Showing headlines posted by SamShazaam

The GPLv3 debates are drawing to a close. By the end of the year, it may have become reality. Whether or not the Linux kernel team will adopt the new license, however is still up for debate. Linus Torvalds is not as fervently anti-GPLv3 as he was in earlier renditions of the license, but he still isn't ready to support a wholesale move to it, either.

Now that the “Final Draft” of the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPLv3) is out I thought it would be a good time to take a look at some of the least well understood provisions in the license. In part 1, we explored the notion of selling GPL software. This part looks at mixing GPL (v3 and v2) software with software covered by other licenses.

John Weathersby, executive director of the Open Source Software Institute, told Linux.com today that, effective immediately, the Department of the Navy has adopted a new policy which requires that open source software must be considered in every software acquisition the Navy makes.

RPM Package Manager (RPM) relaunched under rpm5.org with a roadmap towards RPM 5.0 http://rpm5.org/ -- 2007-05-29 -- at its 10th anniversary and together with a new roadmap towards version 5.0, the project environment of the popular Unix software packaging tool RPM Package Manager (RPM) was relaunched under the domain rpm5.org by the newly formed RPM project team, further on lead by RPM's primary developer Jeff Johnson.

After several delays, Gentoo finally released version 2007.0, code-named Secret Sauce. Despite the extended period of development, the installable live CD and DVD versions didn't work as they should, thanks to obvious bugs with display drivers. That said, if you discount the live CD and DVD and install Gentoo the manual way it's popular for, the new version is smooth as ice.

Most of the Novell/Microsoft patent deal is now out in the public. With this, the veil has been lifted in part from this controversial patent partnership. With this unveiling we now know that there is still no proof, other than Microsoft's flat unsupported statement, that Linux violates any of Microsoft's patents. We also know that it appears, as Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian has said, that Novell never agreed that Linux violated Microsoft's patents.

A study (PDF) funded by Microsoft and carried out by Harvard Business School professor Alan MacCormack aims to determine what kind of features and protections developers want in version 3 of the widely-used General Public License (GPL 3). The study, which uses extremely questionable methodology, concludes that open-source software developers don't want the GPL 3 to impose extensive patent licensing requirements or prevent agreements like the controversial cross-licensing deal between Novell and Microsoft.

Jerry Rosenthal, chief executive officer of Open Invention Network, issued the following statement today: "A recent article in Fortune Magazine raises - or more precisely, re-raises - tired, old allegations about the Linux operating system for the sole purpose of perpetuating unwarranted fear, uncertainty and doubt among current and potential Linux users and distributors.

Linus Torvalds, lead developer of the Linux kernel, has a sharp retort to Microsoft executives' statements in a Fortune magazine article that Linux and other open-source code violate 235 Microsoft patents.

Despite its claim to own 42 patents used in the creation of the Linux kernel and hundreds more embedded in other free software programs, Microsoft does not plan to take a page from The SCO Group and sue users of the open source operating system, a senior company official said Monday. "We're not litigating. If we wanted to we would have done so years ago," said Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft's VP for intellectual property and licensing, in an interview.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on May 14 claimed that "Linux violates over 228 patents. Someday, for all countries that are entering WTO [the World Trade Organization], somebody will come and look for money to pay for the patent rights for that intellectual property." With that comment, Microsoft declared war against Linux and open source yesterday... Oh wait. My mistake, Ballmer made that attack in November 2004.

The popular DD-WRT project was initially an offshoot of the original Linksys firmware for the WRT54, but has since undergone a complete rewrite, and now uses the OpenWRT kernel. DD-WRT is a fine upgrade for your WRT54 wireless router, or any similar device under other brand names, and there are a lot of them.

The first Gentoo Linux release of the year is now available, featuring an improved installer and updated packages. The release, which Gentoo developers have code-named Secret Sauce comes after several delays and revisions by developers to iron out security flaws.

Mono project lead developer Miguel de Icaza says that the Mono development community plans to have an experimental Linux-based Silverlight browser plug-in ready for testing by the end of the year. Silverlight, Microsoft's new .NET-based technology for rapid development of interactive rich media applications, is currently only supported on Windows and Mac OS X.

There are many factors which affect Website availability and performance from end user perspective, namely ISP Internet connection, server location, server parameters, programming language, application architecture and implementation. One of the critical parameters is a selected Operational System (OS). Most users often need to select between Linux and Windows, two popular choices for web servers.

Trademarks have recently become something of an issue in open-source circles. Debian, for example, recently took exception to Mozilla's Firefox trademark rules and called its version of the popular browser, IceWeasel. So, Ubuntu has decided to address possible trademark issues by creating its own trademark policy.

In particular, it’s time for me to leave the board of directors of the Free Software Foundation, where I’ve been since 2000. FSF is in great shape under the continued leadership of Richard Stallman and his executive director, Peter Brown. Completing GPLv3 successfully underlines the credibility with which FSF combines the most uncompromising principle with the depth of knowledge and experience needed to build broad coalitions in our community. Leaving is always hard, but there couldn’t be a more appropriate or less disruptive time.

Mozilla today released the final version of Thunderbird 2, the next generation of the organization's open-source email client. Key new features include message tagging, message history, and a new function to search for content within messages, among numerous other enhancements.

Users of a popular open-source accounting system may have just updated to a license they would never have agreed to had the author actually told them it had changed. What's more, the author is actively censoring attempts to advise the userbase of the license change, and appears to be making an attempt to retrospectively re-license all prior versions as well.

Linus Torvalds, leader of the Linux kernel project and a major figure in the open-source programming movement, said Wednesday he's "pretty pleased" with changes in a third draft of the General Public License (GPL) released Wednesday.