Showing all newswire headlines

PCBurn has just posted a review of the reference book Self Service Linux: Mastering the Art of Problem Determination from PTR and Bruce Perens' Open Source Series. It's squarely aimed at people tasked with determining the source of software/OS failures on the Linux OS. PCBurn takes a look at what the book has to offer and if it's right for your reference shelf.

number6x writes: If I were an "un-biased" analyst I would write something like
Attention all investors! Microsoft admits it can no longer compete on technical merits.

From a comment on the article: Microsoft Lines Up Politician Support In Mass. Format Battle

Open-Xchange Inc., manufacturer of a groupware solution of the same name, is inviting developers to try their hand as Open-Xchange clients in support of GNOME Evolution. All contributions to the project "Intelligent Design" (technical details) are to be made available under GNU Public License, with the best one to receive an award by the company on February 1 2006. In addition to the prize money of 1,000 US dollars the winner will be invited to fly as a guest to the LinuxWorld Expo, which takes place from the 3rd through the 6th of April 2006 in Boston.

Last week, Microsoft announced a set of new Shared Source licenses. Normally, new Microsoft licenses wouldn't be cause for the open source community to pay attention, but the new Shared Source Licenses have gotten praise from open source proponents such as Tim O'Reilly, and even the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) has weighed in with positive comments.

Training company Computeach has launched what it claims is the first distance learning course in Lamp, the open source web server platform.

Need to pull some data from text--maybe e-mail messages--and sort it, graph it or otherwise manipulate it? Here's an AWK script to use as a starting point.

In recent weeks the state of Massachusetts announced, to cheers on one side and alarm on the other, that it would start writing all new memos, spreadsheets, and other documents in the OpenDocument format standardized by OASIS.

Now there's a spiffy new web site by the OpenReader activists, promoting this format for ebooks.

These are two sides to the same coin, one that buys us freedom in document formats. Getting your document's content accurate and readable is enough of a hassle without worrying about whether a change in computer platform or tools will render the document ugly--or worse yet, gibberish.

IBM and eight other storage vendors have formed a new open-source organisation to develop storage software.

Initially called Aperi, the organisation will create a common storage software for all vendors' systems making it easier for sysadmins to manage disparate storage systems. The software will be free.

Dave starts a new series on music notation software and explains why Linux has some of the best available on any platform.

The Copyright Office of the US Library of Congress has formally announced an open comment period to solicit evidence from "interested parties" regarding whether the prohibition on circumvention clause of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has an adverse effect on legal, non-infringing use of copyrighted works. Anyone may submit comments via forms on the Copyright Office Web site between November 2 and December 1. All comments will be made public.

A Durban-based music mixer has won the Yfm and Creative Commons "Mad Half Hour Open Source Mixes" competition by adding his own creative mix commons-licensed music. [What Red Hat, Novell, and others do with GNU/Linux distributions, Nathan Redpath does with music. Libre software will flourish in a libre culture. Or is that vice-versa? -Ed]

With Breezy Badger out the door, the next version of Ubuntu, titled Dapper Drake, went into production today. Top of the high-level goals for Dapper is for it to be a 'polished' distribution.

Beyond the numbers. Customers flock to Linux because it works. By Jeffrey S. Smith, IBM Software Group Vice President, Linux Middleware.

Here is a short article explaining some basics about file systems. This is an area in which many people, even full time computer users, lack much understanding. Its kind of important!

SteelEye Technology, Inc., the leading provider of data and application availability management solutions for business continuity and disaster recovery on Linux and Windows, today announced its membership in the MySQL Network Certified Partner program. As a member of this program, SteelEye and MySQL will work together to facilitate the integration of MySQL into the current IT networks of enterprise customers and to ensure full availability against downtime for these environments.

Journyx is a closed-source, proprietary software vendor with a business model that embraces -- albeit at arm's length -- open source. How can that be? The paradox results from a unique business model that attempts to provide a free-as-in-beer product for the majority of users, support and use open source software projects, and still turn a profit. I recently spoke to Journyx founder and CEO Curt Finch to learn more about that business model, and about TimeSheet, the software Journyx produces and (mostly) gives away.

Writing programs that generate other programs may seem esoteric, but once you learn why metaprogramming is so powerful, it's a skill you'll want to cultivate. This article explains why you might consider metaprogramming and looks at some of the components of this art.

Victoria, British Columbia -- Companies from around the world have joined forces to fund performance improvements to the PostgreSQL open source database. By pooling resources, the contributing companies have saved money while gaining important new database features for their businesses. Now, Refractions Research is pleased to report the completion of this collaborative effort to bring important concurrency improvements to the PostgreSQL GiST indexing subsystem.

The appeal of open source to software developers is that it allows them to improve, modify, or adopt according to their own needs, saving time that might be wasted on the paths traditionally used by commercial developers. Some products are so well known that computer users do not associate them with open-source technology.

Sita is keeping mum on likely open source spend over the next three years, but says winning bids for the government open source tender will be announced as early as mid-November.