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Sun Microsystems will release its xVM Ops Center virtualisation management application under the General Public Licence version 3 (GPLv3), the company revealed at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. The project marks the first application that Sun has put under the GPLv3. Rich Green, executive vice president for software at Sun, told vnunet.com that the licence was a "first step", suggesting that the company could pick GPLv3 for other projects in the future.

Last week I wrote about transparency as an open source value. Today, in the second of this informal series, I want to discuss the value called consensus. Consensus is an essential open source value, and a value which distinguishes open source from the proprietary models which came before it. Every successful open source project I know operates through consensus. Orders aren’t given, instructions are worked out. Raised voices, fists hammered on tables, these lead to code forks, and to volunteers abandoning a project. Successful open source entrepreneurs do their work through consensus. They listen to the people under them, and they seek shared responsibility. The best will say “we” did what works but “I” take the blame for what goes wrong.

In the 2007 Desktop Linux Survey, VirtualBox ranked number 3, after Wine and VMware. As for me, I used VirtualBox OSE almost exclusively when taking screenshots for my reviews. It's fast and easy to use! In this mini how-to, I will also show you some interesting screenshots.

The Krita donation drive has succeeded beyond the expectations of the Krita developers. Donations from all over the world made it possible to buy two Intuos graphics tablets and two art pens for the Krita developers to test their software with. The Krita developers are very grateful to the community for making this possible. The Intuos tablets and art pens make it possible to develop brushes and tools that make use of advanced features such as tilt and rotation for Krita 2.0.

Red Hat plans to begin a private beta test of new open-source messaging software next month, hoping to shake up a section of the server market currently dominated by proprietary rivals and give the Linux seller a new revenue source.

The Free Software Foundation has confirmed that Xming developer, Colin Harrison, has overreached his limits by attempting to impose additional restrictions beyond the requirements of the GNU GPL and LGPL.

In response to one of my Everex articles, commenter Alan Rochester clued me in to the Canada-based Linux store, which is offering a somewhat similar $199 PC preloaded with Ubuntu 7.10.

DivX, Inc. today announced it has acquired MainConcept AG, a leading provider of H.264 and other high-quality video technologies for the broadcast, film, consumer electronics and computer software markets. The acquisition is a stock and cash transaction valued at approximately $22 million with additional payments of up to approximately $6 million upon the achievement by MainConcept of certain product development goals and certain financial milestones during 2008.

Today I am looking at the new release of StartCom Enterprise Linux AS-5.0.1. This OS is a RedHat clone based on it's source packages. Images will guide you through the install process.

The first edition of this book got very good reviews and usually that means that unless something is drastically different about the second edition or it didn't keep up with the technology, it'll be a success, too. It's been seven years since the first edition came out which is reason enough to publish this updated title. This book comes off as cool in a couple of ways right off the bat. First of all, it's vendor-neutral...

Right after Halloween, Wal-Mart introduced Everex's Ubuntu Linux-powered TC2502 gPC for a list price of $198. Two weeks later, they're sold out. Everex tells DesktopLinux that more will be coming though. Wal-Mart only bought an initial run of approximately 10,000 units. For once, Wal-Mart's vaunted supply chain management system failed to predict just how popular an item would be. Wal-Mart offers a similar Everex model with more base memory and Windows Vista Home Basic called the Everex Impact GC3502 Desktop, for $100 more. Wal-Mart still has plenty of those.

This time last year, Oracle's Unbreakable Linux Network launched at OpenWorld to much fanfare. It was supposed to be a Red Hat killer. It has had as much impact upon Red Hat has a dead sheep. Larry Ellison says this is going to change. During his OpenWorld keynote this year, the Oracle CEO said the company means business next year. Oracle VM server virtualization, launched this week, will "differentiate ourselves from Red Hat", he proclaimed. And "going into the second year we will have sales with support and engineering, and we will grow faster."

Back on September 6th of this year AMD shocked the open-source community by committing to the development of a new open-source display driver (this driver is now known as RadeonHD) and that they would be providing specifications to the development community. A week later, they set precedence by not only releasing the documentation to the developers but to the everyone! Their first batch of documentation covered the basics for the RV630 and M56 GPUs and was released freely to the public without any Non-Disclosure Agreement! However, they still have much more GPU documentation that has yet to be released. Some simply believe AMD is doing this as a publicity stunt, but today we have new details to share as they prepare for their next GPU documentation release.

This tutorial introduces the OpenEmbedded build environment used to create filesystem images for OpenMoko phones, such as the Neo 1973. The OpenMoko environment provides a completely free development environment for running application and system code on supported phone hardware, eliminating all dependency on proprietary code.

Apparently, a fair number of my readers think I am either clueless about Linux or worse, that I am just plain anti-Linux. Actually, both assumptions couldn’t be further from the truth! ... From 1991 through 1996, I was a UNIX systems administrator. At home, I piddled extensively with Slackware but I soon grew bored with the experimentation required to use Linux. (In those days, OpenOffice didn’t exist so I was still tied to Windows for much of my personal productivity needs.) Nevertheless, I never stopped watching Linux.

WorkshopLive.com is a virtual music school that features dozens of professional instructors teaching lessons online for all levels of expertise, in guitar, bass, keyboard, and drums. When WorkshopLive was in the early stages of development, the company had limited funds to devote to hardware, software, and human resources, so CTO Marilyn Hoefner decided to give open source software a try. "We've been extremely happy," Hoefner says.

As hordes of European Java programmers descend on the JavaPolis conference in Belgium in mid-december, the developers of XWiki hope to turn heads with their "second-generation" wiki software that includes experimental integration with the Google Docs spreadsheet module. XWiki faces formidable competition, though. JavaPolis's own site runs on the competing Confluence platform, said by its developer to be in use by more than 4,000 organizations; XWiki's clients number in the hundreds. Confluence has its own spreadsheet plugin that interfaces with EditGrid rather than the ubiquitous Google Docs. XWiki hopes Google integration will be the killer plugin that raises its profile as an enterprise wiki.

I’ve been demoing this little green laptop for months. Everywhere I go, it’s a star, and everyone who sees it always asks me the same question: when can I get one? Finally, I have an answer: right now. But you’d better hurry, because they are only available for another 12 days. And here’s a little secret: it’s a really good deal. The mission of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is ambitious: to empower the children of developing countries to learn by providing one connected laptop to every school-age child.

Each new release of Mandriva is called by its developers “the best of all editions”. We had the same situation with Mandriva Linux 2008. But is this really true? Hardly so.

Tracking and squishing bugs (both the six-legged and the computer software kind) is hard, and you need all the help you can get. Though of no use against actual insects, Mantis is great for the other variety, since it lets end users report bugs or suggestions, and gives developers a full workflow solution so bugs can be assigned and progress on them checked until eventually the problems are fixed.