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A popular Oracle-controlled open-source project faces a forking after the software giant reiterated that it will restrict what coders can change. Oracle has said that open sourcers are free to extend Project Hudson, the software-build and monitoring service it inherited from Sun Microsystems. They can add as many plug-ins as they like to the core code, and they don't have to contribute the plug-ins back to the community. But if they build such plug-ins, they'll have to give their code another name.

The Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (LAMP) architecture is one of the most popular choices for web server architectures in use today. Author John Mertic examines five things every LAMP application should take advantage of for optimum performance.

Gray beard Bell Labs scientists and Unix operating system co-creators Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson have been awarded the 2011 Japan Prize for information and communications. Ritchie worked at Bell Labs (in its many incarnations) until he retired in 2007. Thompson held positions at Bell Labs as well as at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Sydney and is currently a distinguished engineer at search engine behemoth Google. Ritchie was the primary creator of the C programming language, arguably the most popular and cursed-at programming language in the history of the world.

“Against all odds, Linux.conf.au is here!” This week more than 500 people from around the world are arriving in Brisbane for Linux.conf.au 2011. As last month Brisbane and indeed much of Queensland was devastated by severe flooding, it’s an incredible effort by the conference organizers that the conference is able to continue at all.

While NVIDIA puts out beta Linux graphics drivers quite often as a means of soliciting testing prior to declaring a new stable GPU driver update, AMD does not but rather they rely upon their NDA-covered select beta testers to put each Catalyst release through its paces before declaring a stable update in their timed monthly manner. Today though it seems AMD has put out a Catalyst Beta driver that's targeting their workstation customers (those with the FirePro / FireGL / FireMV hardware) but as in their usual unified manner, it will work with any supported Radeon (R600+ GPU) as well.

Let me start with a short story about a situation I dealt with this past summer. I flew out to a client site where I found a broken architecture, management with no idea what was wrong while pointing fingers, and a completely dispirited team. After two weeks of taking a look at what was running (and what wasn't) we'd isolated a dozen specific problems with specific workable solutions, and did so using that dispirited team getting excited about fixing stuff and showing up for meetings. Other teams at the client - testing and environment groups - were shocked with the speed we moved as well as how informed and on top of things we were. The two real bad employees were corralled and worked around - the rest lined up and rocked through.

The 3D powerhouse Blender is arguably the most complicated piece of desktop software in the open source world. It handles every part of the workflow used to create a CGI film or a 3D game: creating objects, rigging them to move, animating them, controlling lighting, rendering scenes, and even editing the resulting video. Each release packs in more new features than most people can understand without consulting a textbook (or two). One of the down sides, though, is that over the years Blender has developed the reputation of being difficult to learn. Fortunately, the latest release takes on that challenge head-first, and makes some major improvements.

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A few times each month, I tire of the complexities of GNOME and KDE. Then I turn to a simpler, faster desktop for a couple of days or a week -- and that desktop, more often than not, is Xfce. No other desktop I’m aware of balances convenience and speed half so well.

Three well-known BSD clones are in their latest developmental cycles and have recently released test versions. FreeBSD is closing in on version 7.4 with a RC2, GhostBSD just released their 2.0 Beta 2, and PC-BSD 8.2 has seen its second release candidate as well.

LXer Feature: 23-Jan-2011

In this week's Roundup we have Glyn Moody in defense of hackers, LibreOffice keeps making waves, Xfce 4.8 is released, our own Paul Ferris explains how to be a catalyst for FOSS and just what is this 'Steve Jobs' dilemma Linux is supposed to have? Enjoy!

Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 "Iveland" and OpenBenchmarking.org are launching in late February from the Southern California Linux Expo in Los Angeles during my talk about Making More Informed Linux Hardware Choices. However, for any Bavarians living near Munich, you may be able to get a sneak preview.

Pardus Linux, the independent Linux distribution hailing from Turkey has seen its next major update with version 2011. Pardus is funded by the Scientific & Technological Research Council of Turkey, which is a governmental agency that manages, funds and conducts research in the areas of education, Science, and technology in Turkey. Its underlying goal is to guide and advance Turkey's competitiveness in the global market in these key areas. Pardus is used by the Turkish Armed Forces, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Turkish Police, Turkey's Social Security Institution, and the Ministry of Defense. For ordinary users around the world, Pardus is just a really nice distro.

I guess you heard that Florian Mueller is at it again. He made strong claims of a smoking gun regarding alleged copyright infringement of Oracle files by Google. Well, in the cold light of day, some of the media who printed it without fact checking are now awakening to the news that the news wasn't as reliable or unchallengeable as they assumed. You'll find corrections now, notably from Ed Burnette at ZDNet, who is a programmer-journalist, and by Paul Ryan at ars technica. That is what journalists are supposed to do, if they see wrong information. It's part of the ethics of being a good journalist, and the other part is to issue corrections when the mistake is your own. To their credit, many journalists have now corrected what they wrote initially.

Long-time blog readers should know that I don't rely on tools to defend my enterprise. I rely on people first, followed by tools, then processes. However, today I took a moment to consider the myriad of really cool work happening (mainly) in the open source tool community. When I started counting, I found about seven projects that are likely to help you defend your enterprise.

Version 11.0 of Calculate Linux has been released. This release of the Gentoo-based operating system, which we benchmarked last August, brings many improvements to this promising distribution that -- like Sabayon and others -- makes it easier to run Gentoo on desktops and servers.

HTML5, which has been developed by the WHATWG group, is to lose its version number and be referred to only as "HTML". Ian Hickson, the author and editor of the W3C's current HTML5 draft, announced this decision in a blog posting. Hickson said that, when the group announced that the HTML5 specification was progressing to "Last Call" in 2009, the plan at the time was to publish a "snapshot" of HTML5 in 2012. However, due to the high demand for new features, the group has now decided to switch to a different development model.

When it comes to PCI compliance, there's no such thing as "too careful." One of the keys to being careful enough? Isolating and protecting servers that handle cardholder data from the rest of your network. You already know that you need to keep systems holding cardholder data secure and prevent access from outside your network. But there's more to it than that — PCI-compliant systems should be isolated from the rest of the company's systems as well. Businesses have a range of systems and networks, and the access and policies that go with the various systems should reflect their importance and sensitivity of the data held on the systems.

The aftermath of Oracle's purchase of Sun and the subsequent forking of a number of open source projects, has highlighted the necessity to protect the integrity of the commons and to keep commercially sponsored open source projects honest, and true to the principles of free and open source software.

In last weeks column, I talked about “many-core” processors and why cache coherency may limit the number of cores you can place in a processor. This week I want to be fair and balanced. Large scale SMP (Symmetrical Multi-Processing) is possible, but is usually expensive. Turning a pile of servers into an SMP is, therefore, very desirable and has been advancing on both the hardware and software fronts. I have had a chance to ponder this topic quite a bit over the last several weeks, but not for the reasons you may think.