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A common question you hear from proprietary vendors when dismissing open source alternatives is “how many customers actually want access to the code anyway?” It is a question I put to an open source software vendor myself earlier this week while playing devil’s advocate. The response - that the right to modify the source code is more important than actually doing it - is well known, but it is worth repeating in the light of recent events surrounding the Mindquarry open source collaboration project.

I'm writing this review on Google Docs in Firefox while running gOS 1.0.1, the Ubuntu-based distribution that steers users toward Web-based applications whenever possible -- mostly those under the auspices of Google -- and which powers the Everex Linux PC being sold for $199 by the truckful at Wal-Mart.

It's that time of the month again where we get to share with you all of the details on the latest ATI/AMD Linux driver release. This month, the ATI Catalyst 7.12 Linux driver (formally, what is known as fglrx 8.44) brings a host of new changes, mostly in the form of bug fixes. In total, there are just under a dozen noteworthy bug fixes in this release -- including addressing 3D acceleration issues on AGP graphics cards and the well-known OpenGL memory leak that was introduced with the new driver code-base. In addition, the FireGL graphics cards are now supported on this new driver code-base.

After reporting strong quarterly earnings, Red Hat discloses it is replacing CEO Matthew Szulik. In a move that caught even Red Hat senior staffers by surprise, the Linux company announced on Dec. 20 that long-time president and CEO Matthew Szulik is resigning. He will be replaced by James M. Whitehurst, a former Delta chief operating officer, as of the first of next year.

The Protocol Freedom Information Foundation has just signed an agreement with Microsoft to receive the protocol documentation needed to fully interoperate with the Microsoft Windows workgroup server products and to make them available to Samba and other Free Software projects. No. This isn't a bit like the Novell-Microsoft agreements. This is for access to Microsoft's protocols, as ordered by the EU Commission and agreed to by Microsoft. It's a good thing, in my opinion, and the Samba guys worked really hard to make this as good as it gets.

An international venture called the Universal Library Project has made more than one million books freely available in digitized format. The joint project of researchers from China, India, Egypt, and the US has the eventual aim of digitizing all published works of man, freeing the availability of information from geographic and socioeconomic boundaries, providing a basis for technological advancement, and preserving published works against time and tide.

Government, state and regional agencies, authorities and services may also publish in other formats, but they must always publish in one of these formats. The decree is retroactive, and by 2014 all documents published prior to this decree must have been converted and made available in one of the three formats.

Our resident Master's student Gian Spicuzza chimes in this month with a great feature HowTo on Kernel Hardening! There are a number of ways to lock down a system, and RBAC (role based access control) is one of them. Read on to learn more about what makes RBAC so useful, and to read one of the best overviews on Low/Medium/High Security... The combination of the Linux kernel and GNU packages has always been regarded as a secure operating system, but can it be more secure?

DV and MiniDV camcorder tapes can be used for more than just storing audio and video recordings. If you have a camcorder and a FireWire connection to your computer, you can also use them to store files. Using DV tapes for data storage has its advantages. A 60-minute tape, in Short Play mode, can realistically store about 10GB of information at a speed transfer of around 3MB/second, while in Long Play mode it should be able to store about 15GB. Besides that, moving files to a DV tape is a good way to hide sensitive data, because few people would look there for that kind of information.

As other countries embrace free, open source software (like Austrian schools learning how to use OpenOffice), especially GNU/Linux distributions on the desktop as alternatives to Windows/Mac, the burning question is, how long before the USA catches on? That said, consider how 10th and 11th grade Vietnamese and foreign students are learning...

Sharing printers across subnets is not something that has been reduced to clicking a couple of checkboxes yet, and a lot of folks don't even know it can be done. With Linux it is fairly easy, but it takes some digging to learn how to do this. So Carla Schroder has dug, and today shares the spoils of her digging.

The news that Dell has now released Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) on its boxes (and about time too!) has been tempered somewhat by a potential storm of controversy caused by a couple of software packages that come bundled with the Dell Linux PCs. The two bundled packages happen to be proprietary software. Is this going to be a problem?

I have read roughly half a dozen reports telling horror stories about how many kernel related bugs are not getting to the developers out of fear of being treated like idiots. Speaking as a Linux user who has dealt with other developers in the past, this sounds likely to me.

There probably isn’t a serious hacker around that doesn’t know the name nmap. It’s a security term on it’s own, the opensource portscanner that has been around for as long as I can remember. Since it’s incarnation, nmap has been a command line tool. No point & click, just the power of the shell. A number of different GUI’s have been written, nmapfe, knmap, and so on. But now there is an official nmap GUI, Zenmap.

As I finish my testing on three different Linux supported wireless cards from Edimax running them on Ubuntu Gutsy, I discovered something that I think some people lose sight of. Because all three of these cards are using Ralink-based drivers of one sort or another, they tend to run a bit hot. And bundle that with a notebook not sitting on a notebook cooling pad and you have yourself one very overtaxed piece of hardware.

This document describes how to set up, configure and use TimeVault on Ubuntu 7.10. The resulting system provides a powerful backup system for desktop usage. TimeVault is a simple front-end for making snapshots of a set of directories. Snapshots are a copy of a directory structure or file at a certain point in time. Restore functionality is integrated into Nautilus - previous versions of a file or directory that has a snapshot can be accessed by examining the properties and selecting the 'Previous Versions' tab.

Amarok Headquarters reports yet again another release of the marvelous Amarok 1.4 'Fast Forward' series. Just like its predecessor, Amarok 1.4.8 fixes a fairly large amount of bugs, and therefore increases stability of Amarok's stable branch of development. Among the major improvements is the resolution of an issue that could, under some circumstances, cause a complete lockup during dynamic playback. Last.fm metadata fetching now also works with xine 1.1.8 and we made sure you can now also use your brand new iPods with your favourite music player.

Linux networking cookbook is a book for both a seasoned and new Linux network administrator. It includes valuable time saving recipes, tools and related resources. The book is written in clear and concise style with tons of examples and working code. Book covers wild verity of topics or so called recipes for Linux networking.

Syslets are a proposed mechanism which would allow any system call to be invoked in an asynchronous manner; this technique promises a more comprehensive and simpler asynchronous I/O mechanism and much more - once all of the pesky little details can be worked out. A while back, Zach Brown let it be known that he had taken over the ongoing development of the syslets patch set; things have been relatively quiet since then. But Zach has just returned with a new syslets patch which shows where this idea is going.

Developing secure applications has always been a difficult task. Software that manages critical functions once serviced only users on internal networks; today, applications run on Web servers accessible to users anywhere in the world. Not only have the scope and magnitude of Web applications increased, but so has the complexity of securing them. The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) comes to the rescue of Web application architects with tools, frameworks, and guidelines to improve security in applications.