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You don't have to load a client on your PC to run GMail. You don't have to invest in expensive infrastructure to subscribe to Salesforce.com. It's not that complicated. I'm not sure what's so hard for Ellison to understand. Nor does it seem stupid. Maybe I'm missing something, but to me it seems to be an intelligent and reasonable approach to computing, especially in a fragile economy.

The 2008 Linux Kernel Summit was held September 15 and 16 in Portland, Oregon, immediately prior to the Linux Plumbers Conference. At this invitation-only meeting, some 80 developers discussed a number of issues relevant to the kernel and its future development. The following reports were written by Jonathan Corbet, who attended the event and was a member of its program committee.

Microsoft admits that TCO for education students in developing nations is about the same with their products and Free Software. They further admit that the initial TCO costs of hardware and software are lower with Linux, and that Linux technical people in developing nations command a higher salary than their Microsoft counterparts due to scarcity. I feel that this mandates greater use of Free Software in universities and high schools to help increase the number of locally employed, highly trained Free Software professionals to decrease that scarcity, and to lower the balance of trade problems that occur by sending software royalty money outside of the country.

In the proprietary production world, what matters about a copyright is who owns it. In the free production world, however, who owns a copyright is relatively unimportant. What matters is what license it is offered under. There is a very simple rule of thumb about the best license to use: use a “free, copyleft license”. As usual, Terry Hancock forensically analayses issues of copyleft, the GPL and licences generally and you can read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

Earlier this year Fedora 9 was the first distribution providing kernel-based mode-setting (or KMS for short). At the time there was only a kernel mode-setting driver for Intel hardware and it ended up being disabled by default. We had provided a preview of kernel-based mode-setting that showed how the system display looked when it came to the flicker-free boot experience, fast and clean VT switching, and the technical advantages this method provides over the graphics mode-setting within an X.Org DDX driver. With months having passed since our first article and Red Hat engineers working aggressively on KMS improvements for Fedora 10, we are providing another look at this technology and some of the recent advancements.

Google showed off its new brainchild last week:a smartphone design in collaboration with its Android partners, Taiwan's handset maker HTC, and the wireless carrier T-Mobile USA. The phone specs are all over the place on the Internet. It looks quite attractive, but perhaps because of the Apple iPhone's lasting impression, many tech pundits gave only a"pass" grade on its appearance.

The CC Network Filesystem (ccgfs) lets you mount filesystems over the network using either the push or pull model for connections. Most network filesystems use the pull model, where the client mounts a network share and all connections originate from the client. Using the push model for network shares means that all connections originate from the server. The push model has advantages when you want a machine on your network demilitarized zone (DMZ) to access a file server through a firewall.

So far, all of the browsers that I reviewed for this book have been Gnome-based browsers. Epiphany is a Gnome-sponsored project, and Firefox is rapidly moving towards Gnomeization (though at the time of this writing, a Qt port of Firefox is under heavy development). What’s a good KDE user to do? Simple: use the conqueror of the browser market, Konqueror. Andrew Min is your guide to the all singing, all dancing, resident KDE browser Konqueror. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

This tutorial will run you through the installation, configuration and preparation of media for Apple’s Darwin QuickTime Streaming Server on Centos/RHEL 5.2. Darwin QuickTime Streaming Server is capable of serving H.264 and mpeg4 file formats via the RTP/RTSP streaming protocols.

The simple way to find your Fibre WWN's On RedHat Linux. Today's post should be nice and simple. Maybe even short... yeah ;) This is a bit of a follow-up on a post we did a long long time ago regarding Linux networking tips. It's quite a bit more specific, but remains true to the spirit of that post (from December 2007, which, still, seems like it was just last year ;)

It is coming out a bit late, but the beta release for the upcoming Fedora 10 release (codenamed Cambridge) is now available. It has been almost two months since the last test release and a lot of work has been accomplished when it comes to the new and exciting innovations found within this Red Hat distribution.

The launch of Google’s Chrome has created a frenzy of online activity (just Google it and it will return in excess of fifty one million results), including mine. and already the world and his wife has been busy publicising tips, tricks and hacks. There is absolutely no doubt that Google is very serious about its new baby. They hired no less than four Firefox developers—Ben Goodger, Pam Greene, Darin Fisher and Brian Ryner. Enough said. It wasn’t dreamed up on the spur of the moment as another speculative product of the Summer of Code. Can the same be said of Knol? What is it, how does it work and more importantly, does it conform with the principles of free software and is it a serious challenger to Wikipedia? Find out why Gary Richmond thinks Google's knol is a stinker and not the remotest threat to Wikipedia by reading the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

Do any of you use Linux as your primary operating system? I have been dual-booting Linux and Windows for about five years now, though it’s a rare thing, indeed, for me to use the latter for anything. I know whatever you decide to use is entirely up to you, unless you are stuck using someone else’s computer.

Both One Laptop Per Child and Intel are now moving into million-unit sales numbers for their respective 4P Computers, the XO laptop and the Classmate PC. Last week, the Economic Times reported that OLPC is looking to sell 1 million XO laptops in India for $300 each. But this would not be to the Indian government, which alternates between calling the XO "pedagogically suspect" and attempting its own "$10 laptop". OLPC is looking to India's wealthily elite to fund educational empowerment through an Indian Give Many + Give One Get One:

As I listen to all this talk of lack of trust in the banking system, of inflated values ungrounded in any reality, of “opacity”, and of “contaminated” financial instruments, I realise I have heard all this before. In the world of software, as in the world of finance, there is contamination by overvalued, ungrounded offerings that have led to systemic mistrust, sapped the ability of the computer industry to create real value, and led it to squander vast amounts of time and money on the pursuit of the illusory, insubstantial wealth that is known as “intellectual property”.

Bluefish is a GUI-based text and code editor that runs on "most (maybe all?) POSIX compatible operating systems including Linux, FreeBSD, Ma cOS X, OpenBSD, and Solaris." It has an impressive feature list, and is both lightweight and speedy. It is not currently under heavy development primarily because it is a mature program that already does exactly what it is supposed to do with no fuss or complaint.

It did what it was designed to do...Lindependence 2008, that is. Not only was it to bring Linux to new users, it was to incite others to copy the effort. It worked. This time, it's the city of Portland Oregon that is hosting Lindependence. Will they convert the whole city? Geek please. What they will do however is prove that our instincts were right...LIndependence wasn't a one trick pony. And the two guys that are making the Portland Penguin Parade happen? Are they as diametrically opposed politically and socially as Larry and Ken? Let's take a look.

Open Source is emerging for the first time as a central theme at the CeBIT 2009 conference. Linux Magazine, together with the conference organizers and the Linux Foundation, is now encouraging Open Source projects to bid for free booths at the conference. CeBIT 2009, the largest global IT trade show opens March 3-8 in Hannover, Germany. For the first time Open Source becomes a central theme. Without these projects free software would be unthinkable, therefore not only will industries take part, but free projects will have the opportunity to share their work with the larger public. Linux Magazine, together with the conference organizer Deutsche Messe AG, is therefore seeking out projects that wish to present their work publicly at CeBIT Open Source.

Dmitry Yemanov did a session about Firebirds future, he included several slides about the almost-beta Firebird 2.5, an Alpha build is currently available via Firebirds website.

As some of you know, Linux is what my computers run on, and Simply Mepis is the particular distribution. I have been using Simply Mepis for a number of years, and would not go backwards into a Windows environment for anything. There is no need to, really, as all my computing needs are met in Linux: safe, secure, virus free, and easy to use. For more on Linux, you can read my post Linux - Is It For You?