Showing all newswire headlines

Last month I spent an intense five days learning the ins and outs of the PostgreSQL database management system at the Big Nerd Ranch, a teaching and consulting company based in Atlanta which specializes in Mac OS X and Unix. The "Big Nerd Ranch Way" removes you from your normal environment to Historic Banning Mills, a beautiful resort southwest of Atlanta, where your only concern is learning. Founder and alpha nerd Aaron Hillegass and his staff offer a series of innovative courses taught by world-class professionals.

GNU Bayonne 2 offers a GNU GPL licensed scalable, media independent software environment for development and deployment of telephony solutions for use both with current, and next generation VOIP telephone networks.

In this installment of his FAQ, Mark covers the thinking behind the default Ubuntu brown, and the secret of the naming convention, and other quirks that make Ubuntu what it is.

O'Reilly has published a book for software developers and managers who have started, or are considering starting, an open source project. Producing Open Source Software, by Karl Fogel, aims to help projects avoid failure by outlining best -- and worst -- practices.

The Inland Revenue Department has signed an all-of-government license agreement with Novell that will give government agencies greater freedom in their choice of software and provide a framework for those that opt for Open Source

Yes, yet another Ubuntu release -- this time for the server. But don't expect Ubuntu's track record of runaway success to sway server administrators, though.

Black Duck Software Inc. is making its protexIP/OnDemand software-compliance assessment service available free of charge from Tuesday through year's end, according to a company executive. The service analyzes software projects to determine whether they contain any pieces of open-source code and ensure that the code meets licensing obligations

A vulnerability has been identified in XMail, which may be exploited by malicious users to obtain elevated privileges. This issue is due to a stack overflow error in the "AddressFromAtPtr" function that does not properly handle an overly long hostname portion of an e-mail address passed to the "-t" command line option, which could be exploited by local attackers to execute arbitrary commands with "root" or "mail" privileges.

Software industry group Open Source Victoria has teamed up with technology company Phase N to develop a plug-in for Microsoft Office users to view documents in the Open Document Format.

Microsoft has launched an attack on existing open source "licensing proliferation" claiming that the system is confusing and unnecessarily challenging for software developers.

Jason Matusow, director of Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative, told vnunet.com that the large number of open source licences currently in use is counterproductive.

The Mozilla Foundation has earned around $30 million from Google for its placement as Firefox's default browser. Funding has helped Mozilla hit the 100 million mark has happened despite some growing pains.

In the usual course of business, Inveneo provides information and communication technology for remote villages in places such as Uganda. But after Hurricane Katrina hit the US south coast at the end of August, the company went to Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, to set up a communication system for relief workers, who needed to be able to talk to each other and coordinate relief supplies for local residents.

Developers and DBAs are invited to get to grips with the hottest Oracle middleware and databases. Oracle also gets into the developer spirit with blogs and podcasts of the event.

Firefox has been adding new features in an effort to match IE; now, the browser is catching up in a more unfortunate way -- with vulnerabilities. Our own security guru Russ Cooper recently reported in his weekly Security Watch newsletter (sign up here) that the Web is awash with code that can attack Firefox and its Mozilla brethren. There are two fixes: patches and disabling International Domain Name (IDN) support.

A basic introduction to what CUPS is and why you might want to use it rather than LPD.

Camino contributor Samuel Sidler has recently been posting details of checkins to the native Mac OS X browser at the Camino Update weblog.

Java vendors' growing captivation with Apache has resulted in expanded product and licensing support from BEA Systems and Sun Microsystems. Tomcat is a servlet container, not a server as stated in the article. - ed

It's an unlikely matter for the United States and other nations to lock horns over: the administration of names and numbers used to reach Internet sites. But this seemingly trivial function is occupying a lot of time among government representatives traveling from continent to continent. A United Nations body wants to wrest power over these things from their current master, the Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The United States says that with ICANN in charge, things are running just fine (which they aren't). Many people condemn one side or the other for trying to carry out a power grab, or call the engagement a lot of hot air.

Editor's Notes: We believe Sun Microsystems qualifies for the job of recognizing poor governance since they have lived with it for so long. Now, Basheera Khan writes: "Sun Microsystem's chief open source officer Simon Phipps has issued a call for greater governance in the open source world."

Speaking at EuroOSCON, currently underway in Amsterdam, Phipps said: "It's become obvious to me what we are at a turning point in free and open source software, in terms of thinking about licensing, governance and standards."

"Phipps cited poor governance as the greatest vector for disease in open source projects, and described governance as a whole as the overlooked corner of the open source world."

Well Basheera, Simon should know, since his colleagues are experts at running a company into the ground."

VMWare released a new, free, as in beer, product today. The VMWare player can host VMWare machines created in the commercial VMWare products. Several sample "machines" are offered for download. This included a nice stack of business apps, assembled by SpikeSource, and based on your choice of SuSE 9.3 or Fedora Core 3.