Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In an open letter to Sun Microsystems' CEO, the Apache Software Foundation accuses Sun of restricting its access to a critical test kit to protect Sun's commercial interests.

Vim's flexibility and countless features are a major asset for experienced users, but a challenge for newbies. If you've always wanted to try Vim but were put off by your first attempts, you can start off gradually by getting to know Vim's GUI and easy mode. This article is a primer for those who haven't used Vim much and want to wade in gradually.

Sure, Red Hat's most recent financial results, announced March 29, didn't blow away investors. But the future looks bright. The reason: Open source application developers continue to gain serious momentum. And many of those developers are firmly committed to Red Hat.

Open source luminary Bruce Perens has come out fighting in defence of the latest draft of GPLv3. The draft, which seeks to prevent patent protection deals like that struck late last year by Microsoft and Novell, has come under heavy fire from proprietary software advocates such as the ACT (Association for Competitive Technology).

Popularity shouldn't be the acid test to determine if you should install an extension. The important question is whether it enhances your browsing experience without any nasty side effects. The good news is that the extension community is actually pretty adept at self-policing. Most extensions that are truly "broken" (for instance, they crash your browser or suck up all your CPU power) either get fixed quickly or simply vanish.

Confusion and controversy about Open Source licensing did not start with current Free Software Foundation efforts to revise the GNU General Public License (GPL). Nor will emergence of an acceptable GPL V3 – or of a revised Lesser GPL or Affero GPL (thanks Dana Blankenhorn) – make OS licensing much less problematical for enterprise users. Concerns are both alleviated and complicated by a profusion of options that range from GPL's communitarianism to the Common Public License's collaborative focus to BSD's laissez-faire liberality.

Last May, commercial Debian Linux distributor Xandros jumped into the server fray with its Xandros Server. In the next few weeks, the company will be releasing a new version of its server stack, including support for server virtualization and two distributions, one keyed to SMB shops and the other for larger enterprises. Xandros will also break away its Xandros Management Console from its Linux distro and offer it as a separate product that runs on Windows workstations and can manage other Linuxes. The company will also partner to offer email messaging and groupware bundles.

t has been almost 16 years since Linux version 0.01 was released, and since then the open source OS, and many other open source products, have proven themselves invaluable productivity tools and platforms.

GAIM, the popular open-source instant messaging (IM) application, last week changed its name to Pidgin, in order to settle a longstanding legal dispute with AOL. GAIM originally got its name as the acronym from "GTK+ AOL Instant Messenger," the Pidgin website says.

Last fall, Berkeley Data Systems ran a "Programmer Deathmatch", offering a $10,000 prize to the one programmer who successfully navigated 3 timed rounds of programming competition.

Mozilla this week made available the first release candidate of Thunderbird 2, the next generation of the organization's popular open-source email client. The team asks that users report any bugs or problems that they encounter.

Collaboration Highlights Trend Toward Search-Driven Development

Firstly, we have just released Issue 17, and it is packed full of good things for your reading pleasure. Highly recommended, even if we do say so ourselves! Secondly, we are finally running our web site using Drupal 5! Not noticing anything different? Excellent. That means everything is working as planned. We rewrote our article management system, and are about to release it under the GPL as a Drupal module. This means that we are about to roll out several exciting features, which we have been hoarding up until the new site was out. So... stay tuned!

Swiftfox is a Firefox-based browser, but there is one big difference between it and Firefox -- you can't share Swiftfox with a friend or place it in a repository of a Linux distribution because the Swiftfox license prohibits repackaging and redistribution.

Ubuntu Linux backer Canonical has launched a beta version of its Launchpad service, part of an effort to make open-source programming methods a better match for Microsoft.

Ryan Paul over at Ars Technica has a short article talking about Dolphin and KDE 4. "The Linux-based Dolphin file manager is now scheduled for official inclusion in KDE 4, the next major release of the KDE desktop environment. Dolphin includes several unique usability enhancements that aren't available in Konqueror, KDE's current file manager..."

Over the last few years, we've had quite a few requests for a writeup on the inner workings of the Ars website. Unfortunately, I'm the least productive writer on the face of the planet, so said writeup never materialized. Until today! I'm going to be writing a series of posts covering the soft underbelly of Ars. It might take a week to get through it, it might take a month.

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 82 for the week of April 1st through April 7th, 2007.

In response to the growing concerns regarding H.R. 811, particularly with regard to the inspection of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) voting system components, I wanted to provide this article, previously published in the November 2006 issue of Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery. It is especially important to understand that COTS software products can include both open source (such as Red Hat Linux) and closed (or trade secret) source (such as Microsoft Windows [TM]), and that neither paradigm necessarily guarantees security. Indeed, the examination of source code for "correctness" is well known in the computer industry to be intractable (i.e. not fully solvable in reasonable time), but that does not mean that it should not be inspectable.

[It is interesting that that the voting machines are not required to be inspected, but then for those who got elected everything seems to be just fine. - Scott]

An Atlanta IT security company is finding success by employing open source software, not just in the network security appliance it sells, but on its own desktops and servers.