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A “blended approach”, combining open-source and proprietary software, is the economical and safe route to go to get application development done “securely” and on time, says Bill Roth, vice-president of BEA’s Workshop development environment business unit.

[Roth's anti-GPL comments are pretty galling. Mixing 'OSS' with non-free? Ugh! It was for freedom that Stallman set us free. - dcparris]

The remarkable rate of development in the information technology industry occasionally outpaces the skills of even the top experts in the field. Staying astride the flow of technological advances makes adaptability an imperative for veteran IT professionals and students alike.
[...]
The train-the-trainer institute distributes free open-source Web-based software, allowing teachers to download programs for classroom instruction with minimal hardware requirements.

Vaughn-Nichols really hits the nail on the head with this excerpt: Why do you think Linux sites, like this one, Linux Today, and many others have Microsoft ads running on them? Because, Microsoft buys the ad space, and the Linux companies almost never do. It's that simple. For a long time, Linux distributors have lived off the Linux news sites, yes, like this one, which report on every small Linux move. Guess what guys. That's great for building a niche. Congratulations, it worked. It also worked for the Amiga and OS/2, It sucks at growing a mass-market. It's also beginning not to work. Oh, more people every month are reading our family of Linux publications. I'm sure that's true of the other Linux news sites. I remember, however, when the new generation of online news sites, like Slashdot, also carried all the big Linux news and a lot of the small stuff. Now, many big Linux stories don't even make Slashdot or Digg.

[O.k., I can agree we need to ipmrove our marketing efforts. Some of these are the kinds of things we've been debating about as a community for years. The OEM argument sends chills down my spine in light of the discussions about OEMs here on LXer. - dcparris]

There is still a lot of hesitancy among commercial users over taking on open source software, says Bill Roth. The way to overcome it is for industry to invest in the open-source communities. This is the surest way of boosting the percentage of “trusted” open source applications.

A blind developer at Google has built a search engine to prioritise results that are accessible to visually impaired web users. The Google Labs project, launched last week, has been welcomed by RNIB and its US counterpart, AFB. Put a query into Google Accessible Search and a standard Google search begins. But before the results are presented, they are re-ordered to prioritise those pages identified as the most likely to be accessible to visually impaired users.

IBM has announced the availability of IBM Lotus Notes on Linux, the industry's first business-grade collaboration software to support Linux on the desktop.

To make its distribution appealing to Windows users, Xandros pares things down to sensible basics, unlike other Linux operating systems which bewilder new users with too many programs all doing the same thing.

I have prepared an account of the history of .Net and Java that’s intended to balance more fanciful post-mortem accounts. It reads thus:

The fourth and final day of the 2006 Ottawa Linux Symposium saw the annual tradition of the closing keynote address, this year by Greg Kroah-Hartman, introduced by last year's keynote speaker, Dave Jones, and the announcement of the next year's speaker.

ARTiSAN Studio 6.1 Includes Support for New SysML Standard

Debian has issued an update for gnupg2. This fixes a vulnerability, which potentially can be exploited by malicious people to cause a DoS (Denial of Service).

AIDE, Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment, is a file integrity checker, a type of intrusion det...

Unfortunately three significant pieces of information seem to add up and point to a hacker attack on Ubuntu this weekend.

Not surprisingly, Sun’s response to the recent report from analyst Richard Monson Haefel of The Burton Group, which suggested that Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) was effectively under a death sentence born of its over-complexity, have erred towards the dismissive.

Technalign has started shipments of TaFusion MEPIS Linux Frontier. Frontier is the next generation of TaFusion MEPIS Linux that is Ubuntu based. Version XI is still available from Partners and Technalign directly. The company also announced that they would start development of the 64-bit version of the operating system to be followed by their Enterprise Server offering.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Desktop, which is expected to move into beta testing within weeks, offers an improved desktop with enhanced graphics, Open Office 2.0, support for the Oasis file format, a new Access-like database application, improved wireless support and improved compatibility with Microsoft Office, according to a Red Hat document on the new desktop released at the company's recent summit.

India's biggest life insurer, the LIC, recently decided to shift its IT requirements on to Linux. Rishiraj Verma spoke to all those who were behind this landmark decision

The National Science Foundation has awarded $500,000 in grant funding to support a research and development partnership between the Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. This initiative, "Toward building a Performance-Predictable Wireless Mesh Network", focuses on the development of wireless routing protocols, network testing systems, and gateway discovery in open-source technology. The grant, part of the Network Technology and Systems Program of the NSF, provides support over a three-year period.

Although Palm no longer rules the PDA world, it doesn't mean that your old Palm OS device has to collect dust. You can still use it for some nifty open source applications.

TimeSys's subscription-based online service offering for embedded developers has gained a Linux 2.6.17 reference distribution for Atmel's AT91SAM9261 SoC (system-on-chip), new 2.6.11 patches for Freescale's MPC8272-ADS PowerQUICC II development board, and documentation related to static device nodes, cross-compiling drivers, and subversion.