Showing all newswire headlines

Tom Krazit writes: "Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer believes the company has ironed out all of the security problems in its forthcoming Windows Vista operating system so that users can consider adopting it the first day it is released. For the most part."

Does anyone believe this yarn? - Ed.

India's Canara Bank has selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux as its OS of choice as it automates more than 1,000 of its branches, reports Infoworld/Netherlands. The move involves about 1,000 servers and 10,000 desktops. Canara is one of India's largest government-owned banks.

Today, we (Microsoft) are announcing the availability of three new template Shared Source licenses. In this way, all of Microsoft source code releases will be under consistent terms, and thus more easy to use and to understand. The licenses are each 1 page or shorter. They are written in simple terms that non-lawyers should be able to follow. They are also reflective of the most modern thinking regarding source code licenses within the legal community.

Comment We do not believe Microsoft understands open-source. -Ed.

Netscape on Wednesday released a new version of Netscape 8 to bring the Web browser up to date on security patches with the underlying Firefox software.

Novell and IBM are trying to make it easier for data-center hardware buyers to deploy Linux on blade servers. Companies can now buy a per-chassis license for Novell SuSE Linux running on IBM blade servers, as opposed to purchasing an individual support license for each blade in the box. The license would cover chassis with up to 14 Linux blade servers, with the choice of Intel, AMD or IBM's Power processors running on the hardware.

An open source embedded training and services company in the South of France has expanded its collection of freely licensed French- and English-language educational materials about embedded Linux. Free Electrons says the lectures, presentations, and practical labs can be useful for either corporate training or self-study.

Free Electrons develops corporate training programs about open source embedded development, which it says it delivers to clients around the world. It first began sharing its training materials under the GNU Free Documentation License a year ago.

There is a new facet in the debate between open source and Microsoft, pitting the flexibility of open source against the tight integration of Microsoft technologies. One camp claims that integration is the key for ease-of-use and consequent cost-savings from reduced administration while the open source advocates are preaching the virtues of flexibility.

DataDirect announced a new marketing and technology agreement with JBoss this week, and JDJ was able to reach DataDirect's VP of Production Operations, John Goodson, to answer some questions related to the deal:

Jini was originally released in 1999 as a way to link consumer devices to Sun's Java software. But companies using the Jini software have been using it mainly for corporate computing jobs such as grid computing and clustered servers, according to Sun executives.

The software is specifically designed for building Java applications that rely on widely distributed components. For example, Sun uses Jini as part of its radio frequency identification software, which runs in small warehouse RFID readers.

The development of the Jini software is done through the Jini Community, an independent forum in which companies other than Sun contribute changes to the software.

The central issue in any Open Source business model is how to convert software that is free on the Internet into revenue that can be booked under US GAAP, hence the term invented by some clever person, "Conversion Model." The issue boils down to how to convert the free stuff developed by volunteers into cash?

I am not now and I have never been a chair thrower. No, seriously. In my entire life, I've never once thrown a piece of furniture at a wall. For that matter, I have never in my life said that I would blankety-blank kill anyone, the way a sworn statement in the Google/Microsoft/Dr. Lee litigation says Steve Ballmer has.

I'm not saying I've never been angry. I know how to feel angry, but in my biggest quarrel ever, I can't recall even thinking about throwing furniture. For that matter, I can't remember my biggest quarrel ever. It takes a lot to make me mad, so it's a rare event.

So, imagine my surprise to learn from Daniel Lyons' article in Forbes that I hate MySQL for entering a partnership with SCO, and I summoned its CEO, Marten Mickos, to appear before a "Stalinist show trial" here on Groklaw, which he felt obliged to endure, "cackling" fanatic commenters and all, in hopes of restoring his reputation. As it happens, Marten and I were just discussing which day to publish an article he has written for Groklaw, so we were both surprised.

The open source productivity application OpenOffice.org has been downloaded almost 50 million times since the project was started, according to the company that founded the project, Sun.

A Linuxchix Africa workshop at Wits University in Johannesburg next week aims to improve the open source skills of women from townships and rural areas. In the long-term, the organisation plans to take the training model all over Africa.

Gervase Markham has announced that his second online newspaper column has been published on Times Online, the website of The Times newspaper in the United Kingdom. In the column, entitled Open formats make history - and maintain it, Gerv discusses how the decision of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to use OpenDocument is the start of a move towards people reclaiming control of their data.

The Ubuntu team is proud to announce Ubuntu 5.10 Server, the first release of Ubuntu designed especially for server environments.

Concurrent, a leading provider of technology solutions for mission-critical applications, is entering a new line of business by offering stand-alone software for Linux application developers.

The company believes that a shift is occurring in emerging markets as the number of customers demanding technology solutions based on open source and open standards continues to accelerate. According to an IDC study, industry sales of Linux servers surpassed the $1 billion mark in revenue for the fourth consecutive quarter, while in the second quarter of 2005 worldwide Linux sales grew 45 percent.

Mozilla Firefox has now been downloaded over 100 million times since its release less than a year ago.

Opinion: It's a big stretch to think that Oracle has ruthless plans to destroy MySQL.

I admittedly was caught off guard at Oracle's recent acquisition of Innobase, makers of a transactional storage engine that works under the covers of MySQL, the popular open source database.

For a long time, data warehousing on a terabyte scale has been the preserve of the largest and wealthiest corporations - retailers, telecoms companies, banks. The reason is simple - cost.

Customers of the high-end data warehousing vendors - NCR's Teradata, IBM and Oracle - typically spend more than $1 million a year with their supplier just on upgrades and maintenance. Initial purchase prices reaching into eight figures are not uncommon. The technolog- ists justify that not just by the value that their products deliver, but the cost of developing the algorithms, the parallel hardware and the proprietary database engines that drive the data analysis.

Earlier today we posted an article about the dispute between the Debian Project and the former Debian Common Core Alliance, now known as the DCC Alliance. Before press time we had not received a response from DCCA leader Ian Murdock, the founder of Progeny. Now we have.