Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is going to review the patent held by e-learning software maker Blackboard Inc., in the wake of a challenge by a group advocating open source software. The USPTO responded Thursday to a November 2005 request from the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) for the review on behalf of three open source educational software projects. In granting the review, the Patent Office found that prior art cited in SFLC's request raises "a substantial new question of patentability" regarding all 44 claims of Blackboard's patent.

[I used blackboard at ASU and its EULA was several pages long then, but patenting Teacher-to Students communication? That's over the top. - Scott]

While the eyes of the IT world have spent years squinting to see Microsoft's slowly unfolding vistas, the companies and individuals that drive open source have been steadily building a case for broader adoption of Linux-based operating systems.

Call it Red Hat's forward spin velocity regarding Linux management tools. With competition such as Oracle offering full Red Hat support on their own products, Red Hat is now expanding and improving its Linux management footprint. The leading Linux distributor told internetnews.com that it is rolling out online monitoring tool this year Red Hat customers.

Mustang Linux, a fork of Buffalo Linux and a newcomer to the "mini" Linux distribution field, achieved a v2.3.1 release earlier this month. The lightweight distro, which can run entirely from RAM, is based on a 2.6.16 kernel and offers a choice of desktops, the project team said.

The KDE project today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.5.6, a maintenance release for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop for GNU/Linux and other UNIXes. Significant features include additional support for Compiz as a window manager with Kicker, session management for browser tabs in Akregator, templating for KMail messages, faster frame rates with video chat in Kopete and new summary menus for Kontact making it easier to work with your appointments and to-dos.

At the 2006 China Linux User Convention, held in Beijing on December 21, Chinese Linux users, producers, press, and analysts discussed recent developments in China's Linux and open source industry.

The K12 Linux Terminal Server Project (K12LTSP) is a thin client distribution designed for use in schools. Recently, I was invited by Robert Arkiletian, a K12LTSP contributor, to see the software in action in his computer lab at Eric Hamber Secondary School in Vancouver, Canada. We talked about the system requirements for a K12LTSP installation, investigated the available software, and discussed the success of Arkiletian's own lab, which has saved his school thousands of dollars in hardware costs.

In this multi-part series, DesktopLinux.com columnist and operating system curmudgeon Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols pits Microsoft's latest wares -- Vista -- against Linux's fair haired boy -- Ubuntu -- to see how the pinnacle of commercial desktop operating systems stacks up against the free, community developed-Linux upstart.

When Microsoft and Novell announced that they would work together, Linux enthusiasts were shocked. How has the agreement affected the open-source community, and can it recover?

Apart from a KDE desktop and applications, the developers of the Pardus 2007 Linux distribution have built an entire distribution from scratch. Pardus, released last month, has its own multilingual installer, custom dependency-resolving package manager, and an INIT system that slashes boot times by several seconds. The distribution has come a long way since its first release in 2005, when it was based on Gentoo and lacked a package manager. Thanks to its custom tools, it's one of the easiest Linux distribution to run and manage.

Liberty Alliance, the global identity consortium, has unveiled the openLiberty Project, a global initiative formed to provide resources and support to open source developers building identity-based applications, the company said. With today's news, Liberty Alliance has launched a portal where developers can collaborate in the openLiberty Project and access tools and information for 'jump starting' the development of secure and privacy-respecting applications based on the widely deployed Liberty Federation and Liberty Web Services standards, the company is quoted to have said.

Alan Dechert, one of the pioneers in the open source software movement, will deliver the keynote speech at the Red Hat Summit. The third of the annual events put on by the Raleigh-based Linux software developer and services provider is set for May 9-11 in San Diego.

To support their goal of creating the world's first globally competitive, Linux-based software platform for mobile devices, Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic Mobile Communications, Samsung Electronics, and Vodafone announced today the official launch of the LiMo Foundation.

When working with XML-based applications, developers often find themselves facing the requirement to generate XML-encoded data structures on the fly. Examples of this include an XML order template based on user input in a Web form, or an XML representation of a server request or client response based on run-time parameters.

If there is anything like a "typical" member of the free/open source community, that template is probably nothing like D. Michael McIntyre. By profession a truck driver, McIntyre holds a bachelor's degree in Foreign Languages, and he's used his facility with words to document the popular Rosegarden project. He's since gone on to do whatever he sees that needs to be done on the project, and has become an integral part of the Rosegarden team.

Scientific and industrial research parastal adopts open document format as default standard and rolls out OpenOffice.org to 2500 workstations.

Teaching an old dog new tricks. The "old dog&" in this case is Marcus Ranum, inventor of the proxy firewall and the man who implemented the first commercial firewall product. He’s now the CSO at Tenable Network Security, the company that produces the Nessus security scanner, and author of the book The Myth of Homeland Security.

Building and maintaining packages for multiple Linux distributions has never been an easy task. But Novell wants to change that with a pair of releases it hopes will make it easier to build Linux application packages and custom Linux distributions. Novell's openSUSE Build Service and KIWI build-your-own distro efforts are aimed at building community open source participation, as well as SUSE Linux itself.

Xandros announced today that it is now shipping its new Desktop Professional 4.0 boxed product, which features enhanced network integration, advanced 3D capabilities, Bluetooth wireless support, and its own desktop search function. It sports a 2.6.18 kernel and the KDE desktop as a default.

Levanta (formerly LinuxCare) is shipping a second-generation "Linux management appliance." The Intrepid X aims to help system administrators maintain highly available, highly reliable computing centers, by helping them rapidly provision, recover, roll back, or migrate Linux systems across physical and/or virtual hardware resources.