Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

John Lilly became chief executive of Mozilla Corp. in January, moving up from his role as chief operating officer. He's been with the company that created the open-source Firefox browser since 2005, the year Firefox 1.5 was released. Before Firefox, Microsoft's Internet Explorer dominated the Web. Now Microsoft's share is down and Mozilla's share is 20 percent. The size of the organization makes Mozilla's tremendous success that much more remarkable. Headquartered in Mountain View, it has fewer than 200 employees.

As November's national election looms in the United States, voters can expect increasing coverage of the hot-button issues through the mainstream media and campaign ads. On issues important to the open source and free software communities, however, information is harder to come by. Today we take a look at what the Democratic and Republican candidates say about questions close to the FOSS voter.

IBM has had enough of the silliness that goes on at some of the standards bodies it belongs to. So Big Blue now has a new policy: No shenanigans. Setting standards for hardware, software, communications protocols, document formats -- is a job that's way too important to be done in the dark, says IBM.

Everyone loves open source - well, everyone apart from Microsoft, that is. The only problem with open source is deciding how much code control you're willing to relinquish, especially when open source puts your precious bits and bytes - and ultimately your own product plans - into the hands of your competitors.

Visa announced plans Thursday to develop payment and payment-related services for both Nokia mobile handsets and those running Google's new Android platform. In addition, Visa announced a pilot program that enables U.S. Bank Visa cardholders to transfer money using a mobile phone. The announcement looks to revive the efforts of credit card companies to push consumers toward mobile payments and mobile commerce.

Sometimes I get the feeling that I only know about 5% of what VLC can do. Everyone knows it's a dependable, free, cross-platform media player. But read through the release notes for the latest version, 0.9.2, and you will see a dizzying array of server, network streaming, and conversion functions, most of which I have never even touched -- and the new VLC exposes a lot more of that functionality. You can grab source code and Windows and Mac OS X binaries from videolan.org. Ready-made builds for Linux are not as easy to come by; VideoLAN prefers to work through distros' packaging systems, and the hot-off-the-presses 0.9.2 is not yet available in most of them.

The Fedora project is back on track after its recent "infrastructure issues" with new package signing keys as well as packages and updates signed with the new keys. Fedora users should be able to pick up the new key and update their systems now, with a minimum of hassle—just verifying and accepting the new key. But, no further information has been released about exactly what went wrong, leading to more speculation and some worry in the Fedora community.

Should European governments favor open-source software when they hold tenders for public contracts? Economists and policy-makers appear to think so, but industry giants, including Microsoft Corp., argue that this would be discriminatory and are considering legal action to prevent this from happening. A public consultation on a new set of guidelines regarding software interoperability in the public sector in Europe closed this week, sparking submissions from 50 lobby groups and firms from all corners of the software industry.

Devil-Linux might sound hellish for a Linux distribution, but this live CD offers many blessings for your server needs. Originally developed as a router/firewall distribution, Devil-Linux has expanded its functionality to include nearly every service that a server might offer. It can function as an LDAP server, a VPN server, an email or file server, and more. As stated in the documentation, Devil-Linux runs directly from a CD or DVD-ROM only, so you don't need to install anything to a hard disk -- just keep the Devil-Linux configuration files that automate the configuration upon reboot on a diskette or USB drive. Since access to the live CD is read-only, it's impossible to install rootkits or other malicious software to the distribution.

Should European governments favor open-source software when they hold tenders for public contracts? Economists and policy makers appear to think so, but industry giants including Microsoft argue that this would be discriminatory and are considering legal action to prevent this from happening. A public consultation on a new set of guidelines regarding software interoperability in the public sector in Europe closed this week, sparking submissions from 50 lobby groups and firms from all corners of the software industry.

The biggest news in the Apple-focused blogosphere this week came courtesy of the Google/HTC/T-Mobile G1 smartphone. Can it kill the iPhone? Most Apple fans don't seem overly worried, but it does have a couple of attractive features, like a slide-out keyboard. Coming back around to Apple and its iPhone App Store, the company has been cracking down with its non-disclosure agreements.

Microsoft has built a strategy around the planned early-November release of its high-performance computing server that it hopes will be the catalyst to deliver massive computing power for future applications. The strategy encompasses Microsoft applying its typical mantra of “simplifying computing” to the costly and often complex high-performance computing world in the form of its Windows HPC Server 2008 surrounded by Microsoft’s collection of applications, management wares, development tools and independent software vendor community.

Open source software (OSS) has now become a well recognised and utilised brand. A brand that, if we were to get a broad sweeping perception poll on, would generally stand for free, fair and cost effective. However, despite this growth, the battle between open source and traditional software still rages on whereby the pros and cons for each can be endlessly debated.

On September 27, 1983, Richard M. Stallman announced his intention to found the GNU project in order to build a free operating system. Now, 25 years later, the Free Software Foundation is marking the anniversary of the announcement with a month-long celebration. Looking back at the last quarter century, Stallman expresses some guarded satisfaction with the growth of the free software movement, but also some bemusement about how it has grown more complex as it has faced new challenges from within and without, and an awareness of how far it still has to go to reach its goals.

OK. You've heard of Linux. It's another operating system for a computer. But why use it when you can choose between Windows and Macs? Unless you run business-class servers, Linux isn't really something consumers really need to hear about, right? Well, if that's what you think Linux is, you couldn't be further from the truth. Look around you. Linux is everywhere, but you may not know it.

Sooner or later, we all end up installing new software on our computers. Whether it's a new version of Firefox, or a cool game, or a video editing package, there comes a time when you want to make your system do more than it can do now. Under Linux, installing new applications isn't a particularly hard task, but installations do come in several different varieties, so it's worth understanding the differences and what you'll need to know to make them work.

Yamaha has added embedded Linux to the electronic "player piano" add-on it offers with some models. With version 3.0 of the Mark IV firmware, MontaVista Linux controls the 333MHz AMD Geode-based piano, enabling new interface possibilities, acoustic recording, and interaction with Web-based services.

While I am not always a fan of Microsoft's actions around technology in education, I do have to give them credit for hiring my friends Vital Wave Consulting to do a 5 year Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) study on introducing computers into Indian schools that focused on multiple different configurations, platforms, and even operating systems.

Linux is enjoying growth, with a contingent of devotees too large to be called a cult following at this point. Solaris, meanwhile, has thrived as a longstanding, primary Unix platform geared to enterprises. But with Linux the object of so much buzz in the industry, can Sun's rival Solaris Unix OS hang on, or is it destined to be displaced by Linux altogether?

With the Atom-based ASUS Eee PC 901 we have already delivered disk encryption benchmarks and a Linux distribution comparison of Xandros, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Mandriva. This Intel 1.6GHz Diamondville processor isn't the fastest, but it's performing quite well for a netbook. With netbooks and their users often on the go though, for those not using the suspend and resume mode the boot time can be equally important as the in-desktop performance. To look at this we are delivering boot performance benchmarks for the Eee PC 901 from Fedora 9, Fedora 10, Ubuntu 8.10, and Mandriva 2009.