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Clay Shirky's book on what information technology is doing to our world, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, has important things to say to anyone interested in open source software (OSS). His thoughts on the evolving effects of the technological revolution we are all living in make for a fun way to spend a few hours.

Vietnamese users turning to Mozilla’s Firefox to offer then security got a shock yesterday when the company revealed that the Vietnamese language pack for Firefox 2 was contaminated with malicious code and that this had been available for download for three months.

The kernel developers are generally quite good about responding to security problems. Once a vulnerability in the kernel has been found, a patch comes out in short order; system administrators can then apply the patch (or get a patched kernel from their distributor), reboot the system, and get on with life knowing that the vulnerability has been fixed. It is a system which works pretty well.

Discover PHP's new features and syntax improvements and see how they will take this already-popular scripting language to the next level. Learn how Unicode support, Web 2.0 features, and other changes make PHP V6 more robust, as well as more international.

SqlSync lets you compare two databases to see which tuples have been added, removed, and changed. You can also use SqlSync to make one database a clone of another and maintain its contents to be that way. One benefit of using SqlSync to perform synchronization is that you can perform heterogeneous syncs -- for example, from MySQL to PostgreSQL.

Ask average computer users what FOSS is about, and, if they've even heard of it, they'll probably say something about the source code being publicly available. The problem is that the community has done a deplorable job of explaining itself to outsiders. Focused on the immediate concerns of developers, the Open Source Definition lists only one right out of ten (to redistribute the software) that might be of interest to average computer users. The more concise Free Software Definition includes two out four points for the average user (the rights to redistribute and to run the program for any purpose). But, in practice, those who use it tend to be focused on the rights given to developers like themselves.

AbiWord just had a great 2.6 release and the developers took several hours of their spare time over a few weeks period answering questions and providing information. Thanks to the team and especially MarcMaurer for his time and patience. We present you a detailed interview with the AbiWord team on a broad range of topics.

The members of the Firebird Project team are proud to announce the release of Firebird 2.1, a full release containing many sought-after new features including database monitoring, global temporary tables, database triggers and dozens of new internal functions.

This will be my last post from JavaOne this year–I’m headed back home. But that doesn’t mean that the rest of the JBoss crew is. They’re here through Friday to bring you more packed mini-sessions at the Pavilion booth and a few more technical sessions. Here’s the schedule for the rest of the week and another personal recommendation.

Maybe because of JavaOne and Sun’s well-known concerns about open source profit the idea of proprietary hooks which make people pay for open source software is big again.

Install OpenSolaris 2008/05, based on Nevada build 86, requires workaround recently suggested by Jurgen Keil.It's runtime profile differs from reqular one due to utilizing ZFS filesystem (vs UFS for regular Nevada builds) as was noticed by Mark Jonson at xen-discuss forum @opensolaris.org. Place OpenSolaris 2008/05 DVD in drive, wait until gets mounted and run ..

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install Xen on an Ubuntu Hardy Heron (Ubuntu 8.04) server system (i386). You can find all the software used here in the Ubuntu repositories, so no external files (apart from a fixed Ubuntu Xen kernel to enable networking for the virtual machines) or compilation are needed.

I use Tomboy, an open source notetaking app, to cull and organize the hundreds of bits of information I track, and to prioritize it on to-do lists on the fly. When we first reviewed Tomboy 0.3.5, it had some obvious flaws. The project has had a number of updates since then, and the newest version, 0.10.0, really makes the grade. If you use the GNOME desktop environment, chances are you already have Tomboy on your system, since it's part of the GNOME project. If not, or if you want to update to the latest version, you'll find it at the GNOME's Web site.

In a bit of off the cuff humor, Mark Rais creates another Linux Top Ten countdown. As always, he recommends downloading and listening to a drum roll mpg while reading the list.

Monday’s CommunityOne crowd was manageable and pretty much what I expected. Tuesday’s crowd was larger, but I walked straight into the technical sessions without a problem. This morning I stepped outside for a few minutes, and when I came back in, there was a line stretching across the entire large hallway and down an adjacent narrow one. Then I realized that was the line I wanted to be in. At the end of that long (but quickly moving) line, Gavin King from JBoss spoke to a standing-room-only crowd about the basics of Web Beans. The presentation included a lot of example code, stepping everyone through binding types, deployment types, producer methods, and more.

It took me a few tries to get a good burn on Damn Small Linux 4.3. Once I did, it worked great on my Dell Optiplex GX 520. It also performed flawlessly on my VIA C3 test box. It didn't do so well on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), where the colors were totally whacked out (blue looked like orange, etc. ...). But DSL has never run well on the Gateway, so I didn't expect anything. The biggest "get" in DSL 4.3 is Firefox 2, which for some reason has been renamed Bon Echo for the purposes of this distribution. Going from Firefox version 1.06 to 2 is a huge deal for DSL. Quite a few Web sites require at least FF 1.5 to work at all, including many Web e-mail services and the Movable Type and Blogger interfaces.

Some have voiced concern at Red Hat’s move to deemphasize the desktop, yet it’s a strategy that should be seen in a larger context.

Discover Apache Synapse, a high-performance enterprise service bus with simple configuration, extensible architecture, and a minimal footprint. It is a versatile tool that you can use for a variety of tasks. This article examines how you can use Apache Synapse to create mock Web services.

Cheating is bad, but does cheating infringe on a video game publisher’s copyright? World of Warcraft-maker Blizzard, a subsidiary of Vivendi, is trying to argue in court that it does.

Discover the Simple Text Transformation Tool, an extensible, Eclipse-RCP-based tool that allows you to perform transformations to text data. Also, become familiar with the tool’s built-in features for processing text files.