Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Stormy Peters recently became the executive director of the GNOME Foundation, where she is already working to raise public awareness of the GNOME desktop environment and user interface, and to attract new corporate sponsors and developers to the GNOME community. She says it was not as much a move away from her old job at OpenLogic and the for-profit business world as it was a move toward the community she's been part of for years.

For a decade, Microsoft was open source's worst enemy, combating it at every turn. But last week Microsoft joined the Apache open source project as a platinum sponsor, promising to put $100,000 per year into a project that beats its own IIS (Internet Information Services) in the market. Microsoft also made some of their patents available for use in GPL software like Linux without a royalty. Has Redmond given up the fight? Or is this just their latest strategy?

This year has already seen the second release of gNewSense, the completely free distribution endorsed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), and the announcement that Ubuntu will have a free software option as part of its installation program. Now, if Alexandre Oliva, a Red Hat employee best-known as a board member of the Free Software Foundation Latin America (FSFLA), has his way, building a 100% free distribution will become easier thanks to his linux-libre project. Unfortunately, the path to freedom, he's finding, is often blocked by politics and a preference for convenience over ideals.

Yahoo! Inc. investors re-elected the Internet company's board, with 85 percent of votes supporting Chief Executive Officer Jerry Yang after he fended off a proxy battle with billionaire investor Carl Icahn. Chairman Roy Bostock was re-elected with about 80 percent of the votes, Yahoo said today in a statement after its annual meeting in San Jose, California. Icahn was appointed to the board after the meeting.

Some Ubuntu fans out there may remember Automatix, a tool for Ubuntu that allowed easy access to many popular non-free applications and commonly-used audio and video codecs. It debuted a few years ago, and got negative reviews from Ubuntu developers and experienced users due to the risk of breaking dependencies, but it offered an easy solution for beginners who weren't familiar with the way deb packages worked. Automatix was discontinued in March, when its developers moved on to other projects. Now Ultamatix hopes to continue where Automatix left off.

Examining NetApplications’ numbers, it is almost certain that this data is highly dependent on daily user behavior and that any results have to be taken with a grain of salt. But if the numbers are any indication then it is clear that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer market share is trending down, while Mozilla is playing with the 20% range and is successfully jumping over this mark more often in recent days. The average market share for Firefox was 19.27% in June, up from 18.41% in May. The Internet Explorer dropped from 73.75% to 72.95% in the same time frame.

With the GoogleMapAPI project, you can easily add a Google Map to your PHP Web site. GoogleMapAPI is not packaged for Ubuntu, Fedora or openSUSE. For this article I'll use a 64-bit Fedora 9 machine with version 2.5 of GoogleMapAPI. The commands shown below install the main PHP file in a site-accessible directory, with the remainder of the distribution in /usr/local for reference.

So you're looking for medical advice. Would you: a) call your doctor, b) consult a medical journal or c) go to a wiki? Perhaps surprisingly, many people are beginning to go the wiki route. At least, they're starting with wikis, and maybe after that they're calling their doctors, reading journals, or otherwise getting second and third opinions.

Linux is beginning to find its legs as the foundation in many different technologies and in the process is fueling a feedback loop that is helping accelerate the operating system’s popularity. As more and more people contribute from areas such as mobile, data center power management, and real-time technologies, innovations are coming rapid fire and when folded into the Linux kernel provide benefits across a wide spectrum.

Alfresco Software Thursday said it has added support for SharePoint Server 2007 protocols to its Alfresco Labs 3 beta and created an open source clone of Microsoft's content management platform. Alfresco, which is expected to ship the Labs content-management server near the end of September, added protocols that govern communication between Microsoft Office and SharePoint Server.

The Openmoko Neo Freerunner phone was released only a few weeks ago, and already, a customized version called the W.E. Phone is now available for purchase. So what's the difference between the naked-as-a-baby Neo and the Canadian-based W.E.? The latter comes with a full bundle of custom Google applications, on top of the core GNU/Linux OS base with dialing, SMS and contacts.

One of the things that has amazed me recently is the power of the letter - or, more specifically, the power of the letter when sent to an MP or MEP. Naively, I would have expected a deafening silence from these exalted beings in receipt of my ever so 'umble communications, but by and large they are astonishingly quick to respond, often with personal replies. From this I draw an important lesson: that it is always worth writing to your Mps/MEPs about things that matter to you.

Virtualisation is on the brink of turning operating systems into a commodity item. It may be realistic to see software applications shipped as virtual computer images in the near future. Linux has much to benefit from this, with a repeat of the phenomenal adoption rate it has enjoyed since the ASUS Eee PC.

Lotus's marquee customer was an unnamed major bank in Asia that licensed 300,000 Lotus Notes seats, as well as taking up the free Lotus Symphony office suite. Other organisations choosing Lotus Notes and Domino over Microsoft's products include Max New York Life and Aviva (India), GD Development Bank and DL Cosco Shipyard (China), Affin Bank and Trakando (Singapore), and Russian Railways (Russia). "Enterprise customers - especially many rapidly-growing businesses in emerging global markets - are choosing Lotus software for its open, flexible design," said Bob Picciano general manager, Lotus Software.

DNS is fundamental to network operations, but rather surprisingly, given the usual free/open source software community's habit of having multiple versions of everything, it has evolved into a DNS server monoculture dominated by ISC BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain). All other issues aside, such as security and performance, monoculture is not healthy. There's a whole world outside of BIND; a pleasant world full of DNS servers that are simple to configure, and reliable and secure to use.

Heard about Knol yet? It's Google's Xth new service, and it's a place where you can put up "an authoritative article about a specific topic". That's a knol too. Article=knol. My first encounter with Knol was at Pointless Games, an entry by my friend Bernie DeKoven, a funsmith of the first water balloon. A knol, Knol tells us, is "a unit of knowledge".

Hereâ??s the final installment of Bill Nottinghamâ??s series based on the talk he gave at this yearâ??s Red Hat Summit. Find out about the latest and greatest Fedoraâ?¢ developmentsâ?¦ and the future of Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® from this experienced engineer. Missed the first part? Catch up in the archives.

To describe India’s relationship with OLPC as “rocky” would almost be an understatement. Back in 2006 for example the Indian Ministry of Education was very critical of the project and called it "pedagogically suspect". Later that year some Indian organizations came together and announced their work on a “$10 laptop”. Then suddenly in autumn of 2007 the first information about a small pilot-site in Khairat became available which was soon followed by quite an extensive report from the school which appeared on the OLPC wiki.

Alfresco Software announced Thursday the availability of Alfresco Labs version 3, an open source alternative to Microsoft's enterprise content management software SharePoint. Formerly called"Alfresco Community," Alfresco Labs 3 offers users the first open source fully compatible SharePoint repository.

While OpenOffice.org Base is good for storing and querying data, it doesn't provide any easy way to chart information. This is exactly what Calc does best, with its dedicated chart module. If you want to visualize data stored in a Base database, you can write an OOo Basic macro that pulls data from a database, inserts it into a Calc spreadsheet, and then creates a chart. Here's how.