Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

IBM is claiming a series of competitive wins against Microsoft. Big name companies are said to be choosing Lotus products over Microsoft's collaboration software.

O'Reilly Media has published the sixth edition of Linux in a Nutshell, by Ellen Siever, Stephen Figgins, Aaron Weber, Robert Love, and Arnold Robbins. The sixth edition of the reference book boosts coverage of Linux system essentials and newer technologies like virtualization and wireless, says O'Reilly.

There have been many claims over the purchase of 22 patents by the Open Invention Network. Some have lauded the cunning of OIN in snatching the patents away from patent trolls. Others suggest the OIN have acquired useful defensive patents. The trouble is that the process of acquiring the patents is relatively opaque. The H decided to talk to the organisation in the middle of the deal, Allied Security Trust, and its CEO, Daniel McCurdy and to the OIN's CEO, Keith Bergelt, to find out exactly what happened, and what it means in practice for open source.

There are a lot of reasons to customize your own Linux kernel: better performance, bugfixes, try out new features, and earn valuable geekcreds. In this new series Akkana Peck introduces us to the fundamental steps of building a Linux kernel.

Quickly is a new utility to simplify Linux application development by bootstrapping repetitive project setup, user interface, packaging, and release chores. It targets both new application developers and those who simply want to speed up recurring tasks. Quickly is a product of the Ubuntu project, but is flexible enough to be used in other distributions and for other types of tasks — the real power of Quickly lies in the templates that automate different aspects of project configuration and maintenance.

Lucas Rocha, on the behalf of all GNOME developers worldwide, has just announced the release of GNOME 2.28.0. GNOME 2.28 is the last release prior to GNOME 3.0 that is due out next March, with some of the improvements in this version being a GNOME Bluetooth module, the Empathy instant messaging client has picked up more features, the Epiphany web-browser has finally switched to the WebKit rendering engine over Gecko as the default choice, improved audio settings support, and much more.

Lawyers for Texas Instruments are taking aim at a group of calculator enthusiasts who posted the cryptographic keys used to modify the devices so they run custom-designed software. Over the past few weeks, TI has sent webmasters letters invoking the DMCA, or US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (PDF), and demanding they remove the keys published in blog postings. The private keys are needed to sign operating systems before they work on a wide variety of calculator models designed by the Dallas-based electronics manufacturer.

The release of Google Chrome Frame, a new open source plugin that injects Chrome's renderer and JavaScript engine into Microsoft's browser, earlier this week had many web developers happily dancing long through the night. Finally, someone had found a way to get Internet Explorer users up to speed on the Web. Microsoft, on the other hand, is warning IE users that it does not recommend installing the plugin. What does the company have against the plugin? It makes Internet Explorer less secure.

The code analysis tools vendor, Coverity, has released the 2009 edition of the Coverity Scan Open Source ReportPDF. The survey, which was originally initiated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2006, examines the integrity and quality of open source software. The results are based on an analysis of 11 billion lines of code from 280 open source projects including Firefox, Linux, PHP, Ruby and Samba over three years. The analysis was carried out using Coverity's Scan service.

Many things have rings: mobile phones have incredibly annoying ones, jewelers have incredibly expensive ones, and Hell — at least according to Dante — has incredibly detailed ones. For the past three years, thanks to a government contractor called Coverity, Open Source has rung as well.

The Linux desktop is highly-polished and functional, but still isn't making a dent in the mainstream. Matt Hartley looks at some of the roadblocks keeping desktop Linux in a small niche.

IBM and Canonical are introducing an Ubuntu Linux-based distribution and related cloud services for netbooks and thin clients in Africa. The IBM Client for Smart Work works locally or via "VERDE" virtualization to make IBM's Lotus-based software "affordable to new, mass audiences in Africa," says IBM.

Does Linux desktop even need to be popular? There are, shall we say, differing options among the open source cognoscenti gathered in Portland, Oregon this week for the annual LinuxCon. For the last eight years, we've been told it's the year of the Linux desktop. Yet penetration figures have remained somewhere in the region of 0 to 1 per cent. The top brass at the Linux Foundation don't seem particularly interested in desktop uptake these days. They prefer to press towards successes in end-user device and mobile phone markets rather than worrying about turning hearts against Windows and OS X.

Speaking at a forum in Silicon Valley, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said that the delay while European Union regulators consider whether to approve Oracle's acquisition of Sun is costing the latter company US$100 million a month. He also insisted that the Oracle would maintain MySQL and outlined an ambitious future for the combined companies.

The father of the open-source OS calls his baby "scary" and "bloated," Sony gets down with the indie (distribution) kids, and we learn how the Netflix Prize was won in today's odds-and-ends roundup.

The KDE project's Sebastian Kügler dreams of a desktop that melts, like silk, into the Web. In a writeup to KDE developers he promotes Project Silk for better Web integration.

Backed by Microsoft, IBM, and three other outfits beckoning developers into the sky, Zend Technologies has unleashed an open source API for fashioning PHP apps that float on multiple clouds. Zend calls it the Simple API for Cloud Application Services. The idea is to offer a single programming interface for file storage, document database, simple queue, and other application services offered by the likes of Amazon, Rackspace, and, yes, Microsoft.

Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, has made it clear that he is not prepared to spin off Sun's MySQL business in an attempt to placate the European Commission investigation of competition issues with Oracle's planned acquisition of Sun. The deal has already been approved by US authorities and Ellison thinks that the European Commission will follow saying "I think once they do their job, they're going to come to the same conclusion".

A few developers have tried to discern the goal behind Microsoft's CodePlex Foundation established just a week ago. A legal advisor for the Linux Foundation has made some recommendations to what he considers the foundation's faulty organizational structure.

Sure, programmers (especially operating systems programmers) love their specifications. Clean, well-defined interfaces are a key element of scalable software development. But what is it about file systems, POSIX, and when file data is guaranteed to hit permanent storage that brings out the POSIX fundamentalist in all of us? The recent fsync()/rename()/O_PONIES controversy was the most heated in recent memory but not out of character for fsync()-related discussions. In this article, we'll explore the relationship between file systems developers, the POSIX file I/O standard, and people who just want to store their data.