Showing all newswire headlines

Late December the KOffice team announced a design competition for KOffice 2. A prize of $1000 USD will be given to the best entry as determined by a panel of judges. The deadline for submissions is now only 2 weeks away. Several quality proposals have been submitted, but there is always room for more. So if you have been considering an entry until now, please read the guidelines for objectives, submission formats and examples. For those already working on entries, please review entry requirements and make sure to meet the deadline. Questions on the competition can be directed to the KOffice mailing lists or on the #koffice IRC channel.

[Ed: All right, let's get those submissions submitted! Let's go! Move it! Move... Please excuse the Parris Island flashback. Still, time is running out on the KOffice 2 design competition. I'm sure some starving programmer could use at least one or two of those thousand dollars. - dcparris]

Doc's first report on CES. Several thumbs-down and one big thumbs-up on the keynotes.

'We are not crusaders,' declares the Linux kernel leader in a debate over proposed open-source license changes.

[Ed: For once, I find myself really questioning the value of the DRM clause in the GPLv3 draft. Yet, how else can one prevent free software from being misused to enable DRM? - dcparris]

The move is part of a broader push for greater use of open standards-based applications worldwide.

Novell has launched The Springboard ISV programme, a new initiative to help ISVs and partners in EMEA take their slice of the rapidly growing Linux market. Novell hopes its programme will get partners moving their clients from Unix to Linux.

VMware is getting ready to follow up on its VMware Player with a free server product for Linux and Windows.

The more I see of IE 7 the more I think it's going to make a big splash when it hits the scenes. Even though it's a better browser on Windows Vista than on earlier versions of the operating system, it's got some impressive features on Windows XP as well. Many of them come from Microsoft's willingness to adopt a Firefox feature or abandon something that's been in IE for years. Consider the way IE 7 starts what I think is a long-term shift away from ActiveX.

First of all, Photoshop -- on either Mac OS X or Windows -- is the default photographic and prepress program for serious graphics firms. Just as Quark Inc.'s QuarkXPress was for the longest time the best layout program in serious publishing work, Photoshop is simply "The" application that professionals use.

Nowadays, the biggest traditional database companies are making free availability and open source development an increasingly significant part of their product lines. In the latest such move, this week IBM announced it would make its DB2 Express-C package available at no cost, though still under a proprietary license.

[Ed: If this is a move toward FOSS licenses for proprietary database systems, great. For me, freeware is not so much a threat to free software as it simply steals the thunder. My real problem with freeware is that it creates confusion, as if there isn't enough of that already. Thus, a certain IT director I know, who doesn't understand the concepts behind libre software, would point to this as an example of "everything going proprietary". People miss the point that underpins the whole Free Software movement. - dcparris]

Aspiration Tech co-director and long-time open source advocate, Allen "Gunner" Gunn, recently returned to the USA after winding up Africa Source II in Uganda. Richard Frank spoke to him (via Skype, apologies to OSS purists) about Africa Source II, getting developers to talk to end users, and the death of Windows (or lack thereof).

ARMONK, NY -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 02/03/2006 -- IBM today announced free software and educational resources to help developers in Russia build and deploy innovative applications based on open standards and open source. Tapping into the booming software development market in Russia, IBM is giving software developers, architects and students free access to software and hundreds of new tools and technical and educational resources that will enable them to more easily build open standards-based applications.

Chuck Ebbert raised an issue with the stability of Andrew Morton [interview]'s 2.6 -mm kernel development tree, "most -mm kernels have small but critical bugs that are found shortly after release. Patches for these are posted on linux-kernel but they aren't made available on kernel.org until the next -mm release." Andrew releases a complete copy of his -mm kernel with varying frequency, not making the in between tree-states available from source control due to his development methods [story].

As a solution, Check suggested the creation of a hotfix directory for each -mm release, in which critical fixes could be placed as they are discovered, "I'm talking about patches for problems that keep you from even testing
-mm, or that fix really annoying things you hit while testing.". Andrew agreed to the idea, "OK, I'll create a hot-fixes directory there and will try to remember to put stuff into it." The release of the 2.6.16-rc1-mm5 kernel quickly followed and includeda directory for critical hot-fixes.

Esther Dyson has had a ringside seat for the development of the Internet. She was Interim Chairperson of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) when it was a fledging organization whose goal was to help move the burgeoning Internet's administration out of the US Department of Commerce. Dyson is credited with trying to make ICANN an open and transparent body, but she concedes that she was not completely successful. Today, Dyson is still involved with IT development around the world. She is also editor of Release 1.0, a quarterly report that outlines the opportunities and issues produced by the converging worlds of technology, communications, and the Internet, as well as organizer of the 25-year-old PC Forum conference. We asked Dyson for her perspective on today's IT world.

Even though Microsoft's Internet Explorer still owns some 85 percent of the browser market, Mozilla's Firefox "already has the technological lead in the browser market, and the momentum has just started to build," an Lxer.com column suggests. "So, how can Internet Explorer catch up?"

Last week's newsletter on Linux moving to a cable/digital set top box near you drew more reader response than I expected.

The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg has positive comments about two services, PubSub and Rollyo, two services that we've posted about several times.

Version 2005-04 of the increasingly more popular KANOTIX Linux distribution was recently released. LinClips has a nice demo of this release in their KANOTIX 2005-04 Foresight Linux 0.9.3 screencast.

Mainstream acceptance of open source will expand in 2006, according to research firm Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu.

Disclosure and diversity are the key to trust for tomorrow's computers, says technology critic Bill Thompson.

One of the most under-used programming techniques -- Metaprogramming -- programming with code generators or writing programs that themselves write code, has many uses in large-scale computer programming. This article shows you some tools needed to do Metaprogramming in Scheme.