Showing all newswire headlines

With LinuxWorld Conference and Exposition approaching, security vendor Symantec began nestling up to Linux reporters. The company sent out an invitation to a come-one-come-all "media appreciation dinner" at a tony Boston restaurant the first night of LWCE, perking up the ears of dozens of open source writers and starting the wheels of speculation turning. What could Symantec want with the Linux press? But the dinner was canceled due to "conflicts," according to Symantec's PR firm, which makes us wonder, does that mean Symantec doesn't appreciate us anymore?

Martin Fink, Hewlett Packard's Linux vice-president, yesterday slammed the open source community's complex licensing schemes, suggesting that there are too many open source licences for developers to manage properly.

He said there were currently "58 open source licences in use," and the task of keeping up with them created many difficulties for open source developers. Its something of a personal crusade for Fink, who said, "I've spent a lot of my time stopping people from creating more [licences]", before going on to say, "[HP has] never ever created an open source licence. If we never had to, why do you?"

Debian, Gentoo, Mandriva, Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu released security updates this week. Fedora and FreeBSD did not issue any security advisories this week. Advisories were issued for KOffice, OpenOffice.org, Flex, bsd-games, libcairo, FreeRADIUS, RealPlayer, and netpbm-free.

Content management system Mambo rakes in another award as it readies to release a new version and celebrate its fifth birthday.

At CaFeLUG, the local Free Software User Group in Capital Federal, Argentina, we have been putting on different types of installfests, technical meetings, annual conferences, and traditional LUG meetings for several years now. From them we've learned a lot about how to organize a technical conference. This article covers all the things you should think of before putting on an event. By hearing what worked for us and what didn't, maybe you can avoid making some of the mistakes we made.

A Voice over IP primer with special attention to using it on Linux.

Getting Ubuntu Back The first of a series that begins with the recovery methods employed to revise grub to show and boot Ubuntu Breezy that resided on a second disc.

  
At least 10% more programming effort is being poured into software released under the General Public License (GPL) than the combined output of all the programmers in Microsoft, says Eben Moglen, who has been analyzing the coding hours per week people have done.

Our man in Wheeling writes: This will become popular. Pretty soon, we'll have dozens, maybe even hundreds, of virtualization packages to choose from. Now we'll just need to make sure the software we want to run supports the virtualization package we are using.

I'm continually astounded by the depth and variety of the tools available for Linux, particularly for system administrators or even those who run just a regular Linux workstation. While other administrators in my Windows shop struggle with costly Windows GUI-based programs to get their data, I just smile and go back to my toolbox. What follows are some useful programs that I use on a daily basis.

Microsoft [seems] on Capitol Hill to push their perspective on nearly every piece of legislation.

According to Senate records analyzed using CRP’s new Lobbying Database, Abramoff represented at least 41 clients from 1998 through 2004. The largest, by far, was Microsoft, which employed the firm of Preston, Gates & Ellis as a lobbyist—a law firm where Microsoft chairman Bill Gates’ father is a principal. During the time that Abramoff worked for Preston, Gates as a Microsoft lobbyist, political contributions associated with the software giant totaled more than $13.3 million, accounting for 60% of contributions from all of Abramoff’s clients.

[ed: Now why is the US Government asking Europe to be kind to Microsoft? - tadelste]

BRUSSELS, March 30 — The United States government has intervened in Microsoft's antitrust dispute with the European Commission, urging it and the 25 national governments in the European Union to be fair to the company, American diplomats and European officials said on Thursday.

Microsoft has complained frequently in recent months that it has been denied the right to a fair defense in the continuing antitrust case with the European Commission. It has also accused the commission of collaborating with its rivals in the software industry and denying it access to what it contends are vital documents it needs to prepare its defense.

The University Of Southern Mississippi has a Linux Install Fest - Get the Worms out, a C.S. student sees the light.

[Must be a date error: Published 30th of March for an event on the 25th of the same month. I know things are slow down there, but one needs a time machine to attend.]

The Massachusetts decision to implement OpenDocument Format (ODF) has attracted so much attention that little has been directed at other end users (governmental and otherwise) that have decided to adopt ODF. But there are others.

With support from IBM, Binghamton University in New York is launching a Linux Technology Center where students and faculty are expected to do cutting-edge research on Linux-based systems and open source computing.

JBoss CEO Marc Fleury speaks about the future of the open-source company and whether he thinks an IPO, a merger or staying the course is the best road to take.

The chief operating officer of Novell’s Suse Linux group is the latest senior manager set to leave the company. Amnon Harman, COO of the German-headquartered division, is believed to be planning to leave the company this August, according to reports. Novell has refused to confirm or deny his departure

Tradeware Global is a financial services company that allows securities brokers to provide direct market access to their clients. It currently handles 5% of all transactions in the New York and American stock exchanges. Tradeware is about halfway through with an infrastructure migration that is moving the company's 100+ servers off of Solaris and onto Red Hat Linux.

The first full GPLv3 event since the launch of the draft was held recently in Turin, Italy. The whole thing was recorded and a transcript has been put online as well as the video and audio. Topics covered in the presentation included software patents, DRM, and licence compatibility. The transcript also includes the Q&A session, which covered "What about Linux?", "Can we really win against DRM?", "Why are you making the decisions this time, will a team do it next time?", and "What issues were considered but then not addressed?".

Refusing to annoy the EC, rejection comes as Microsoft squares off in Brussels over a potential 2-million-euro-a-day fine for failing to comply with the terms of a 2004 anti-trust ruling by the Commission on Microsoft's bundling of Media Player with Windows.