Showing all newswire headlines

Paul writes: "People should care about these issues, and over time we've seen things like the Electronic Frontier Foundation emerge and other politically oriented groups, but I believe in the past decade we've only scratched the surface of what we have to do to ensure digital democracy, so to speak."

SAN DIEGO – There’s room enough within governments to adopt open-source and proprietary software solutions, several technology experts said yesterday.

“Clearly, it’s changing the landscape of the technology industry for better and worse,” said Alan Yates, general manager of Microsoft’s information worker business strategy, referring to the growing use of open-source software.

Bill Welty, CIO at California’s Air Resources Board, which conducts air pollution research, said his organization has been involved with open source for about 11 years and has found success.

Open source is “cost-effective for us, particularly where we can get really good software for very low cost,” he said.

Welty said 63 percent of applications run on Linux, 88 percent of Web applications run on an Apache server, 61 percent of applications require a database using open-source products and 83 percent of scripting languages are nonproprietary, he said.

Linux software distributor Red Hat Inc. said Tuesday that Bob Young, the company's co-founder and former chief executive, is resigning from the board.

Frustration is what led John Roberts to abandon the world of proprietary software development.

He jumped ship last year as director of product management at US software company E.piphany, recently acquired by another enterprise software company, SSA Global, and with two other E.piphany executives founded a commercial open-source project and a company, SugarCRM, which he now leads.

Analysis Plumtree is being acquired by BEA. This raises two points. The first is the perennial question of integration that arises whenever a vendor buys another that has a directly competing offering: how will the two products be merged? How long will it take? Will they, in fact, be merged at all? If not, how long will the acquired product continue to be supported? And so on and so forth. Interesting questions but it is not my intention to address these in this article.

The Free Standards Group, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to developing and promoting open source software standards, and the LSB workgroup today announced thirteen leading Linux vendors have united behind its new Linux Standard Base Desktop project and pledged their support.

After spending any amount of time playing (and yes, when necessary, working) with Linux systems, you can't help but notice that penguins do tend to figure prominently in the mythos of the operating system. Penguins show up everywhere — from the Linux mascot, Tux (designed by Larry Ewing), to the numerous variations on the penguin theme, you can't go near a Linux system, magazine, T-shirt, mouse pad, coffee mug, or book, without running into some kind of penguin. That's okay for most people because, well, penguins are cute.

The KDE Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of KDE 3.5 Beta 2, dubbed "Koalition"

Scott McNulty write: "Some of you are thinking, 'a browser is a browser is a browser,' and that's where you are wrong. Joe Kissell has penned a fantastic article uncovering all sorts of neat tricks and shortcuts that you can use in Firefox. This article will transform you from a Firefox booster to Firefox pro in just a few minutes." Full Story - MacWorld

The Tor project, which designs tools for anonymous Internet communications, is running a public user interface design contest in two phases. Phase one will select designs for the new GUI Tor, while phase two will choose among the best implementations. A panel of top-caliber judges from the network security and human-computer interaction worlds will select the winners, and qualifying entrants will receive a free Tor T-shirt from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

Sorting out the facts from the errors and omissions in recent reaction to Massachusetts' announcement to use OpenDocument.

Advanced solutions offer expanded performance, availability and service level management for business-critical email applications

Altiris Helps Deliver Network Security Adding Heterogeneous Network Management, System Assessment and Remediation for NAC-Enabled Networks

The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), a global consortium comprising over 70 of the world's largest Linux customers, has announced the formation of the Mobile Linux Initiative (MLI), a new working group dedicated to accelerating the adoption of Linux, in a rapidly-growing mobile market.

PalmSource has joined the MLI, and as founding member, PalmSource will be expected to work with other OSDL members and the development community, to advance use of Linux in mobile devices. The company had announced last year, that it would build its new applications' framework on, and port its Palm OS platform to run on Linux.

The open source software (OSS) movement started as a result of dissatisfaction with the proprietary software world. It is a global initiative that is correcting a seriously broken system in which vendors are taking undue advantage of consumers and depriving the consumer of choice.

Many IT professionals ask me when Linux will finally "make it" on the desktop. How will they know when Linux has made it? What's holding it back? In what ways is Microsoft working behind the scenes to inhibit the adoption of Linux desktops?

Motorola and PalmSource have signed up to efforts to put Linux on mobile phones.

The Mobile Linux Initiative has been launched by Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) to tackle technical challenges and support the adoption of Linux on handheld devices.

(Eben Moglen) A polymath who wrote code for IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ) in the 1970s while he was earning a law degree and a Ph.D in history at Yale, Moglen enjoys using the tools of capitalism against itself. He’s wrung significant concessions out of software companies without filing a suit, including forcing Cisco Systems (nasdaq: CSCO - news - people ) to “open up” the code in Linksys routers soon after it bought the company for $500 million in 2003.

“I was always able to begin that phone call with the magic words “I don’t want money,’” Moglen says, chuckling. “I only want you to play by the rules.”

The ship may not win any interior design awards, but the latest Geek Cruise made up for that with smart minds giving great talks--both on the schedule and off.

Microsoft: what part of the word 'open' do you not understand?

From Sam's PlexNex Blog

Sam Hiser is the former Marketing Lead for OpenOffice.org and has worked with the OpenDocument Format (ODF) teams in gaining acceptance globally.