Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The number of open source projects targeting mobile platforms is rising sharply, according to Black Duck Software, the leading global provider of products and services for accelerating software development through the managed use of open source software. Black Duck spiders the Internet collecting open source and other downloadable code into a repository it calls the Black Duck KnowledgeBase.

In 2007, Fedora, Red Hat's community Linux distribution, hit an all-time low. Users were leaving it behind in favor of Ubuntu and openSUSE. Well-known Linux evangelist Eric S. Raymond, after looking at the latest release, Fedora Core 6, dismissed Fedora as junk. Raymond wrote at the time, "Over the last five years, I've watched Red Hat/Fedora throw away what a near-unassailable lead was at one time in technical prowess, market share and community prestige. The blunders have been legion on both technical and political levels."

Sometimes open source projects "fork." Disagreements over direction cause a splinter group to hive off and maintain their own separate code base. This is going to happen with well-known heavyweight FOSS staple, MySQL, after the original author quit Sun Microsystems earlier this month.

How do you take a project with 40 million lines of code that's shipping on millions of devices around the world and make it open source? That's the Everest of a problem facing the Symbian Foundation as they start to deliver on the promises made when Nokia brought Symbian under its wing.

For simplicity's sake, I keep all of my general-purpose boxes running the same Linux distribution. That minimizes conflicts when sharing applications and data, but every substantial upgrade means downloading the same packages multiple times — taking a toll on bandwidth. I used to use apt-proxy to intelligently cache downloaded packages for all the machines to share, but there are alternatives: apt-cacher, apt-cacher-ng, and approx, as well as options available for RPM-based distributions. This article will take a look at some of these tools.

With a new government policy on open source announced, The H sounded out open source vendors for their reactions. Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems was the first person The H called. He was pleased to see the updated policy, "It's a great thing to see it published, as the 2004 policy didn't help very much". The new policy had "a lot of good things in it" such as the costing in of exit, or as Phipps calls them, sundown costs and the preference towards open source because of, as the policy puts it, "its inherent flexibility". Phipps explained "Open source has inherent benefits in that it gives a CIO control of the complete life-cycle. The four freedoms put the CIO in control".

The logic bomb episode at Fannie Mae is an illustration of the destruction that's possible when enterprises fail to properly monitor user privileges. IT managers must be aware of who has what privileges and determine the appropriate level of access for all users.

We are certain that many of you want to try Linux to see what it is like, but have no idea where to start or how to get into it. This article is the first installment in a four-part guide that will gradually introduce you to the Linux environment and how to adjust to it if you are a new user. One of the hardest things to do while starting out is finding a distro that is right for you. Many users try several before settling on one of two that they really like. Once they find a distro that feels right, they are often reluctant to switch unless the distro becomes unsuitable for their needs for whatever reason.

Microsoft filed suit against TomTom today, alleging that the in-car navigation company's devices violate eight of its patents -- including three that relate to TomTom's implementation of the Linux kernel. It's believed to be the first time Microsoft has filed a patent suit over Linux, after claiming for years that elements of the open-source operating system violate its patents. However, Microsoft says open-source software is not the intended focal point of the action. Five of the alleged patent violations relate to proprietary software.

[Maybe we will finally get to see some of those 200 or so patents Microsoft keeps (not) talking about. - Scott]

Project Oekonux researches the economical, political and social forms of Free Software and similar forms of production we collectively call peer production. In Project Oekonux, different people with different reasons and different approaches get together to build something new. A lot of participants want to know, whether and if so, how, the peer production can serve as a basis for a new society.

Linux certainly has established itself as a prominent server OS these days, pushing Unix into the background. But the open source OS shares the stage with commercial software giant Microsoft, which remains a dominant player with Windows Server. Gartner research published this month found the server OS market shaping up as a battle between Windows Server and Linux. Gartner in other research also has found both OSes on a growth track in terms of revenue. "There still seems to be plenty of robust interest in deploying on Windows, but Linux is still very key," says Gartner analyst George Weiss.

This morning, Mountain View-based startup Appcelerator is taking the wraps off its second Preview Release for Titanium, an open-source developer platform meant to compete with Adobe AIR and the likes for building rich internet, mobile and desktop applications. Titanium PR2 comes with a number of new features that are worth taking a look at, like an extensible Module API and built-in support for Linux and a wide range of programming languages like Python, Ruby and JavaScript in addition to C++. More technical details are outlined on the company blog Appcelerant.

Google wants to join Mozilla in the European Commission case against Microsoft regarding its bundling of Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system. Earlier this month Mozilla's Mitchell Baker said that "Microsoft's business practices have fundamentally diminished (in fact, came very close to eliminating) competition, choice and innovation in how people access the Internet." In a post on Google's Public Policy Blog, the Vice President of product management, Sundar Pichai, details why they requested to join the proceedings as an interested third party.

[Look who's joining the party? - Scott]

Location, privacy and web standards: as the first alpha and beta releases of Fennec, Mozilla's mobile browser, come out, Mozilla VP Jay Sullivan tells us the phone isn't a separate world any more.

The day of the mold-your-own OS has come, and Linux is the clay. Linux provides free and open access to the source for the OS itself. Developers are free to tailor a custom Linux -- even down to the level of the kernel itself. You can trim away drivers, services, and other OS components unneeded by the task for which the custom distribution will be targeted.

There's no doubt that more and more scrutiny is being applied to patents around the world, with particularly hopeful moves in the US in the wake of the Bilski judgment. So it's a wise move on the FSF's part to turn up the pressure with their EndSoftwarePatents.org campaign.

Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer had some interesting things to say yesterday about which companies Microsoft sees as its competitors in the client operating system space. You'd think Apple was their number one competitor - and you'd be wrong. Microsoft sees two other competitors as their primary adversaries.

The UK government has published an updated policy on open source in government. The new policy takes a more aggressive position on government use of open source than the original policy, published in 2004. That document set out five policy points that allowed open source based solutions to be considered alongside proprietary solutions and tried to avoid lock in to proprietary software. The new policy document notes how the 2004 policy has already had effects, such as 50 per cent use of Apache web server within departmental web sites, and the NHS "Spine" migration to a Linux based infrastructure, which will cover 35 per cent of NHS organisations.

When budgets are tightening pretty much everywhere, selling businesses on new software systems is not an easy job. However, open source development and support firms are using the world's economic malaise to underscore their value propositions, hoping cash-strapped companies may give free software a closer look.

Microsoft TechNetMicrosoft Unified Messaging Kurt Roeckx has been appointed to the post by Debian leader Steve McIntyre. As required by the project constitution, McIntyre made the appointment in consultation with the acting secretary, Bdale Garbee. Manoj Srivastava, the former secretary, resigned on December 18, following dissatisfaction among project members over the options offered in a vote about the release of Lenny.