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Standards always imply wide public access, an openness of the standard in both setting of the standard as well as access to the standard. It is therefore important to realise that an Open Standard would necessarily have to meet higher standards of openness than those provided by article 41 of document SCP/13/2. It is furthermore important to add that “de facto standards” are typically not standards, but vendor-specific proprietary formats that were, as the secretariat correctly pointed out in the introduction to this discussion, “strong enough to impose themselves on the market.” It is for this imposition on the market that “de facto standards” are commonly used to describe monopolistic situations and corresponding absence of competition, which conflict with the basic purpose and function of standards.

The open-source version of Microsoft's Silverlight is adopting hardware-based decoding for video, a move that will boost multimedia on Linux devices. Moonlight is adding support for Nvidia cards to offload the work of H.264 and VC1 decoding from the software player to the actual hardware. Nvidia features the Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) so that the video card - not the software player - does the decoding. It's a small but significant development.

Discussing in good faith the likeness and differences between distros, between desktop environments, and between FOSS programs is a vital part of uplifting the entire FOSS process. So why do some inisist on being rigid dogmatards whose only purpose is to argue meaningless points? Larry the Free Software Guy has one word for those who are so inclined: Stop.

JAMA has a blockbuster article on Health IT vendor 'Hold Harmless' contracts. Linux Medical News readers know is just the tip of the proprietary Electronic Medical Record iceburg such as the interoperability scam, the failed EMR business quandry, and the sustainability conundrum among many other things that has yet to be widely discussed. Courageous and forward-thinking past LMN contributor Scot Silverstein has a number of further analyses. Unfortunately the knee-jerk solution will likely be to change the proprietary contracts which naturally the proprietary vendors will want more money for. The real answer is education among purchasers to only use EMR software that is Affero General Public Licensed and a law that states that all Electronic Medical Records purchased with federal funds be Affero General Public Licensed.

This is the second article in a two-part series that looks at a hands-on approach to monitoring a data center using the open source tools Ganglia and Nagios. In Part 2, learn how to install and configure Nagios, the popular open source computer system and network monitoring application software that watches hosts and services, alerting users when things go wrong. The article also shows you how to unite Nagios with Ganglia (from Part 1) and add two other features to Nagios for standard clusters, grids, and clouds to help with monitoring network switches and the resource manager.

Bringing the freemium model to the musty world of textbook publishing, Flat World Knowledge (FWK), a Nyack, NY-based publisher of open-source commercial textbooks, has raised $8 million in its first round of funding. Investors include Greenhill SAVP, High Peaks Venture Partners and Valhalla Partners. Founded in 2007, it received $1.5 million in seed money. The company recruits authors on various subjects, and then makes its books available as free web-hosted textbooks for any student to use.

I know this won't get the pageviews that a good rant will, so I guess you could say the rants subsidize the positive articles. At any rate this is not about me, but about two genuine community-driven Linux projects that aim to help children learn about tech, and to engage them in high tech in a good way, rather than trying to turn them into good little compliant button-pushers: the Helios Project and the Qimo 4 Kids project.

Memory leaks and code exploits are a fact of life for both browser developers and their users — regardless of the specific browser in question. For the developers at Mozilla, both issues have been on their minds this week, as browser bugs of both sorts have been all over the news. Security researchers published code on Wednesday that reportedly would allow an attacker to load unauthorized software on a target's computer simply by having the target view a specially-coded XML file. According to reports, Mozilla developers were blindsided by the bug and immediately raced to find a patch.

Red Hat Inc. posted a lower quarterly profit on Wednesday, but the results surpassed most estimates as sales grew sharply and the software company moved aggressively to rein in costs. In after-hours trading, shares of Red Hat, a provider of open-source software used by businesses, rose more than 4% to $15.72 following the report.

It was a short presentation that focused dryly on "opportunities" for open source in something he called the "service-driven data center." But when he turned to the need for Linux to inter-operate with Windows in this service-driven data center, Novell's chief executive Ron Hovsepian delivered an apology - of sorts - for his company's controversial marriage to Microsoft in 2006. Speaking at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), Hovsepian said he could have done a "better job" of communicating about the deal and suggested he got caught up in thinking about customers, instead of the perception and possible fallout from dealing with Microsoft.

With the publication of drive by download attack code this week which impacts Firefox security on all platforms by exploiting an unpatched and critical flaw in the browser, and the successful hacking of the Firefox client (as well as IE8 and Safari) at the CanSecWest PWN2OWN competition, you might be getting a little concerned that the ‘more secure than Internet Explorer’ choice isn’t, perhaps, so secure after all.

This tutorial shows how to prepare a CentOS 5.2 server for the installation of ISPConfig 3, and how to install ISPConfig 3. ISPConfig 3 is a webhosting control panel that allows you to configure the following services through a web browser: Apache web server, Postfix mail server, MySQL, MyDNS nameserver, PureFTPd, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, and many more.

In this article, we have learnt how to secure a Scalix server. Firewalls and OpenVPN do a very good job, but there are some quirks where the admin has to pay attention. Stunnel works flawlessly, whereas https redirection does not survive updates and cannot be recommended, but it helps understanding the structure of the Scalix web server.

In this article we will cover the installation and configuration of the FreeNAS server. We boot the FreeNAS server from the LiveCD disk and configure a simple disk that is accessed by CIFS and http://FTP. We also look at how to install FreeNAS to the hard drive and how to upgrade it.

You don’t have to be an uber system administrator of a network to use Htop. It might have been designed with the masters of the universe in mind but just because you are a mere solitary desktop user in a Pizza-strewn study room staring at a single machine doesn’t mean you can’t get it and use it too. This article will show you how to configure and use htop to monitor system resources and how to use this dinky interactive application to manage running applications and processes on your desktop. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine

More than two years ago the South African Revenue Service (SARS) began a process to migrate its desktops to Linux by calling for a proof on concept. Two years on the desktop migration has not happened but the tax-collection arm of government has made some progress towards wider open source use, including wide use of Suse Linux. We take a look at exactly what has been going on.

While backup and recovery solutions are considered paramount in most organisations, they are possibly one of the most overlooked procedures in company security policies, mainly because they seem to try to achieve the opposite. Security demands strong encryption and overall policy control over employee and enterprise-wide information, while backup software tries to simplify the data centre recovery process regardless of platform, location and user, anywhere on the network.

Red Hat CEO doesn't know how to make money off of Desktop Linux.

Each time you upgrade to a new version of Ubuntu, here are five essential Ubuntu modifications you should consider making, according to WorksWithU, the independent guide to Ubuntu.

There’s been alot of discussion about IBM being in talks with Sun Microsystems about a $6.1 billion acquisition. Initially Sun’s stock (ticker: JAVA) shot up significantly while IBM’s stock (ticker: IBM) initially dropped a few points before recovering to only a small loss. While this may or may not be good for each company, I started to wonder what would happen to some of the projects that Sun manages, specifically MySQL but also ZFS, OpenSolaris and others.