Showing all newswire headlines

sharkscott started a thread in November discussing SUSE and has 22 replies. He wrote: "Today is the day that my casual relationship with Linux gets serious". We missed pmcc's comment, however, sharkscott picked it back up today. We're pleased he did. You can see the thread if you're interested in the saga of our readers interested in SUSE.

  LXer feature

When Microsoft launched its first shared source initiative, Eric S Raymond called it a 'poisonous pill'. His opinion was, anyone who ever saw the 'shared' code, could be sued by Microsoft if the viewer ever wrote code that even looked like the shared Microsoft code. The latest Microsoft initiative to 'open source' parts of the Windows Server to settle with the EC may be one of the latest of Redmond's poisonous pills.

Paris: France has two national police forces, each reporting to a different ministry. One ministry is trying to avoid the kind of IT monoculture that allows viruses to spread and disable all key systems; the other wants to bring uniformity to a sprawling IT infrastructure. Both are turning to open source software to achieve their aims.

There have been some rumors that Sun will dual-license Solaris as CDDL/GPLv3. If they're smart, they will. Here's why.

I met the most amazing San Francisco Muni Bus driver the other day. Let's call him Ralph Kramden. (Not his real name). I took the bus to work. Ralph was the driver. He and I chatted. Ralph wants to partition his Windows XP hard drive, but XP won't let him. I suggested Linux. Did Ralph freak out? Did he veer the bus into on-coming traffic? No, Ralph never flinched. He wants to give it a try.

I don't believe the reports from IDC and others on desktop Linux use. I keep fiddling with statistics and I get a higher figure. Now, I'm counting more than Novell's Linux Desktop and the Red Hat desktop. I'm curious if IDC even counts Linspire. But, if you start looking at downloads and do a scatter chart, the percentage runs higher than people say.

So, I started a thread in Lxer's Linux Meta Forum to get a feel for what people use.

Please go to that thread and let me know what you use. Please, also tell me why you use that distribution, if you have any annoyances with it and if you'd like something added.

On Digg.com

Ars Aperta, "an independent consulting firm focusing on free and open source software" has joined the OASIS Consortium.

The Eclipse Foundation has granted initial approval to incorporate a new AJAX Toolkit Framework into its Web Tools Platform (WTP) project. The framework includes a "personality builder" that is expected to provide IDE-building tools for many specific AJAX runtime programs, including Dojo and Zimbra. IBM, the driving force behind the AJAX Toolkit Framework development effort, has launched the OpenAJAX initiative in hopes of attracting coding participation from outside IBM.

A common complaint about FreeBSD when compared to Linux is the relative difficulty in installing it by an ordinary user. Here is a flavour of BSD which is geared for the desktop and is designed to be installed and used by an ordinary user.

The ultra slick Foresight Linux 0.9.3 has just been released to the public. LinClips is showcasing Foresight's latest offering in their Foresight Linux 0.9.3 screencast.

Python for S60 source code enable broader contribution to advancement of open-source mobile solutions. [Ed: Another slant on previous news item. -tadelste]

Thanks Tom for pointing out the underlying value system of FLOSS. What makes FLOSS work isn't so much that efforts (products) are cost free, although that goes a long way towards initiating mass participation and use. It's that FLOSS is a vast exchange system where value is routinely traded, in exchange for participation and effort.

Related to :
Firefox Extensions Say it All

MFI Furniture Group has until Tuesday to serve a writ for compensation against IBM before its claim expires.

In Finland, Linux users have formed the Finnish Linux and Open Source Initiative forum as a cooperation organ for research institutions and companies in the software sector. The forum creates ideas for research projects relating to the open source, supports research and provides resources.

The founders of the forum include IBM, Ericsson, Nokia, the Universities of Helsinki and Oulu, the Tampere University of Technology, the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, the Finnish IT center for science CSC, and the Centre for Open Source Software COSS.

Brits pull the rug from under patent lawyers

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.