Showing headlines posted by sakgarg

As of Tuesday morning, Acquia Drupal--the commercially supported version--and Acquia Network--which offers subscription-based access to technical support and remote network services--are going live. Acquia has also announced that entry-level subscriptions to the Acquia Network will be free of charge through the end of the year, so that people can try the services. Here are details, and some comments we got from Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal and co-founder of Acquia...

InformationWeek details the conception of House Resolution 6898. The bill's name is more cryptic than the shorthand on a prescription order, but could bolster both the US Health Care system, and perceptions of open source in both public and private sectors. The Health-e Information Technology Act of 2008 offers incentives for health care providers to move to an open, shared platform for health records.

Legal news wire service Courthouse News reported recently that Reuters was suing the Commonwealth of Virginia because George Mason University was "handing out its proprietary software." Nothing is ever that simple, is it? George Mason University's Center for History and New Media distributes Zotero, an open source Firefox extension that helps users collect and manage citations found on the web. It performs a similar function as Thomson Reuter's EndNote software. The lawsuit is based on the premise that Zotero's newest beta is able to convert the proprietary EndNote format to the open CSL (Citation Style Language) format.

This week the GNOME Desktop team officially released GNOME version 2.24. This release incorporates numerous bugfixes and impressive new features, including the first release of the GNOME Mobile Platform.

As Downloadsquad is reporting, the Chromium source code for Google's Chrome open source browser has already been fashioned into a new version of the browser: Iron. Apparently German company SRWare developed its knock-off of Chrome for users who are concerned about Google's policies for collecting private information--a constant Achilles heel for the company. SRWare's home page is in German, but the folks at the Incomplete News Project have published a translation with details on what SRWare's version does.

The Linux Plumbers Conference may have ended last Friday, but the discussions -- and one discussion in particular -- will be analyzed, deconstructed, and argued for quite a bit longer. Greg Kroah-Hartman's assertion is that Canonical doesn't contribute significantly to kernel development and the packages that make up the core of a Linux system. Canonical CTO Matt Zimmerman responded to this assertion. It seems at that point, much of the community, developers and users alike, took to examining their particular parts of the open source elephant.

The openSUSE Project recently announced the availability of openSUSE 11.1 Beta 1 for wide scale testing and bug squashing. This development release is available in x86, x86-64 and PPC architectures as a DVD disk image (liveCDs are not available for the current beta). The 11.1 beta provides a decently solid look at where the final release is heading. As with any development release, there are known bugs that vary in severity and new or updated features that the development team is encouraging users try out, in order to find and resolve any bugs and suggest changes and improvements.

OpenOffice.org is in an unenviable place. Office suites -- word processors, spreadsheets, presentations and the ilk -- are utilitarian, complex bundles of software. They are a necessity of modern life, used daily by individuals and businesses all over the world. It isn't that people take them for granted. People don't consider them much at all. It has been a long time since I've had any feelings whatsoever about an office suite. There have been developments in office software that have been innovative, such as online document creation. And though useful, I still can't honestly say that I've been enthusiastic about (or, since Clippy was retired, repulsed by) any office application.

Untangle has announced its new, open source Re-Router Technology, which is available for download now. If you're familiar with Untangle's previous open source gateway software for Linux, this is the same technology for Windows. It lets Windows desktops perform network gateway services such as blocking spam, spyware, viruses, adware and inappropriate websites for a whole network.

Matt Hartley at Datamation recently suggested promoting open source adoption -- using a very different venue. He suggests mall kiosks as a potentially effective way to spread the word about open source software, and how it can work for the average computer user. This is a fascinating idea. User groups could reach several different demographics, populations that might never have heard of Linux, never mind understand the joys (and trials) of using it.

It's good to see news about continuing adoption of open source software in schools around the world. I've written before about how doable it would be for many American schools to reduce costs, increase efficiency and arm kids with Linux notebooks through open source adoption. I've also concluded that excessive love of the Mac and the improbability of the arrival of paperless processes will keep many schools from taking the FOSS leap. However, schools in Oldham, England--a metropolitan borough of Manchester--are leaping.

Sun Microsystems has launched a new effort to compete with Google Code and various Forge sites with its beta site Project Kenai (pronounced Keen-Eye). According to a blog post, the site was launched quietly on Friday, and a primary goal of the site is to host open source projects and encourage collaboration on them. Project Kenai is built on Ruby on Rails, and uses Subversion and Mercurial version-control systems. How will this compete with similar sites?

We've written about the folks at CodeWeavers before. They make a customized, commercial version of Wine called CrossOverLinux. and have been major contributors to Wine. (Wine allows Linux users to run Windows applications.) This post from the CodeWeavers blog details how the company has succesfully ported versions of Chromium--the open source core of Google's Chrome browser--for Mac and Linux. The ports are free and available here. You won't want to run these ports as your main browser, but as proof-of-concept for cross-platform versions of Chrome, this is good news.

I haven't been a big fan of the moves that Yahoo has made recently, but I like the sound of their latest move--opening up their online services and pages to third-party developers, as reported today by the Wall Street Journal. Reporting from a briefing held at the company's Silicon Valley headquarters, the Journal says that everything from Yahoo's home page to Yahoo Mail would become fair game for outside developers--a more open Yahoo. Here's how this may make a lot of sense.

Hypervisors - bare-metal virtualization solutions that don't depend on an underlying operating system - used to be the high-priced spread of the virtualization world. You can still pay a pretty penny for hypervisor solutions from some vendors. But an announcement from Sun yesterday increases the pressure on purely-commercial solutions: Sun's own xVM Server is now open source.

Mark your calendars: this year's Software Freedom Day is September 20 (the third Saturday in September). If you're looking for an occasion to help out with the spread of free and open source software, that's a great one.

Each year, Linden Labs, the folks behind online virtual world Second Life hold the Linden Lab Innovation Awards, dubbed the Hippos. This year Linden recognized the achievements and contributions of seven members of its open source community. The awards ceremony was held live in Florida, but also took place simultaneously within Second Life.

This month marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of the GNU Project by Richard M. Stallman. GNU is one of the oldest and best-known organizations in the free and open-source world, providing not only high-quality software, but also a well-known license (the GNU General Public License), and a philosophy that continues to influence many activists and programmers. The exact anniversary of Stallman's announcement is September 27th, 1983, when he called upon programmers to join him in creating "free Unix."

The open source arena never fails to surprise when it comes to offbeat implementations of community-produced technologies. Put together enough eyeballs and collaboration, and unusual inventions will ensue. We've covered several examples of this phenomenon on OStatic, including open source efforts completely outside the software arena. In this post, you'll find six unusual open source efforts worthy of Rube Goldberg.

By going paperless, it is possible to put a Linux netbook or notebook in the hand of every kid in school. With Linux-based netbooks such as the Asus Eee PCs dropping well below $400 for basic systems and stocked with lots of good open source software, every kid could have a personal computer.