Red Hat is using the so-called Bilski case in support of software non-patentability.

When is an open source license not an open source license? The recent rush to "Open Core Licensing" as defined by Andrew Lampitt, the business development director of JasperSoft, raises many questions as to the meaning and purpose of free and open source software. The terms "open source" and "free software" are often confused by companies who want to gain the benefits of a wider developer community. More often than not this has arisen from a misunderstanding of the full implications of "open source" and "free software", and how free software licensing works to the advantage of developers and the companies that are formed to market the software.

This week at the X Developers' Conference there was a talk surrounding OpenGL 3.x and its lack of complete support within the latest Mesa code. While development manpower can end up be limiting, there are also some patent / legal issues surrounding this with regard to some parts of core OpenGL being covered by such inhibitive patents. This was explained here along with some of the possible ways to circumvent the issue.

We already introduced Dell's new laptop wonder, the Z600, to you earlier this week. What makes this laptop special is that it contains a small ARM motherboard which runs a special version of openSUSE Linux, allowing for instant access to basic functionality like checking email, browsing the web, and playing multimedia files. What's news, at least for OSNews, is that research from Dell has shown that people spent 70% of their time in the Linux environment.

There are plenty of things that I love about Linux, but when it comes to maximizing battery life performance, there is very little to desire. On the frontend, you might be running very few applications, but unknown to you, there are actually plenty of applications running in the backend that are quietly draining away your battery. Compiz, workspace, dock are few such examples. As a result, a battery that used to last 3 hours can only last for 2 hours (or less) now.

Way back in ancient history, in 1997, Clayton Christenson of Harvard wrote The Innovator's Dilemma, explaining a seeming paradox in high-tech. Why is it, he asked, that in many product areas, innovation does not come from established companies, but from startups? Why is it that companies doing exactly what the experts tell them to do, that is, to listen to their customers, are constantly going under? The short answer is, because the next big market isn't with your current customers. It's with a vastly larger group of would-be users who couldn't afford your previous products, or couldn't carry around the huge devices of previous generations.

The openSUSE Conference was held September 17 - 20, 2009 in Nürnberg, Germany. There was full schedule with talks, workshops, Birds of a Feather sessions, an RPM summit, and more. We talked with openSUSE community manager Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier about the conference.

The development team behind open source file and print server Samba have released versions 3.0.37, 3.2.15, 3.3.8 and 3.4.2. They fix three vulnerabilities which attackers could exploit to access data or disable the server. In addition to the new versions, source code patches are also available.

The SEP firm has released its Sesam backup and recovery software in version 3.6. Among the new features are a command line interface and support for Hyper-V.

Commercial DNS software firm Nominum has responded to the backlash against its criticism of open source alternatives. During interviews promoting its recently launched cloud-based DNS (Domain Name System) service, SKYE, Nominum slammed open source and freeware DNS packages as a recipe for security problems. During a question and answer session with ZDNet, for example, Jon Shalowitz, Skye general manager, was particularly strident in his criticism.

Many vendors offer a variety of operating system options, but very few preload an OS targeted specifically at the netbook. ZaReason is one of the few and preloads Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix on their Terra A20 netbook. Paul Ferrill takes this little beauty for a spin.