Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

As a member of the Apache Software Foundation, my views on open source tend to gravitate towards more liberal licenses, like the Apache License (v2.0), BSD, or MIT licenses. I strongly believe in enabling companies to take open source software and do whatever they wish to do with it, placing as little restrictions as feasible under current laws. I believe that better communities for software development are enabled by these liberal licensing situations. Rather than creating a single power with significantly more rights, as seen in the “open core” movement, liberal open source development encourages real, dedicated and sustainable contributions, made by companies with business models other than selling support and ‘enterprise features’.

How will GNOME 3 compare to KDE 4? The picture is still emerging, since GNOME 3's official release is still months away. However, with GNOME Shell available as a preview in the latest GNOME releases, a general outline is starting to be visible. Of course, some elements cannot be compared yet. It would be unfair, for instance, to compare panels in any detail, because in the previews GNOME Shell's panel has neither applets nor configurations. Nor, for that matter, can much be said yet about the upcoming KDE 4.6, which should be the latest version when GNOME 3.0 is released.

There is now a legal publication with the goal of explaining FOSS issues to lawyers. It's the first peer-reviewed law review entirely devoted just to the legal issues of FOSS. It's called The International Free and Open Source Software Law Review, or IFOSSLR, and it's "a collaborative legal publication aiming to increase knowledge and understanding among lawyers about Free and Open Source Software issues," as they describe it. If this is an area of law that interests you, X marks the spot.

Here's some fun news: "Gartner Says Android to Become No. 2 Worldwide Mobile Operating System in 2010 and Challenge Symbian for No. 1 Position by 2014." I moved to a smart phone within the last year. In the past I hadn't really needed one. When I went somewhere I typically had my laptop with me, so I usually hid behind that. However, as my role became more and more driven by general email and Internet access rather than specific proprietary programs I realized that I wanted to have more access and functionality without lugging the computer around all the time. If you know me at all, you know I'm a Linux nut, so I naturally gravitated toward an Android phone. I love it. The openness suits me and I get to use my curiosity and ability to tinker to my advantage.

The survey, entitled “Linux Adoption Trends: A Survey of Enterprise End Users” and published in partnership with Yeoman Technologies, asked nearly 2,000 selected users if they thought that the use of Linux within their organisations would increase within the next five years. Almost 80% of respondents said they felt it would. According to the survey, in the last two years, 66% of new Linux deployments have been green-field deployments, while 36.6% have been migrations from Microsoft Windows. Over 60% of respondents said that they would use Linux for more mission critical workloads within the next twelve months.

Policy group New America has written a scathing blog entry that criticizes the HTC G2 for including a "hardware rootkit" that prevents users from installing custom firmware on the device. The report appears, however, to be based on a misunderstanding of technical issues raised in an XDA discussion thread. The G2 isn't unique in blocking third-party firmware, and it doesn't come with anything that could correctly be described as a rootkit.

Linux server deployments are expected to take slightly more business from Microsoft than Unix in the next year, according to latest data. A Linux Foundation poll of major public and private sector organizations using Linux has found that 76.4 per cent plan to add more Linux servers during the next year, with just 41.2 per cent planning to add more Windows servers to their IT infrastructure's mix.

I finally became fed up with this one little idiosyncrasy that my KDE-based home entertainment center kept exhibiting -- it would not let me specify VLC as the action handler when I inserted a DVD in the drive. Instead, it was most insistent that I use the KDE default DragonPlayer, which had somehow gotten confused about where the drive was and could no longer start the DVD. That was all it took for me decide to to take the time to rebuild the home entertainment system last weekend. You may recall from a previous article, I discovered Linux Mint 9 not too long ago, and really liked it.

The Linux Foundation says Linux is poised for significant growth in the enterprise, some of it at the expense of Windows servers. 76.4% of companies surveyed are planning to add more Linux servers in the next twelve months. 41.2% are increasing their Windows servers, while 43.6% will decrease or stay the same. Over the next five years 79.4% of businesses surveyed plan to add more Linux servers compared to other operating systems, while only 21.3% plan to add more Windows servers.

Oracle and IBM have unveiled a new collaboration which will allow developers and customers to build and innovate based on existing Java investments and the OpenJDK (Java Development Kit) reference implementation. According to a joint statement issued by Oracle, the two partners will make the OpenJDK community the primary location to facilitate open source Java SE (Standard Edition) development. The new collaboration will also center on the Java language, JDK and Java Runtime Environment.

A trojan recently analysed by Webroot is said to rely on retrieving web page passwords from a browser's password storage, rather than logging a user's keyboard inputs. To make sure it will find all the interesting passwords in Firefox, the malware, called PWS-Nslog, makes some changes to jog the browser's memory. A few manipulations in a JavaScript file prompt Firefox to store log-in information automatically and without requesting the user's consent.

I found a computing treasure in a local Goodwill store three weeks ago: a book about System/360 assembly language. (Assembly language is the human-readable form of the concrete instructions carried out by the computer.) In earlier years, this would have been a wonderful surprise, but a previous find precludes that from happening... Last year, I found a special treat in the discount bin of a local grocery store: a movie, in Mongolian. In the rural Midwest USA, that is difficult to surpass that for surprise finds.

There are all kinds of fancy backup applications, from free to complicated and expensive. But it's still hard to beat the speed, simplicity, and flexibility of the old standbys.

Thank you Mr Chairman. We should like to thank you for the opportunity to take the floor during this very important meeting. The agenda includes several items of great interest to the Free Software Foundation Europe, and the Free Software or open source community at large. Free Software relies on licenses to give users the freedom to use, study, share and improve a program. These licences in turn rely on copyright. Free Software is, however, fundamentally incompatible with patents on software.

Oracle is no longer totally isolated on Java — IBM now stands with the giant, in a move that potentially stymies Google's Android. IBM said Monday that it's putting its efforts into the OpenJDK project, run by Oracle, and switching away from the Apache Software Foundation's (ASF's) Project Harmony on Java Standard Edition (Java SE).

Yesterday's Kubuntu 10.10 release features new KDE software for your phone. Working with KDE's Plasma Mobile team, Kubuntu have created Kubuntu Mobile, suitable for smart phones and available for i386 and ARM platforms. This is a technology preview of the upcoming Plasma Mobile workspace and is not ready for day to day use.

Dalibor Topic was the one to give me this idea, though I’m not sure if he’d remember the tweet. He was, however, the one who pointed me at MarkMail‘s archive of open source list traffic, which I’d seen before, using a by domain constraint, which I hadn’t. The idea is simple: MarkMail maintains a searchable index of the mailing lists for a number of open source projects (these, specifically). As a means of demonstrating the value of its MarkLogic Server, it parses the individual messages into XML and renders them queryable according to specific dimensions.

In what has become an unfortunate tradition for the past few releases, prior to the release of Ubuntu 10.10, AMD provided Canonical with a pre-release of their latest proprietary Catalyst driver at the time. They have done this to fix some major bugs, but primarily to provide a working ATI/AMD proprietary graphics driver that will run against their latest Ubuntu Linux release as usually their latest public releases at the time do not support Ubuntu's kernel and/or X.Org Server. With Maverick Meerkat, which was released yesterday, there is a pre-release of the Catalyst 10.10 Linux driver, which will not be released to the general public until later in October.

Today is 10/11/10 on the US calendar, mm/dd/yy. Happy binary day! Today is binary day in the US, 10/11/10. European calendars put the day first, 11/10/10, which is still binary. Yesterday was binary day too, 10/10/10. It might seem like cheating a little bit to use a two-digit year, but I'll worry about Y3k later.

What you do with your disks after you're done with them does matter. Find out how to properly prepare them for the next owner. Listed at number ten in Ten Essential Linux Admin Tools a few weeks ago, you had what was perhaps your first glimpse of Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN) disk wiping utility. Today, you have it in glorious 3D* action that’s sure to convince you to add DBAN to your utility belt as you head to the inner sanctum of your local data center.