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Perl hacker Ian Malpass uses Perl, Firefox and Greasemonkey to make Etsy.com, the popular online crafts market, more usable and seller-friendly---without ever touching the servers. Tina Gasperson reports on how he did it, and how anyone can do it.

Open source business intelligence (BI) vendor Jaspersoft has closed a new round of financing -- thanks to backers that now include Linux vendor Red Hat, InternetNews.com has learned. Jaspersoft's new round of financing totaled $12.5 million, bringing the company's total venture financing to $43.5 million to date.

Sugar Labs today announced its membership in the Software Freedom Conservancy, an organization of Open Source and Free Software projects. Sugar Labs supports the free and open source desktop environment, Sugar, originally created for the One Laptop per Child Project (OLPC). The Sugar community now has an active global developer base that is focused on engaging young children in learning through computing and the Internet. As a member of the Conservancy, the Sugar community will work to accelerate the adoption of the Sugar learning platform and strengthening the project by attracting new industry members and community contributors.

My primary target was testing xVM performance at opensolaris 2008.11(based on 101b Nevada build). Solaris Nevada works smoothly with images located on UFS and zpools.Opensolaris 2008.11 requires only zpools as image devices for Xen Guests to be installed in reasonable time.I believe it's a known issue caused by ZFS. From my standpoint the most impressive UI feature is Package Manager. It's really helpful.

The Open Invention network has formally launched a program aimed at helping developers document patent claims and defend them against possible claims from vendors and patent trolls.

Dear President-elect Obama, As part of your campaign, you were an advocate for small and medium business (SMB). I agree with this philosophy, since such a large number of people in the United States are employed by SMBs, and since such a large portion of our economy is based on SMBs. In the computer industry there is something known as Free Software, which is software that guarantees the availability of the source code for the software solution to the end user. This allows the end user to make a business decision about whether they wish to use the software the way it exists, or take steps to change the software to have it meet the end-user needs.

"The future of software is in cloud computing," says Fabrizio Capobianco, CEO of Funambol, a company that provides mobile services. And if free and open source software (FOSS) is going to survive in that emerging market, he says, then the community needs to adjust by promoting greater use of the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL), a license specifically crafted for software as a service.

Microsoft has launched Oxite, an open source blogging platform. However, the software maker was quick to underline that the product is aimed at developers and not intended to directly compete with popular blogging software such as WordPress or Movable Type. Microsoft posted the Oxite code on its CodePlex Web site last week and made an official announcement this week. The software, described as an alpha release, is available under the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL), one of Microsoft's OSI-certified open source licenses.

Linux users enjoy various sets of tools that allow one to record the active desktop. From GUI applications to command line scripts. A simple way is to use just vncserver: vncserver -geometry 800×600 Open another Terminal window an type vncrec -record desktop.vncrec to start recording.

cURL is just what the guru ordered when you want an all-purpose downloader that supports practically every file-transfer protocol there is, and it's invaluable for getting behind pretty but uninformative GUIs when you need to see what's really going on. This tip shows you three useful ways to use it, and how to find out more.

Corporations and home users alike need firewall protection. Many choices abound, including some expensive, commercial options that only run on specialized hardware. Others, like SmoothWall Express, are freely downloadable, built on the same technology as the commercial solutions, and even deliver some superior features.

Hi All, Here's the 18th tip in the "OpenLDAP Quick Tips" series: "You need to encrypt the raw bdb files"

For some, Ubuntu 8.10 was something of a disappointment. Not because it is bad, which it is not, but because is feels more like slightly refreshed Ubuntu 8.04 rather than a new release. For one, Ubuntu’s promised desktop interface overhaul is still not in evidence and that was promised two releases ago. And then there is the fact that apart from a few minor tweaks it looks every but the same as ubuntu 8.04. Which is not good considering the ongoing talk from founder Mark Shuttleworth of how the Linux desktop must be as appealing as Mac OS X. Right now it feels as if Ubuntu is making no ground on that goal.

Symbian, the UK-based maker of the world's most popular smartphone operating system, is going through big changes. As well as being taken over by Nokia, the company is preparing to convert its closed code into open source. At the Symbian Smartphone Show in London in October, Symbian's research chief David Wood told ZDNet Asia's sister site ZDNet UK that the Symbian Foundation will be established in the first half of next year, with the first version of the Foundation software available in March or April 2009. He also discussed the complications of such a process, as well as what the next few years holds for smartphone technology.

This blog is momentarily interrupted to bring you a snippet of recently received email. "...observed one of my students with a group of other children gathered around his laptop. Upon looking at his computer, I saw he was giving a demonstration of some sort. The student was showing the ability of the laptop and handing out Linux disks. After confiscating the disks I called a conference with the student and that is how I came to discover you and your organization. Mr. Starks, I am sure you strongly believe in what you are doing but I cannot either support your efforts or allow them to happen in my classroom. At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful. These children look up to adults for guidance and discipline. I will research this as time allows and I want to assure you, if you are doing anything illegal, I will pursue charges as the law allows. Mr. Starks, I along with many others tried Linux during college and I assure you.."

[Go get em' Ken! - Scott]

The FBI is advising users of the open source VoIP package Asterisk to upgrade to the latest version, but has so far provided very little evidence on what vulnerability it has detected.

Debian Lenny’s release is getting closer and closer and many people will want to upgrade their Etch servers to Lenny, maybe even before Lenny is declared stable (at RC1 at this time). Even people that don’t want to upgrade to lenny might find some useful information in this post ;-) ...

You probably know that reading from RAM is a lot of faster than reading files from the hard drive, and reduces your disk I/O. This article shows how you can store files and directories in memory instead of on the hard drive with the help of tmpfs (a file system for creating memory devices). This is ideal for file caches and other temporary data (such as PHP's session files if you are using session.save_handler = files) because the data is lost when you power down or reboot the system.

Good news is that China is increasingly shying away from Microsoft and adopting Linux in its Internet cafés. However, can we trust the Red Flag Linux they're using?

The Internet giant announced an open source project to dramatically boost the power of Web applications. Native Client lets Web apps run with PC power. Rumors have abounded over the years about a Google operating system, perhaps based on the Ubuntu version of Linux widely used within the company, but this week the company revealed an open source project that provides a different answer to the same problem: Native Client.