Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The Wikimedia Foundation have published a draft plan for the process of switching from the GNU Free Documentaion Licence (GFDL) over to the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 Licence (CC-BY-SA) for Wikipedia. The change in licensing was made possible by the publication of the GFDL 1.3, which was itself prompted by an initiative of the Wikimedia Foundation.

In preparation for hopefully the final beta version of KOffice 2.0, the bug squad will host a Bug Krush Day next Sunday Jan 25th from approximately 10 am CET. Everybody who has an interest in making KOffice 2.0 usable should try to be present. Especially note that you do not have to have any programming experience to take part of this Krush. The purpose of the exercise is to test the applications and to try to find as many bugs as possible.

When your editor posted the Grumpy Editor's next project, he certainly did not anticipate that it would take more than a year and a half for the next installment to be written. Or that, even after all that time, the project of moving LWN's accounting from proprietary software to free software would be incomplete. But the world is full of surprises, even in places where surprises are most unwelcome - like accounting. Happily, your editor's surprises do not involve counterparty risk, credit-default swaps, or anything else of that sort.

DesktopLinux founder Rick Lehrbaum has posted a fun how-to that shows how to lash a Ubuntu Linux desktop right up to Google's cloud. Lehrbaum shares everything needed to make your Mac- and Vista-using friends feel like they're living with last's year's model.

Mark Shuttleworth is looking forward to a good, clean netbook fight with Microsoft following the release of Windows 7. Speaking with The Reg, the founder of popular Linux distro Ubuntu and chief executive of Canonical called Windows 7 a great operating system. Great? Doesn't Shuttleworth work for the competition? Shouldn't he be building up Windows 7's hidden weaknesses? Apparently not. "I'm not going to 'diss it", he said categorically. So there.

There was a time when the Linux community used BitKeeper as its source code control system, after switching from the open-source CVS. But then Samba developer Andrew Tridgell figured out you could telnet to a BitKeeper server, type "HELP," and get a list of commands. Upon hearing of Tridgell's daring hack, BitMover - the company that maintains BitKeeper - got all license-revokey on the community, changing the terms of the agreement and demanding that Linux developers start paying for its software.

JBoss Operations Network (JON) recently became available as an open source solution through the Jopr project. (That’s pronounced “jopper.”) We interviewed Chris Morgan from Red Hat’s JON group to learn more.

In November 2006, Sun Microsystems began making all of its Java technology implementations open source, offering them under the GPL. More than two years later, reactions are mixed as to what exactly has been the impact of this momentous change. Some, including the chief executive at Eclipse Foundation and Sun's own James Gosling, considered the father of Java, have seen little impact. "That was mostly about community relations," says Gosling, who is CTO of the client software group at Sun. "So far, I think it hasn't had too much [effect]," says Mike Milinkovich, executive director of Eclipse, which was spawned in an IBM-based effort to build Java tools.

iTunes has the looks, the industry muscle, the DRM, and the lock-in. But the iTunes media player is inflexible and limited. Matt Hartley reviews some powerhouse open source media players that offer attractive feature sets, user-friendliness, and don't even try to fence users in.

According to a Nabble post from an OpenStreetMap (OSM) community member the French Minister of the Economy, and the Direction Générale des Finances publiques (DGFiP) in charge of the French cadastre have allowed the OSM project access to vectorised geo-data from the French land registry.

It's one of those perennial age-old battles that can never be resolved. Coke or Pepsi? Chocolate or vanilla? Linux or Windows? I've been in the trenches of those wars for years. I've written about Windows since the days of Windows 2.0, including numerous books and hundreds or even thousands of articles, blogs and columns. Along the way, I've been called every name in the book -- and many you won't find in any books, either -- by Linux proponents, because I've extolled the benefits of Windows, while ignoring those of Linux.

The secret to a more secure and cost effective government is through open source technologies and products. The claim comes from one of Silicon Valley's most respected business leaders Scott McNealy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems. He revealed he has been asked to prepare a paper on the subject for the new administration. "It's intuitively obvious open source is more cost effective and productive than proprietary software," he said. "Open source does not require you to pay a penny to Microsoft or IBM or Oracle or any proprietary vendor any money."

KBasic is a new programming language similar to Visual Basic. It combines the best features of those tools and comes with built-in backward support for those tools as it is 100% syntax compatible to VB and QBasic. It is written with Qt making it entirely cross platform. The Full Version Professional Edition is available to download for KDE now. It follows the old Qt licencing of being GPL licenced for Free Software and commercially sold for proprietary software.

Developers might get the picture, but Eclipse reckons it had better ramp up awareness its products among senior management as it moves beyond tools in 2009. Eclipse Foundation marketing director Ian Skerrett has blogged it's important to help senior business and technology executives to understand the Foundation as it moves into runtimes.

The Ubuntu Mobile operating system is undergoing its most radical change with a port to the ARM processor for Internet devices and netbooks, and may use Nokia's LGPL Qt development environment as an alternative to GNOME. During a presentation at this year's linux.conf.au conference in Hobart, Canonical's David Mandala said Ubuntu Mobile has changed a lot over the past year in that it now includes netbook devices in addition to MIDs and the ARM port.

A new GNUmed live CD is out. With the help of this CD one can test drive GNUmed without altering the currently running environment such as operating system. No installation necessary. Just download the CD image and either burn it to a CD or set up VirtualBox, Vmware/Vmplayer, QEmu or the likes to accept the CD image as a virtual CD drive. Just boot the CD in your physical or virtual PC/Mac and testdrive GNUmed. GNUmed client 0.3.9 is included and configured to connect to either the public GNUmed server via the internet or connect to a GNUmed server included with the CD. No setup needed. Have fun and please let us know how it works for you.

Fred Grott, a programmer who specializes in smartphone applications, has two models for his business: He can write specialized applications in native code that take advantage of all of the features of a specific smartphone, or he can write a Web application that works in the Web browsers of all of the top devices. "Guess which one of those business models [needs] $15K in seed capital and [which] one is in the $250,000 range?" he asks. Given the economics, Grott's choice is simple. Take a standard Web application, add a bit of logic that tests the type of Web browser and then send back slightly customized versions formatted to the screens of smaller handsets.

A quick look at the security vulnerabilities fixed between Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 and 5.3 including metrics and mitigations. For Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 since release and to date, every critical vulnerability has had an update available to address it available from the Red Hat Network either the same day or the next calendar day after the issue was public.

CherryPal announced an Atom-based "Bing" netbook that runs Linux or Windows XP, and offers a claimed five hours of battery life. The company also announced an upgraded version of its Linux-based nettop, the CherryPal C114, and launched a "Green Maraschino" open-source Linux distribution supporting the Bing.

The South African State IT Agency’s (SITA) Free and Open Source Software Programme Office (FPO) will host the second annual chief information officers (CIO) workshop on February 24. The one-day workshop will bring together all government IT decision makers to share ideas and experiences regarding FOSS implementation in government.