Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

BERLIN — Microsoft and the European Commission have canceled the only hearing planned in an antitrust investigation into the company’s Internet browser because of a dispute over the attendance of European regulators serving as advisers. As a result, the commission, which began its inquiry after a complaint by Opera, a small browser maker in Norway, will reach its decision and levy a fine based on written statements from Microsoft and its adversaries. Microsoft decided not to give oral evidence in the case after it was unable to persuade the commission to move the meeting, scheduled for June 3 through 5, so that it did not conflict with a global antitrust conference in Zurich that draws European antitrust regulators.

LWN recently posted a brief article on the GNOME Foundation's plea for support to help it get through a difficult year. Some of the comments on that news questioned the role of the foundation and its executive director. In response, the Foundation offered to make a board member - Luis Villa - available for an interview. Luis quickly answered our questions, despite being in the middle of final exams at the time; some people, it seems, will do anything to get out of studying. The result is an interesting view into the state of the GNOME project and where it is heading.

Another important bounty quota has been reached in the Power2People website, and this time the result comes from a common effort of the whole Amiga/Morphos/AROS Community. The result of this bounty being reached is that the Poseidon USB stack will be ported to AROS, and released as open source under the AROS Public License.

Regnum Online, a Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Game that has a native Linux client offered by its developers (NGD Studios), has received a major overhaul. Regnum Online is one of the very few MMORPGs that has a native Linux client, but now its own game engine got a whole lot more powerful. The game engine has been reworked greatly and is now known as NG3D2.0, but later this year they already plan to introduce another major update on top of that.

Until September 20, 2007, nobody had ever sued anybody for violating the General Public License (GPL) — not a single company, project, or individual developer in the license's then-eighteen year existence. This momentous first, settled in a mere month, was only the beginning — the beginning of a landslide of litigation large enough to make Apple's lawyers cry.

Mozilla has unfurled a new API designed to expand the worldwide population of Firefox add-on developers. The open-source house boasts that over the last four years, more than 8,000 developers have built more than 12,000 add-ons for its Firefox browser. But with its new API, dubbed Jetpack, it hopes to breed many more.

Xen.org announced release 3.4 of its widely deployed, Xen virtualization hypervisor, which is widely used in Linux environments. The open source Xen 3.4 offers device pass-through improvements using Xen Client Initiative (XCI) technology, enhanced integration with the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor, and improved reliability and power management, says the project.

With the launch of the Free Software Pact initiative the European Elections now have free software as an issue for candidates. The initiative will ask those standing for election to support free software in the UK. The Free Software Pact is a European project to bring the importance of the development of free software to the fore, especially as the European Parliament is where many discussions and decisions, regarding software patents, interoperability and net neutrality, are made.

Cisco is only the latest on the long list of companies that have been forced by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) to comply with the GPL. The Center uses copyright law to protect the freedoms guaranteed by the GPL. It's perhaps not surprising that makers of network-capable devices, from routers to set-top boxes, use Linux to drive them. There's all this useful open-source software lying around on the internet, ready for downloading, almost always accompanied by the source code – why reinvent the wheel and write, say, your own network operating system plus tools for a SOHO DSL router if, after all, Linux can do all that's needed and will run on virtually any hardware?

Juliet Kemp introduces us to TrueCrypt, an excellent, easy-to-use encryption tool for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. Using TrueCrypt will instantly make you smarter than all the big government agencies and companies who compromise terabytes of data when their unencrypted laptops and backup media are stolen.

Keith Curtis, a programmer with Microsoft for 11 years, says proprietary software made Microsoft one of the most successful companies, but is a model destined to fail. Bill Gates probably will not sing the praises of Keith Curtis, a programmer with Microsoft for 11 years who's now left the fold and written a book about why the Redmond way will fail. Oh yeah, Curtis is not afraid to speak his mind as a Linux guru, either. The mantra Curtis repeats throughout his book After the Software Wars: proprietary software is holding us back as a society.

If you follow Phoronix or the Linux gaming scene at all you will know the mess that has become to be known as Unreal Tournament 3. Last month when we asked Epic Games about the status of the Linux game client, they were not even sure.

A $100 networked-attached storage (NAS) device using the Marvell SheevaPlug reference design has been updated to support Linux desktops. The Cloud Engines "Pogoplug" (pictured) has also gained 64-bit OS support, as well as easier searching and sharing software, says the company.

IBM commissioned market research company Freeform Dynamics to conduct a study on companies' use of Linux as a desktop system. Researchers interviewed 1,275 IT professionals from the UK, US and other countries, 90 per cent of whom use Linux on their company desktops.

One of the discussions your editor missed at the recent Linux Storage and Filesystem workshop covered the proposed reflink() system call. Fortunately, the filesystem developers have now filled in the relevant information with a detailed email exchange, complete with patches. We now have a proposed system call which has created more open questions than answers. The creation of a new core system call requires a lot of thought, so a close look at these questions would seem to be called for.

Mozilla Labs have launched Jetpack, a new way of creating extensions for browsers. Jetpack builds on HTML, JavaScript and CSS to provide the platform for add-on developers. By switching to web technologies for extensions, the Labs developers hope to make add-on creation accessible to a wider audience of developers. Jetpack Features, as they are called, can be installed and debugged without restarting the browser and can be debugged in the browser using Firebug. Another advantage of the switch to web technologies is that Jetpack Features should be portable to other Mozilla based applications, such as Fennec, Thunderbird and Songbird. It is also possible that other browser developers could add Jetpack compatibility to their browsers.

The OpenDocument Format (ODF) Alliance says that “serious deficiencies” in Microsoft’s support for ODF need to be addressed to ensure greater interoperability with other ODF-supporting software. ODF Alliance managing director Marino Marcich said in a press statement this week that “support for ODF represents an important and ongoing test of Microsoft’s commitment to real-world interoperability. Unfortunately, serious shortcomings have been identified in Microsoft’s support for ODF. Putting potentially millions of ODF files into circulation that are non-interoperable and incompatible with the ODF support provided by other vendors is a recipe for fragmentation.”

Microsoft's new entry-level server edition, Windows Server 2008 Foundation, is aimed squarely at Linux, and the software giant says its "simplicity" is expected to give it the edge over Linux as the choice server OS for the small business segment. By competing with Linux on a lower price point and touting Windows' familiar interface, Microsoft said it hopes to make both servers and its server OS an easy choice for small businesses looking to deploy a server. Each server, preloaded with the OS, will cost below S$1,500 (US$1,029).

Instead of wandering in ignorance and getting frustrated, or bouncing randomly all over the Internet, 75-year old Emery Fletcher believes in learning from books, and becomes an accomplished Ubuntu user.

In a recent vote, the active majority of Wikipedia authors voted for dual licensing for Wikipedia content: In addition to the previous GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) used by articles and other media, a new "Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license" (CC-BY-SA) will also be used. The amendment will affect all Wikipedia content, as existing content is also to be re-licensed.