Showing all newswire headlines

Tensions are already high over Novell's patent agreement with Microsoft, but Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth's invitation to openSUSE developers "concerned about the long term consequences" has kicked the tension up a notch.

“That was fast!” said one acquaintance on learning that the first openSUSE 10.2 release candidate put in its appearance on Thanksgiving afternoon not three weeks after beta 2 arrived. The release is currently available for downloading via both ftp and BitTorrent.

David Johnson's hobby is flying, but his obsession is open source. In true geek fashion, he merged those passions to create a better membership management solution for the Buttonville Flying Club, which led to money-saving options for his clients.

Apparently they believe the damage Novell will sustain from the loss of the community will outweigh any sustainable benefit from MicroSoft(R). Accordingly, Novell has been downgraded to "Underperform".

Red Hat has announced that strategic members of Red Hat's broad ecosystem of independent software vendors (ISVs) are already supporting and testing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Beta 2 to prepare for Red Hat's next major subscription milestone.

System builders considering a Linux desktop are faced with a dizzying array of choices. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of Linux distributions to choose from. Narrowing the field of contenders basically comes down to what works best for both the system builder and its customers.

There are hundreds of gift guides this holiday season filled with junk you can buy - but a lot of time you actually don't own it, you can't improve upon it, you can't share it or make it better, you certainly can't post the plans, schematics and source code either. We want to change that, we've put together our picks of interesting open source hardware projects, open source software, services and things that have the Maker-spirit of open source.

[What's not to like? - dcparris]

Microsoft has insisted it did not slash its software prices to encourage Birmingham City Council to abort its Linux project. Birmingham pulled the plug on its open source desktop project after it found an upgrade to Windows XP was cheaper. The city council had planned to roll out 1,500 Linux PCs across its libraries but in the end converted just 200 PCs.

Our battle is not about escaping software patents infringement. It is about invalidating software patenting as a whole. The former is basically impossible and hence pretty worthless. If you really want to fight the MS-Novell deal in the area of their patent covenant then support GPLv3 and urge as many developers as possible to switch to it.

The Education, Culture and Sports Department of the Spanish Canary Island's regional goverment have released mEDUXa 1.0. mEDUXa is a Free Software GNU/Linux distribution developed for educational purposes based on Kubuntu. It will be deployed on 35,000 computers in 1100 schools, which represents 325,000 possible users (25,000 teachers and 300,000 students) in the Canary Islands state schools. mEDUXa comes with different profiles, configured thanks to KDE's Kiosk mode. One of mEDUXa's major feature is the profile for young pupils (from 4 to 8 years old).

Bruce Perens has posted an open letter to Novell regarding its patent agreement with Microsoft. I likewise find it troubling that Novell may lobby in favor of software patents while claiming to have the interests of the Linux and FOSS communities in mind.

Some Linux distributions have longer lives than others. After two years of supported life, Novell is discontinuing support for SUSE Linux 9.2, effective yesterday. Its closest competitor, Red Hat's Fedora Core 3, which was released at roughly the same time as SUSE Linux 9.2, remains supported. "With today's release of "pam_ldap" we discontinue the security support for SUSE Linux 9.2," SUSE developer Marcus Meissner wrote in a mailing list posting.

Raw Therapee is a free RAW photo converter application developed single-handedly by Gábor Horváth. It has been available on Windows for some time, but on October 11, Horváth released the first build for Linux. If you are familiar with other graphical RAW converters, such as UFRaw, you will feel quite at home using Raw Therapee.

[Program is gratis, not sure about libre. - dcparris]

Having formed last year to provide Linux with intellectual property (IP) protection, the Open Invention Network has declared itself ready to respond to Microsoft Corp's 'baseless' claims that Linux contains its IP.

A few years back, Eric S. Raymond (or, as everyone else calls him, ESR), wrote a lengthy paper about this community. Entitled The Cathedral and the Bazaar, he wrote about how the Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) community does what it wants when it wants to.

GRISOFT, the developer of AVG security software, announced several new versions of its antivirus offerings for GNU/Linux and FreeBSD open source platforms. The products include AVG Email Server Edition 7.5 for Linux/FreeBSD now with integrated anti-spam as well as new products for the GNU/Linux platform – AVG Anti-Virus Professional Edition 7.5 for Linux/FreeBSD and AVG File Server Edition 7.5 for Linux/Free BSD.

I am glad to announce a new edition of MCNLive, code name Cherbourg, a portable live Linux system based on and 100% compatible with Mandriva Linux 2007. Highlights: 2.6.17 kernel; 3D desktop (AIGLX) with the free X.Org drivers for Intel and ATI video cards; desktop environment: KDE 3.5.4; office suite: KOffice; Opera 9.02; music, video and image applications with most common codecs; Internet and networking applications for all your needs; NTFS read-write support. All this on less than 360 MB.

It must be the season for big announcements, because they seem to be flying right now. I'd like to point out two of them from the Ruby community.

SOA (service oriented architecture) is a big deal, I like it. But it isn't the be all and end all of computing. Here are ten things you need to know about SOA.

Gaming equipment startup Bigfoot Networks is shipping a Linux-powered NIC (network interface card) aimed at improving network gaming performance. The Killer Network Interface Card has a 400MHz processor and hardware UDP/IP acceleration, to offload network processing. A contest for other Killer NIC apps is underway.