Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Zack Urlocker of MySQL fame was at the Stanford Accel Symposium earlier this week and, along with some other open-source heavyweights, participated on a panel that attempted to cull some lessons learned in building open-source businesses. If you didn't get to attend the event, don't panic. Urlocker has written up a few key principles.

The bad economy may be a boon to relatively inexpensive open-source IP PBXs, which one study says already account for nearly 18% of all PBXs installed last year in North American business networks. Because they are generally less expensive, open source products may become attractive to more corporate users as their budgets are cut, laying the groundwork for a growth spurt, according to the recent study by Eastern Management Group.

The Linux Foundation — the not-for-profit that keeps Linus in keyboards, and most recently, has been looking to glam things up a bit — earlier this month provided a first glimpse into its plans for the 2009 Collaboration Summit, to be held April 8-10 in San Francisco.

Novell officials cited declining fortunes across its business yesterday "due to the slowing economy" as it summarized its first-quarter results of 2009. CFO Dana Russell said net revenue for the quarter was $215 million, compared with net revenue of $231 million for the first quarter of 2008. Net income was $11 million, or 3 cents per share, compared with net income of $17 million, or 5 cents per share, for the same period the year before, Russell said in Novell's quarterly earnings report teleconference.

Recently we looked at networking your Linux receiver – and described how you can stream video from it to any PC on the same network. Now we'll take these networking aspirations further afield by going online. Although a few satellite receivers offer the Ethernet port that gives rise to such flexibility, only Linux-based receivers are capable of taking full advantage of such functionality.

Without much fanfare or self-congratulations, networking giant Cisco Systems has become one of the top contributors to the Linux kernel and an active contributor to the broader open source community. It's a message that Cisco isn't boasting about yet, but was willing to discuss with InternetNews.com. Cisco is the world's largest networking vendor and a technology juggernaut that is seeing the value in using and contributing to open source.

Exciting news from the LinuxDNA project, which earlier this month successfully compiled a recent Linux kernel with the Intel C/C++ compiler (ICC). This is not just a compile without errors, this is — for the most part — a fully bootable, compatible Linux kernel that can boot into a full Linux system. The full system is based on Gentoo Linux, and utilizes kernel version 2.6.22.

I was asked by the editor of OLPC News to comment on the sales of the Intel Classmate PC based on my experiences seeing its marketing while visiting Colombia this month. I have also seen its competition, the ASUS Eee PC being sold there the past 2 years. These events have happened while people asked me where they could purchase an OLPC XO that I had shown them. My basic response to those interested in the OLPC XO has been to say that they needed to purchase one via Ebay.com, since I had arrived in Colombia after the G1G1 program had ended the past 2 years. Just shipping an envelope via FedEx to Colombia costs $50, so most would not get the XO from my suggested source after paying the initial Ebay price.

Novell's $340 million lifeline from Microsoft appears to be losing its potency. Although Microsoft originally gifted Novell $240 million to help fight Red Hat, and later added another $100 million to the pile, it doesn't seem to be enough to revive Novell's fortunes, as the company reported disappointing first-quarter earnings and a slide even in its Linux business, which had been growing fairly well.

In a presentation at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE), GNOME Foundation executive director Stormy Peters discussed the differences between companies and communities and how to bridge the gap. This issue is becoming increasingly important for open source software projects that are trying to build close ties with corporate adopters and contributors.

What do you get when you put a stable operating system, an innovative desktop manager and plenty of eye candies together? You get nothing short of a beautiful and functional OS. Elive is a Debian-based Linux distro, customized with Enlightenment e17 desktop manager. It is designed with the aim of providing a stable, fully functional and beautiful operating system that can run with minimal hardware requirement.

The realtime preemption project is a longstanding effort to provide deterministic response times in a general-purpose kernel. Much code resulting from this work has been merged into the mainline kernel over the last few years, and a number of vendors are shipping commercial products based upon it. But, for the last year or so, progress toward getting the rest of the realtime work into the mainline has slowed.

Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin said in his blog yesterday (26th February) that the Microsoft patent infringement suite against TomTom, at least at present, does not appear to be a covert attack on Linux. Microsoft have made assurances that their dispute is solely with TomTom and Zemlin says there is no reason to doubt that is the case, or to suspect a move against the Linux ecosystem.

One Laptop Per Child program has a new twist for small deployments. Rather than selling XO's to already funded projects wanting 100 or so XO's for programs that have committed community buy-in and long-term project plans, OLPC is going to develop: OLPCorps Africa - $3,500,000 for 100 teams of college students to get $35,000 in support for 10 week projects in Africa. Each group gets 100 XO laptops, assorted hardware, a $10,000 stipend, and 10-day training in Kigali, Rwanda, before being sent out to projects they need to have arranged by March 27th. While the OLPCorps Africa is a great idea - similar to the Peace Corps or Geekcorps - 10 weeks is wastefully too short, college students, while meaning well, are the wrong implementers, and $3.5 million could be much better invested in small deployments.

As a kind of pint-sized free software fidei defensor I feel obliged to counter some of the misconceptions that are put about on the subject around the Web. But I find myself in a slightly embarrassing situation here, in that I need to comment on some statements that have appeared in the virtual pages of Computerworld UK.

As the global economic crisis deepens, companies are considering options they might once have rejected out of hand in order to cut costs. Open source vendors have long waved the lower-TCO banner, and the recession seems to fueling business in the sector. It's not quite clear, though, whether a switch to open source will result in cost savings in the long run.

This interview with lead developer Stefan Kost continues my report on the development of Buzztard. As the interview reveals, Stefan's work on Buzztard represents only one level of his deep involvement in Linux software development.

It has been a number of months since CrossOver Games was last updated, but this morning CodeWeavers has issued a new update for this software based upon WINE that allows gamers to run their favorite DirectX and OpenGL Windows titles on Linux.

Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard (HP) have announced an expanded partnership in which HP will become a key distributor of Sun's Solaris 10 operating system. According to Jeff Carlat, Director of Marketing in the HP software group for the ProLiant and BladeSystem platforms, "Customers have been demanding increased levels of support for Solaris 10" and this partnership is the result. Sun previously signed distribution deals with IBM and Dell in 2007. HP, certified with Solaris since 1996, will be distributing and providing support for Solaris on its ProLiant server and BladeSystem platforms.

Trolling around the Linux blogosphere, one can't help but come across repeated references to this company in Redmond, Wash., that makes a similar operating system. They're putting this Windows thing in dual-boot laptops over at Dell, and Red Hat just signed an interoperability agreement with these Microsoft people.