Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

With the recent release of the second draft of the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPLv3), digital rights management (DRM) is back in the news. The new draft may raise concerns about the rewording of section 3 of the license, which deals with DRM. The Free Software Foundation dislikes the term "digital rights management" and instead choose to call it digital "restrictions" management. But many people don't understand the implications of DRM on free software like Linux.

Digium, the company that spawned open source PBX and telephony software, Asterisk, has received $13.8 million in Series A funding from Boston-based telecom specialist venture fund, Matrix Partners.

The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), (http://www.lpi.org), the world's premier Linux certification organization and the Free Standards Group (http://www.freestandards.com) will combine forces in Latin America to promote Open Standards and professional certification
. The two organizations will initiate this relationship through their key participation in a five city IT tour in Brazil beginning in August 2006 which includes such leading companies as IBM and Novell, local LPI training partners and other IT organizations.

You've probably heard of full disclosure, the security philosophy that calls for making public all details of vulnerabilities. It has been the subject of debates among researchers, vendors, and security firms. But the story that grabbed most of the headlines at the Black Hat Briefings in Las Vegas last week was based on a different type of disclosure. For lack of a better name, I'll call it faux disclosure. Here's why.

After the dotcom doldrums of the past five years, there is a new wind blowing through the world of commercial software. It's open source, but not as we know it. The first-generation start-ups like LinuxCare, TurboLinux and even Red Hat, were essentially service companies. Today, an increasingly-favored approach is to employ dual licensing to create two revenue streams: one based on providing services for free software and the other through traditional commercial licenses to products that are generally based on the free software version.

Over the past few weeksSynSeer (the sponsoring company forMirrorMed) has been going back and forth with IBM regarding the newEclipse OHF project. This work started with the release theOHF bridge and has culminated in the integration of MirrorMed and Eclipse OHF.

Wind River says it supports Linux on a dual-core Freescale communications processor capable of SMP or AMP operation (symmetric or asymmetric multiprocessing). The company's Linux implementation for the MPC8641D is available with hardware and software tools, run-time environments, and middleware, including message-passing middleware based on TIPC (transparent interprocess communications), the company says.

With the launch of new Web-based services from two major online music subscription providers, Mac and Linux users can finally get in on the all-you-can-download action. But are these services any good?

SugarCRM is touting the first fruits of a technology relationship with Microsoft in the next version of its open source customer relationship management suite.The bitterest pill for some, though, is likely to be Sugar's plan for a distribution issued under Microsoft's Community License, part of Microsoft's pseudo open source Shared Source Initiative. SugarCRM is currently licensed under a modified version of the Mozilla license, called SugarCRM Public License (SPL).

For several years, Nero has manufactured one of the most popular CD/DVD burning suites for Windows. Now at version 2.1.0.1, NeroLINUX is the GNU/Linux equivalent of Nero Burning ROM, one of the main programs in the Nero suite. Like its Windows counterpart, NeroLINUX combines an easy-to-use interface with a variety of options. However, unlike the Windows version, it offers little, if anything, that is not available in comparable free software.

Sun Microsystems, and Greenplum recently unveiled a data warehouse appliance built from open source software and general purpose systems. Powered by the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) and PostgreSQL, both the mature product of open source development, this breakthrough solution aims to deliver two orders of magnitude better price-performance over the competition.

These days, when one talks about free software, the first word that comes to mind is Linux—be it the kernel or a distribution based on it (which would then be a GNU/Linux operating system, and its flavour marked by a brand name: Red Hat, SuSE, Mandriva, Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware...) At one time, there was another project worthy of note: BeOS. It wasn’t POSIX-compatible, but it was neat. But now, only free *NIX prevail... really?

The eighth annual O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) continued yesterday with more tutorials, the O'Reilly Radar Executive Briefing, the Open Source Awards, and Larry Wall's State of the Onion report.

A recent patch posted to the lkml contained the following description, "this patch adds an efi e820 memory mapping", in response to which Andrew Morton asked, "why?". Linus Torvalds offered his views on EFI, the Extensible Firmware Interface beginning by describing it as "this other Intel brain-damage (the first one being ACPI)".

Last week in Part 1 we changed a bale of passwords. Today we'll take two more important steps to lock down our Asterisk@Home server: make sure that all Web administration traffic is encrypted, and lock down OpenSSH more tightly.

We have already discussed how you can create text user interfaces for command-line tools using dialog. This time, we are going to look at Zenity and KDialog, which allow you to create GNOME- and KDE-specific front ends for scripts.

The vendor is revamping its home page and has a preview available. Firefox users, however, are redirected to Microsoft's generic "page not found" message and screen.

Open source and unencumbered drivers for 3D acceleration on Linux are lagging behind their proprietary counterparts. When 2D hardware goes away and everything requires 3D hardware, what options are there for people who use free software? Old hardware… unless something changes. Yes, I’m being deliberately provocative. No, I’m not really kidding.

Responding to tough competition from comparative giants Nokia and Motorola, Matsushita (Panasonic) and NEC may form a joint venture around Linux-based mobile phones, according to several business papers in Japan, as reported by Reuters. The venture may focus on Linux OSes and applications, mobile phone hardware, and/or mobile phone chips, and may include Texas Instruments, the news agency reports.

A wiki software start-up is releasing two products into open source to help get more developers familiar with its commercial products. MindTouch, founded by former Microsoft employees, on Tuesday announced the creation of an open-source project around MindTouch Dream, software for building distributed Web applications using Microsoft .Net development tools.