Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Linden Lab, the creator of online virtual community Second Life, released its viewer earlier this year with a GPL 2.0 license, adding a clause called the "FLOSS exception," which releases developers using certain open source licenses from the requirement that any derivative works be licensed under the GPL. Linden added the exception to make it possible for many more developers to create new applications from Second Life viewer code. "We had the sense that Second Life has the potential to be much bigger than Linden Lab alone," says Rob Lanphier, Linden's director of open source development. "We needed to figured out a way to let the world build this into a much bigger thing."

The team behind the OpenVZ project will announce today the availability of its operating system virtualization software for the latest stable release of the Linux kernel. OpenVZ for Linux 2.6.22 now supports user ID namespaces for improved security, and has new process ID namespace code that makes live migration possible.

Every few years, I check in on how OpenOffice.org Writer compares to Microsoft Word. The first comparison came in 2002, the second in 2005. In those two comparisons, OpenOffice.org emerged as superior, not least for its greater stability. With Microsoft Office 2007 now out for six months and OpenOffice.org 2.3 about to be released, what's the situation today? To find out, I compared the two programs on the tools that most intermediate to advanced users are likely to use.

According to GPLMedicine.org and a company letter,AcerMed is officially dead. Fred Trotter opines:"The important thing to note here is what did NOT matter. The AcerMed people seemed decent enough: did not matter. AcerMed was CCHIT certified: did not matter. AcerMed was recommended in the industry press and by industry experts: did not matter. Companies get sued, people get sick. When will the medical community wake up to the fact that proprietary medical software is incompatible with medicine, incompatible with free thought and dangerous to patient data?"

South Africa's minister of public services, Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, this week accepted an invitation to be a patron of FOSSFA. On her acceptance, Fraser-Moleketi emphasised that she did not want to be a figurehead for an inactive structure, but rather wanted to be involved with something that was going somewhere. Tectonic spoke to FOSSFA to find out what the foundation has planned.

When the Open Source Software Institute (OSSI) sought Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-2 validation for its OpenSSL toolkit last year, it was anything but smooth sailing. In fact, the whole process took so long that by the time it eventually wound its way through the validation process, it was already technically outdated. OSSI has just submitted a new OpenSSL update for FIPS validation but, according to Executive Director John Weathersby, things are bound to go much more smoothly this time around.

If you manage a system that's accessed by multiple users, you might have a user who hogs the disk space. Using disk quotas you can limit the amount of space available to each user. It's fairly easy to set up quotas, and once you are done you will be able to control the number of inodes and blocks owned by any user or group. Control over the disk blocks means that you can specify exactly how many bytes of disk space are available to a user or group. Since inodes store information about files, by limiting the number of inodes, you can limit the number of files users can create.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Colour Picker and Welcome applets appear for Plasma. Many bugs fixed, especially through the merge of the Summer of Code project "KRDC Revamp". A KPart created, amongst other improvements in Marble. Support for XESAM UserLanguage queries in Strigi. More work, especially in playlist handling, for Amarok 2.0. Improved search interface in KSystemLog. A return to work on KRecipes. KVocTrain is renamed Parley. Restart of development on a successor to the Eigen math library, Eigen2. Start of a port of KMLDonkey, a file sharing frontend, to KDE 4. Parts of the Cokoon decorator infrastructure ported from Python to C++. Security fixes in KDM. Work on page effects in KPresenter. Kross bindings for the Falcon programming language. Import of PyKDE4, new Python bindings for KDE development. KDE SVN housekeeping sees the move of a variety of unmaintained applications to more relevant locations with regard to the KDE 4 release.

IBM joined OpenOffice.org on Sept.10, and the company is bringing its programming muscle with it to improve the popular open-source office suite. While IBM has long used OpenOffice.org code, licensed under the LGPL (Lesser GPL), in its own programs, such as the groupware program Lotus Notes 8, this has been IBM's own fork of the code. Starting now, IBM is directing its OpenOffice development efforts--involving about three dozen programmers--to the public, open-source OpenOffice suite.

A download manager can save you time if you download a lot of large files from the Internet, but it can be annoying to have to grab a link from your browser and pass it to the download manager manually. With the FlashGot extension for Firefox, you no longer have to. FlashGot sits between the two applications and fuses your favorite download manager with your Web browser. FlashGot supports more than 38 graphical and command-line download managers for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. The tools supported on Linux are Aria, cURL, Downloader 4 X, GNOME Gwget, KDE KGet, and wxDownload Fast. If you have any of these installed, FlashGot will automatically detect it and integrate it with Firefox.

SmoothWall has released the latest version of its open source network firewall - SmoothWall Express 3.0. Code-name Polar, this version claims huge advances on Version 2.

Discovering the perfect formula for profiting from an open source project is not easy. There are countless variables that must be considered, many of which determine early on whether or not a project will be successful with the community using it.

"My experiments show that when there is not much free physical memory, swapoff moves pages out of swap at a rate of approximately 5mb/sec," Daniel Drake noted in a recent discussion about swapoff performance. He added, "I've read into the swap code and I have some understanding that this is an expensive operation (and has to be)." Hugh Dickins acknowledged, "Yes, it can be shamefully slow. But we've done nothing about it for years, simply because very few actually suffer from its worst cases. You're the first I've heard complain about it in a long time: perhaps you'll be joined by a chorus, and we can have fun looking at it again."

Curtis Poe on oreillynet.com hasan important opinion piece in which he argues:"...thatany software with substantial risk to harm your life or liberty must be open source. I’m not saying that it should be free or that manufacturers should not be allowed protections, but the protection of the people must come first. Certainly we could come up with schemes for various systems which might purport to thoroughly test them without opening up the code, but there are too many systems and too many parameters for us to do this safely on a case-by-case basis..." Editor's note: Electronic Medical Record falls firmly in this category.

South African programmer Charl van Niekerk has been invited to be part of the Joomla development working team following his successful Google Summer of Code project.

If you have a point-and-click digital camera made by Canon, you may be able to turn on all sorts of features usually reserved for more expensive SLRs. That includes live histograms, depth-of-field calculation, under and overexposure highlighting, and -- best of all -- shooting your pictures in RAW. The secret is CHDK, an enhanced, free software replacement firmware.

Is PC maker Lenovo looking for a Linux distribution to ship with their product range? A blog by a senior Lenovo staffer calling for users to vote for their favourite distribution suggest the company may be doing exactly this.

IBM will join the OpenOffice.org community and contribute code and resources, the company announced today. IBM has been a major supporter of the Open Document Format (ODF) which originated at OpenOffice.org, but hadn't yet taken the plunge to help out with the development.

"I've just released Linux 2.4.36-pre1," announced 2.4 maintainer Willy Tarreau. He described a new feature found in the first pre-release: "In private discussions, Solar Designer proposed to restrict the ability to map the NULL address to CAP_RAW_IO capable processes only. The idea behind this was to prevent 'normal' users from trying to exploit NULL dereferences in the kernel which have not been discovered yet. This is purely a preventive measure."

As noted in the update to our review of Paterva Evolution, a personal data mining tool, Roelof Temmingh has removed the binaries for the application after having received legal threats over its use. In an email on the Paterva announcement's mailing list over the weekend, Temmingh revealed more about why the binaries had to be removed and unveiled his plans for future work on the project.