Showing all newswire headlines

Sean Daly had the opportunity to meet up in Brussles with George Greve, President of the Free Software Foundation Europe, on July 2nd, and naturally he wanted to ask him about GPLv3. He also got Greve's views on what's wrong with Open XML, some news about the complaint ECIS, the European Committee For Interoperable Systems, has lodged with the European Commission, this time in the area of office and internet interoperability, how the FSFE's Freedom Task Force has been working out, and much more.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has decided to abandon net neutrality and allow telecoms companies to charge websites for access. Afraid of the potential stifling of information to you? Good. Then go to Save The Internet and see what you can do to fight. There are literally only days left for you to get your voice heard.

aKademy 2007 is continuing. Tuesday featured the Education Day and many smaller BoF sessions. In the meantime, hackers worked around-the-clock on various projects, both in the 'quiet' area and in the discussion area.

Earlier this year, former US senator and presidential candidate Bill Bradley published The New American Story, a book about reforming the American agenda. As part of that process and as a public citizen, he has joined open source activists to produce a Web-based window into the US federal budget.

"With all the tickless and other goodies going into the kernel in the last few months, there is a lot of hope that this helps Linux reduce power consumption," Arjan van de Ven began on the lkml, "and the good news is that it does... once you fix some bugs and fix a bunch of userspace applications." He referred to a promising graph generated utilizing the recently introduced PowerTOP utility, measuring power consumption before and after applying a series of related bug fixes.

Synfig Studio is a 2-D animation program that uses vector graphics. Although it has only just released version 0.61.06-1, it is already approaching early maturity, with enough tools and innovations that professionals might seriously consider using it. The only real question about its future is the minor one of whether the developers can learn the difference between practical and merely arbitrary changes in standard interfaces and tools.

Linux and Eclipse leaders and programmers are trying to make Eclipse the IDE of choice for Linux software development.

aKademy 2007 goes on. Monday was filled mostly with the KDE e.V. meeting, and finished with a social event at the city chambers.

The Software Freedom Law Center, provider of pro-bono legal services to protect and advance Free and Open Source Software, today released a white paper that considers new U.S. Federal Communications Commission rules, which go into effect today, governing Software-Defined Radio devices.

Try as it might, Microsoft could find it very hard to wiggle out of its GPLv3 connection.

Open Tuesday is back with renewed vigour after a brief hiatus. Once again the Joburg open source community will have a chance to come out the computer screen and meet each other while learning a little bit more about local developments.

Now that the SourceForge.net community has selected the nominees, you can vote for the projects you think represent"the cream of the crop on SourceForge.net. Don't procrastinate; voting ends at 11:59 p.m. PDT on July 20.

Bonding is the same as port trunking. In the following I will use the word bonding because practically we will bond interfaces as one. Bonding allows you to aggregate multiple ports into a single group, effectively combining the bandwidth into a single connection. Bonding also allows you to create multi-gigabit pipes to transport traffic through the highest traffic areas of your network. For example, you can aggregate three megabits ports into a three-megabits trunk port. That is equivalent with having one interface with three megabytes speed.

Unless you're an old Linux user, you've only probably used the KDE, GNOME or Xfce desktop environments. But since the time when these desktops were in their infancy, the Enlightenment desktop environment has been impressing users. Bringing this mature, visually appealing environment to new Linux users is what the Elive distribution is all about. Its developer Samuel "Thanatermesis" F. Baggen, explains his reasons for spinning Elive and how the distro has evolved over the years.

Keyto in his article Understanding the Common User points that "everything should be as simple as it is.. or even simpler" and warns that converting a common user to Linux without giving him enough protection leads to a imminent failure. Karol Trojanowski, in a rebuttal Get Real or How NOT To Convert Your Grandma to Linux stresses that dumbing down is not the key to success, understanding is. Both articles are a must-read for Linux nerds trying to convert anyone on their way.

Psst. Want to buy a zero-day? A Swiss startup called WabiSabiLabi Ltd. has some for sale, but to qualified buyers only. On Tuesday, the company launched a security vulnerability marketplace, where details on unpatched software flaws can be bought and sold. By Thursday, the site was offering details on four bugs in products such as the Linux kernel and Yahoo Messenger. No bids had yet been registered, and asking prices for the research ranged between $681 and $2724. An 0day vulnerability is a previously undisclosed bug that has not been fixed by the vendor.

The obvious question that any open source "business" needs to address is how to get people to pay for offerings. Being that the code is out there and customers can theoretically support themselves and/or never pay there needs to be a compelling reason for them to give you their money. Every open source company struggles to figure out what these "value triggers" are.

When Evans Data released its survey on Tuesday showing a sharp shift toward Linux (and away from Windows) among developers in North America, the Linux world went wild. Wistful penguin heads heralded the coming Open Source Age. There are several signs that the coming year could bring a sea-change among end users, making 2008 the year of the Linux desktop.

One of the unsung features of GPLv3 is its grant of compatibility to the Apache and Eclipse open source licenses. Apache or Eclipse licensed code can now be combined with GPL code without creating a violation of the GPL. That wasn't possible in the past, or at least, not sanctioned by the Free Software Foundation. GLPv3, wrote Brian Behlendorf, "is good news, from my perspective."

I just watched Mark Shuttleworth’s Keynote on aKademy. The discussion afterwards was mainly dominated by his suggestion to switch KDE’s development cycle to a 6 month release cycle. Here is a closer look at what Mark said - and what KDE did in the past.