Showing all newswire headlines

It's been over a year since I first wrote about Seam and enough has changed over that time to provide a refresh of the entry. Last month JBoss released version 4.2 of its application server, a release JBoss refers to as a "stepping stone from JBoss 4.0 to JBoss 5.0".

As I reported recently, the Massachusetts ITD has announced its intention to add Microsoft's OfficeOpen XML specification (now Ecma 376) to its list of approved "open standards," subject to a very short comment period that will expire on July 20. I have great concern that such a decision may be as influential outside of Massachusetts as was the original decision by the ITD in August of 2005 to include ODF, and exclude OOXML. That first decision raised the credibility and visibility of ODF dramatically, and it is fair to say that all of the later successes of ODF were made possible by that decision.

After internal consideration in the Samba Team we have decided to adopt the GPLv3 and LGPLv3 licences for all future releases of Samba. To allow people to distinguish which Samba version is released with the new GPLv3 license, we are updating our next version release number. The next planned version release was to be 3.0.26, this will now be renumbered so the GPLv3 version release will be 3.2.0.

With little fanfare, Nokia released the latest upgrade for its N800 Internet tablets this weekend. Known officially as Internet Tablet OS 2007 Edition version 4.2007.26-8 and to open source patrons as Maemo 3.2, the new download features long-awaited changes to the Linux kernel, improved battery life, and some flashy updates to the application software -- including the popular Skype softphone.

Shortly after the GPLv3 license was released, Microsoft issued a statement in which they expressed their view that Microsoft is not a party to the GPLv3 and it is therefore not applicable to them. Microsoft’s current position, taken unilaterally, is intended to eliminate any perceived ambiguity about the applicability of GPLv3 to Microsoft. Nonetheless and independent of Microsoft’s position, we would like to make clear our commitment to our customers that Novell will continue to distribute SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with its full set of functionality and features, including those components that are licensed under GPLv3.

Now that Microsoft has declared itself untouched by any GPLv3 terms, everyone is trying to figure out if they have a leg to stand on. There is a whole lot of analysis going on, with some wondering if Microsoft is a distributor of software under GPLv3 by means of the voucher distribution and others wondering just what those vouchers included.

Dell Inc. plans to sell computers with preinstalled Linux outside the U.S. as well as offer the Ubuntu Linux distribution to small business customers.

Canonical, Ltd., the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, today announced that it won Enterprise Open Source Magazine's Readers' Choice Award for the "Best Linux Distribution," voted on by members of the open source community. The winners of the Readers' Choice Awards were revealed by SYS-CON, the parent publishing company for Enterprise Open Source Magazine, at the second annual Enterprise Open Source Conference in New York last week.

Today marks the launch of openmoko.com the corporate site for the openmoko project. If you didn't know already the openmoko is a new cell phone designed from the ground up in an open manner. All the hardware is designed in an open manner and the software on the phone itself is gnu/linux.

Despite Microsoft's attempt to dissociate itself from GPLv3 software, Novell is embracing the new licence.

This solution is based on the Sliding Door technique with dynamic width and a rollover effect. The menu is defined using a plain HTML list and using CSS you get a gracefully degradable tabbed menu. PHP is used to automate most of the process so that maintenance is very easy. Easily adaptable to other frameworks.

The collaboration space is getting crowded these days, with various products offering Exchange-like functionality and a few enticing extras. Among the available solutions is Zimbra, which provides a collaboration server that runs on Linux. Find out what Justin James discovered when he installed Zimbra and put it through its paces.

[TechRepublic is a Windows centric site, so I was curious to read this review. As expected, he complains heavily about CLI, but has some good things to say about Zimbra. -- NoDough]

Open Source software was at the heart of multimedia coverage of this year's National Arts Festival in Grahamstown. The Cue Online website is powered by Drupal, while CuePix is running a vanilla installation of Menalto's Gallery2. Cue is the official festival newspaper.

Determining usage and growth of Free software has always been a challenge. For over a decade, arguments have been held – sometimes flamewars – whose central point was the usage level of software that is freely distributed. At the center of this debate, one typically finds the GNU/Linux operating system. Endless attempts have been made to count Linux users, but in the end this might always remain an impossibility.

This is the review of the latest stable release of Elive 1.0 which was released on 5th of July 2007. Elive 1.0 will enlighten you with E16 and E17 window manager and also make your PC as stable as a Debian system. Old PC? No problem!

The Gentoo Linux project team will host its UK 2007 community conference on Saturday, July 14, at University College London. A wide range of topics will be covered, from clustering to KDE, a project spokesperson said on the distro Web site. The event will be held in the Chatwick Lecture Theater at UCL. Doors will open at 10 a.m., and the day will finish at around 5 p.m., the spokesperson said.

As its name implies, Mail Notification is a utility for keeping track of incoming mail and reading it in a popup window without activating your mail reader or moving other open applications. Simple to configure and easy to use, it is especially useful for watching multiple mailboxes.

As market watchers have predicted, Sony has dropped the price of its Playstation 3 console by US$100 ahead of the E3 expo in Santa Monica this week. The cut was widely expected but some had thought Sony may wait until closer to the holiday shopping season. The price cut has taken the PS3 60GB down to US$499 while a new 80GB model will fill the previous US$599 slot.

[Considering that it comes with Yellow Dog Linux on it I thought it would be of interest to our readers. - Scott]

Linux fans (myself included) love to argue to Windows users how much better the Linuxes are than Microsoft Windows. However (and there's always a however) we tend to be very selective on what we tell you when it comes to the minor details. Take this as a confession, as an admission of those details you might not necessarily like about Linux.

It's probably safe to say that today's desktop Linux users have come to expect a certain out-of-the-box experience ("OOBE"). This usually includes things like an easy-to-use, graphical installer, a good-looking desktop and graphical configuration tools. And then there's Slackware, which is more traditional. It's got a reputation for sacrificing ease-of-use in favor of letting the end user configure the system and its software by herself.