Showing all newswire headlines

After more than a year of active development, the open source PostgreSQL 8.2 database is now available.

[Hooray! - dcparris]

I've wanted to tackle Ruby for quite some time. Luckily, Addison-Wesley just sent me a copy of The Ruby Way, Second Edition by Hal Fulton. This is one of those books that makes me think publishers feel the need to sell books by the pound. The sad part about that is that, in many cases, books printed by the pound contain tons of fluff and useless information. Not so with The Ruby Way. Every page contains gems valuable for anyone who wants to program with Ruby.But this isn't a book review, per se. If it were, I'd recommend The Ruby Way without reservation.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) finally published the Open Document Format (ODF) as an official standard last week after approving it as an international standard last May. The ODF file format—the XML-based open format for text, spreadsheet, database, and presentation files—is now published under the standard name of ISO/IEC 26300:2006.

Winzig is a free, low-resource personal information manager (PIM) written in Python. It fits address book, calendar, to-do list, note-taking, and more into one small, fixed-sized window -- perfect for embedded devices, and if you care about your screen real estate, good for desktop systems as well.

Business software maker Novell posts a preliminary quarterly profit, bouncing back from a year-earlier loss when it took a$38 million restructuring charge.

Last month a new update of SIAG Office, version 3.6.1 was released. It’s a minor update, mainly bugfixes. Still, it was an update I was very glad to see since it had been nearly a year since the previous release.

With Power -- which previously was Apple's processor platform -- IBM has created synergy among developers, operators, architects and others thanks to Big Blue's global scale and industry strength, Interarbor Solutions Principal Analyst Dana Gardner told LinuxInsider. "It's really a growth area because of the clout IBM can bring to it."

Miguel de Icaza, inthis weblog entry says,"Facts barely matter when they get in the way of a good smear. The comments over at Groklaw are interesting, in that they explore new levels of ignorance." This comment rings especially true of his weblog entry. For example, Miguel states...We have been working on OpenOffice.Org for longer than anyone else has. We were some of the earliest contributors to OpenOffice, and we are the largest external contributor to actual code to OpenOffice than anyone else.Say what? Who created OpenOffice? Who bought it? Who opened it? Anyone ever hear of Star Division gmbh or Sun? Since when did Novell become the earliest contributor to OpenOffice.org?

Eldy doesn't need a cutting edge computer to function: it runs on most Windows PCs and will soon be available also on Linux. The project has deep roots in open source: it was developed in accordance with a set of rules and with the support of the open source community; Eldy was released freeware in order to guarantee the feasibility of the project, but it will have an open future and a self-installing Linux distribution.

[Frankly, it seems more like a FOSS project, or a project that aims to be released under a FOSS license. Can any Italians help us get a better grip? - dcparris]

The contest resulted in some superior and innovative work. "Some of the templates show just how advanced and flexible Openoffice.org's OpenDocument format is as both a Word and Spreadsheet ODF processor. The winning templates and many others breaks a myth that Openoffice.org cannot do advanced editing functions like Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel."

Sysbotz releases Systems Panel v2.0, An upgrade to their IT management solution accessible from your web browser.

[Appears to be non-libre - dcparris]

Traditional methods of securing a computer have revolved around controlling access to critical services. So, if you need to secure network applications, you need to police network traffic. But security vendors are realizing that securing a computer, in effect, boils down to protecting the applications instead. Novell's AppArmor is designed with just this is mind.

The first One Laptop Per Child hardware devices are still months from deployment, but you can sneak a peek at their Sugar desktop environment and bundled applications by running an OS image under an emulator. It's a great way to finally get some hands-on time with this long-anticipated project, even though it's not perfect.

Open Source Management Company to Showcase Enterprise Monitoring Solution

Stratus To Include XenEnterprise As An Integral Component In Stratus' Continuous Processing Architecture

[Non-libre implementation of Xen - dcparris]

The French government plans to make the region around Paris a center of excellence for open-source software development, the French minister of the Economy, Finance and Industry, Thierry Breton, said Monday.

Cluster collapseOur SCO cluster watch has officially shifted from threat level "amusement" to "concern."

[Ready the bugle for "Taps". - dcparris]

Learn the basics of GWT in this first article in a series, including how GWT lets you create an Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (Ajax) application and still write your code in the Java language.

The Linux operating system is the recipient of 75% of all vendor investment in open source software, according to a new report from the Harvard Business School, which also indicates that vendor support for open source is primarily motivated by boosting their proprietary offerings.

Things are changing very fast in the ODF landscape right now: Last week, Corel announced it would provide limited support by mid-2007 for ODF (open, view and edit of text only – but not save), and greater support for OOXML – presentations and spreadsheets as well as text.  Yesterday, Carol Sliwa at ComputerWorld released a detailed story on Microsoft's anti-ODF lobbying in Massachusetts.  Later this week, Ecma will formally vote to adopt OOXML and submit it to ISO for consideration (expect things to pick up on a number of fronts when that happens).  And now we have the Novell announcement. What, as they say, does it all mean?