Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The Debian project is known for its public brawls, but the truth of the matter is that the Debian developers have not lived up to that reputation in recent years. The recent outburst over the attempted "semi-hijacking" of the dpkg maintainership shows that Debian still knows how to run a flame war, though. It also raises some interesting issues on how packages should be maintained, how derivative distributions work with their upstream versions, and what moral rights, if any, a program's initial author retains years later.

Another week and another bag-full of Linux releases. Over the past week Damn Small Linux has edged closer to a 4.3 release with a release candidate, Astaro is showing off its security appliance distro, Knoppix makes big changes in 5.3.1 and Fedora issues a beta release of the forthcoming Fedora 9 release.

The New York Times has a great write-up of the continued rapid growth of Red Hat. Despite the looming recession, Red Hat is predicting 30 percent revenue growth in the coming year, to more than half a billion dollars. For a few years, Mike has been talking about how to make money while giving away infinite goods, and Red Hat could probably be the poster child for his argument. Despite the fact that virtually all of its "products" are available for free on the Internet, Red Hat is still convincing companies to pay it hundreds of millions of dollars.

Love it or hate it, anyone who runs Ubuntu has at least heard of Automatix. This program made it possible for any Ubuntu user to easily add a host of new programs and media codices to a desktop. Now, however, Automatix's developers are being pulled away to other projects, so they have announced that they will no longer be working on their popular software installation program.

Photo buffs who are fond of open source software would do well to look at blueMarine. Right now, the free, cross-platform application's strength is image management, but it is on its way to becoming a complete workflow tool. Its cataloging features are robust, its architecture is extensible, and it takes some intriguing new approaches. Java consultant Fabrizio Giudici started the project in 2003, but it languished as he grew frustrated with the limitations of the Swing toolkit. In 2006, he rebuilt the code using the newly released NetBeans platform, and hasn't looked back since.

"Here is a new flash file system developed by Nokia engineers with help from the University of Szeged. The new file-system is called UBIFS, which stands for UBI file system. UBI is the wear-leveling/ bad-block handling/volume management layer which is already in mainline (see drivers/mtd/ubi)," began Artem Bityutskiy. He explained that UBIFS is stable and "very close to being production ready", aiming to offer improved performance and scalability compared to JFFS2 by implementing write-back caching, and storing a file-system index rather than rebuilding it each time the media is mounted. The write-back cache implementation claims to offer around a 100 time improvement in write performance over JFFS2.

Red Hat's profit rose 7 per cent during its fiscal fourth quarter, with a healthy bump in revenue offset by the open source software distributor's increased sales, marketing, and R&D expenses. In Red Hat's first quarter under new CEO James Whitehurst, the company earned $22m, compared to $20.3m in the same period last year.

"It's not over until it's over," is a classic aphorism that Yogi Berra is reputed to have coined. He couldn't have been more right when it comes to Microsoft's quest to transform its Office 2007 file formats into a broadly recognized international standard. With less than 24 hours to go before the cut off for nations to change their votes in the great contest to see if the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) will grant Office Open XML (OOXML) standards status, the playing field is shifting like the bases on a sandlot baseball diamond.

Red Hat, the Linux software company, gave a nice welcome present Thursday to its new chief executive, James Whitehurst. The company, which distributes Linux and other open-source software, reported that its quarterly sales grew 27 percent and earnings slightly surpassed analysts’ consensus estimate. The company also presented an upbeat outlook for its just-started fiscal year, predicting growth of another 30 percent. In after-hours trading, Red Hat shares rose nearly 5 percent.

Ploticus is a throwback to the days when Unix programs did one thing, and did it well, using a minimum of system resources. Its SourceForge.net page hints at this orientation by describing Ploticus as "non-interactive" software for "just-in-time graph generation." How useful it is depends on what you want to do, whether you use the settings that come with the program or define your own, and your willingness to master a lengthy -- if well-documented -- set of options.

In a few days the fate of Microsoft's Office Open XML will be known - whether it will be accepted as a second ISO standard for documents. Two years ago, the Open Document Format was ratified as a standard. Plenty of politicking has gone on over the past month or so and it makes for some interesting reading.

LifeType is a full-featured GPL blogging platform designed for use with a MySQL database and PHP. You'll need access to a server in order to properly install and use LifeType, but the installation is easy with LifeType's wizard, which can even create your MySQL database and all the tables you need, automatically. In addition to support for all the "standard" blog features, such as pinging, trackbacks, commenting, mobile blogging, and RSS feeds, LifeType is perfect for site owners who want to administer multiple blogs and users through one back end. Even if you have only one blog and one user, you'll appreciate the features and flexibility of LifeType.

"Now that we are (presumably) approaching the next merge window, can I ask what use (if any) will you be making of the linux-next tree? Alternatively, is there any information you want from it?" Stephen Rothwell asked regarding the tree he started maintaining last month for tracking upcoming stable merges.

OpenOffice.org has released the latest edition of its open source productivity suite, with refinements to further close the gap on Microsoft and enable migration from MS Office. The OpenOffice.org 2.4 database, Base, now supports MS-Access 2007, while capabilities for MySQL, Oracle JDBC and native HSQL databases have been improved.

Anyone under the delusion that you can't make money from open source and Linux should have been on Red Hat's 2008 fiscal year earnings call on March 27. If they had been, they would have heard Red Hat executives report that the Linux giant posted net income of $76.7 million, or $0.36 per diluted share, for the year, compared with $59.9 million, or $.29 per diluted share, in the prior year.

You've almost got to feel sorry for Google. It tries to do something cool with its annual Summer of Code program, but some sourpusses just have to spoil the idyllic 60's vibe. Google this month announced the 174 project organizations it is supporting in the 2008 GSOC.

We got the chance to talk to a lot of developers at JBoss World, including Mark Proctor. In case you don’t know the name, he’s the leader of the Drools project, also known as JBoss Rules to the enterprise folks.

Last weekend a group of developers gathered in Berlin at the KDAB office for an Akonadi sprint. The goal was simple, getting Akonadi in shape for the first public release of Akonadi when KDE 4.1 is released. In the couple of days they met, they made an amazing amount of 270 modifications to the KDE repository, and worked on average from 10am to 3am to make a big step into reaching that goal.

Filling out tax returns has traditionally been an area where Linux comes up short compared to the proprietary platforms, but you actually have several options for using commercial income tax products on a Linux platform. Here's a quick look at three commercial tax offerings I found that work just fine using Ubuntu 7.10 and Firefox 2.0.0.12, even though two of the three vendors warn Linux users they are not supported. Translation: Don't look for vendor help if you run into problems.

The SourceForge OpenEMR group would like to announce the recent addition of two board members, Dr. Michiel Bosman of the Netherlands and Dr. Mark Leeds of Florida.