Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In September 1991, when Linux Torvalds (sic), a student at the University of Helsinki in Finland, released 10,000 lines of code on the Internet, nobody could have believed that it would spark off a revolution.

[I know what your thinking, but at least they are writing and talking about it. - Scott]

Companies may want a solid, for-profit vendor providing support when they embrace an open source project. One shortcut to checking on a support company's qualifications is to find how many of a project's core developers, the ones who commit code to the code base, are employed by the support firm. But the history of support for the PostgreSQL database offers a cautionary tale.

A hacker using the pseudonym Xoron (real name Mehmet Ince) has disclosed on mailing lists that there are such vulnerabilities in Omegaboard, Cerulean Portal System, phpBB Tweaked, Hailboards, EclipseBB and Xero Portal. Exploits are available for some forum systems that could permit an attacker to remotely upload and execute arbitrary malicious code on affected systems.

How could Gutenberg and Caxton have known that the invention of the printing press would be a massive force for the democratisation of knowledge and central to the transformation of a feudal society into the beginnings of a recognisably modern world via the Renaissance and the Reformation? The ability of printing presses to produce a massive volume of information, especially on religion and science, helped to break the elitist monopoly of the Roman Catholic Church.

H&R Block wanted a flexible, easy- to-use document management system to capture clients' tax documents and move them digitally to its tax preparers' offices. It considered commercial products, such as FileNet and Documentum. But H&R Block CIO Marc West eventually directed the team to focus on open source options, since the cost of putting commercial options in 13,000 fields offices wouldn't fly.

IBM has published the following new technical articles, tutorials, and downloads on its DeveloperWorks and AlphaWorks websites. They cover a range of interesting (though not necessarily embedded) technical topics, primarily related to Linux and open source system development. Some require free registration.

Mac owners and Linux users hoping to run Windows Vista using virtual machine software had better own the Business or Ultimate editions of the new operating system, according to Microsoft's licensing terms. The end-user license agreements governing both the Home Basic and Home Premium editions of the OS specifically forbid users from booting the software "within a virtual (or otherwise emulated) hardware system." The blanket prohibitions don't apply to the higher-end editions of Windows Vista.

The KDE Project this week released version 3.5.6, a maintenance update to the popular free desktop for Linux and UNIX. KDE now supports 65 languages, making it available to more people than most non-free software.

A new open source advocacy group, the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), is scheduled to debut February 15 at the upcoming LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit in New York. But unlike most open source software launches and even open source association beginnings, OSA founders are unwilling to be quoted by name about their plans before their formal launch. Instead, they are only speaking to media representatives grudgingly, "on background," without attribution. The reason for this, says an OSA insider Linux.com interviewed by telephone on Friday, February 3, is that they "don't want to ruffle feathers of people we're still talking to about joining."

After years in the making -- and after some people had given up on ever seeing it -- the distribution-neutral Linux Professional Institute (LPI) and its affiliate, LPI-Japan, have finally jointly launched the LPIC-3 certification program.

Second acts are rare in the computer industry but Jean Ichbiah, who died this week, managed it. Not only did he revolutionise software development for military computer systems with the Ada programming language, but he also devised a widely-used fast text-entry system for handheld computers.

Running a basic, truly minimal window manager can save significant CPU cycles and memory. This becomes important if you’re running old, limited hardware or when designing a desktop environment for an embedded Linux device. Even the oldest, most primitive window managers (think TWM or MWM) can support a pretty desktop background image. The ability is almost as old as X itself.

French authorities will give out 175,000 USB memory sticks loaded with open-source software to Parisian high school students at the start of the next school year. The sticks will give the students, ages 15 and 16, the freedom to access their e-mail, browser bookmarks and other documents on computers at school, home, a friend's house or in an Internet cafe -- but at a much lower cost than providing notebook computers for all, a spokesman for the Greater Paris Regional Council said Friday.

Ticket broker In Ticketing is going head to head with Ticketmaster. It's able to offer lower fees for the same services because of open source software, says co-founder and CTO Marc Urbaitel.

As written, GPLv3 threatens to fork GNU projects and marginalize the Free Software Foundation, writes Linux observer Bill Weinberg in this well-written essay. Drawing on long experience evangelizing open source licensing to business users, Weinberg suggests that the FSF's GPLv3 high road could be a lonesome one.

The Fedora team has announced that the first test spin of Fedora 7 is available for download via BitTorrent or from Fedora Project mirrors. Fedora 7, also available on live CD, mixes both Core (the complete operating system) and Extras (add-ons that complement the OS) into one package in anticipation of the merger between the two for Fedora 7's final release. Aside from the newly abbreviated name, the release also departs from Fedora Core 6 in that it no longer ships with the entire Core collection as an ISO set, because the team is planning to produce targeted spins for specific uses.

It services provider Unisys Corp is expecting rapid growth from its recently launched open source services businesses as it looks to improve innovation with open source software, rather than simply cutting costs.

Vista is finally here but Microsoft’s journey to this point has been infamously painful. Does the company really want to do that again? Some industry watchers, such as Gartner Group, are arguing that operating systems are now so complex that the cycle of major releases...are at an end.

The BBC has announced its Web TV plan will provisionally go ahead, despite concern from media watchdog Ofcom over how the launch would affect the U.K's commercial telly.

Masatsugu Koketsu, former Sun executive, to expand structure to answer demand for Red Hat solutions in Japan.