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  LXer Feature: 12-01-2005

Bill Gates said he wanted to be able to make the next paradigm shift. Libre software has created a free-market economy in the technology realm. Don Parris offers Microsoft some free consulting to help them make that paradigm shift. What do you think of the two approaches he suggests?

Diggable

SCO was able to sell $10 million worth of shares to existing shareholders and a member of its board of directors.

Saying he is "ecstatic" about Sun's move to open source its software stack, JBoss CEO Marc Fleury characterized the move as a strike against IBM, not JBoss.

Southern Africa's largest independent medical aid scheme administrator, Medscheme, stopped using Windows and SCO Unix, to adopt an Oracle, Unisys and Suse Linux solution that is expected to save the company around R10 million ($1,5 M) in its first year alone.

This release marks a significant milestone for the open source community, who now have access to the code for the console and administration engine as well as the previously open sourced LDAP engine. This release uses the Apache httpd engine as its administration server, and includes mod_nss - a rewrite of mod_ssl which uses the Mozilla NSS crypto engine.

Sun Microsystems, already waist-deep in open source, is getting in deeper. The company announced yesterday that it would be releasing more of its software for free -- and, eventually, as open source software.

  LXer News: 12-01-2005

The Web Empowered Church aims to web empower 10,000 churches by 2010. Using Typo3 and other libre software, this ministry could change the way churches view and use the Internet.

Diggable

Two Korean public financial institutions, the state-owned Korea Post and The National Agricultural Cooperative Federation, will start the first Linux-based Internet banking services this month as the government tries to end Microsoft Windows’ long-running monopoly in online banking systems.

Diggable

Tony Mobily of Free Software Magazine interviews Patrick Luby, the man behind OpenOffice for Macintosh.

TM: Patrick, first of all: please tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you do? What’s your programming background?

PL: I run my own software development consulting company called Planamesa Software. I have spent nearly a decade working as a software developer in a variety of commercial and open source projects including OpenOffice.org and Apache Tomcat using the C, C++ and Java programming languages on a variety of operating systems such as Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris and Windows...

Click here to read the whole interview.

Diggable

The kind engineers at IBM have delivered a new tool for moving customers off Sun Microsystems' Solaris operating system and onto Linux.

The Migration Kit for Solaris to Linux arrives at no charge and can be picked up by business partners, ISVs and customers. Those interested in the kit will likely use it to shift Solaris C/C++ software over to Linux running on IBM's Power, x86 and mainframe systems. This toolkit complements a more structured migration program IBM announced in conjunction with Red Hat in May.

One of the most extensive uses of free software in the Italian educational system uses Zope, Plone and Fle3 to run its e-learning portal.

Microsoft's creative troubles are about to hit Main Street. Redmond has unleashed a trio of killers: Windows Live, Office Live and Windows Live Custom Domains. The web-based Windows services promise to steal small business accounts from those Microsoft-centric dealers and ISPs still standing after earlier scourges. Can Linux/BSD fill the breach?

LONDON — Thales computer operations has entered into a hardware partner agreement with Red Hat. Under the agreement, Thales will deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux software in embedded defense systems and will also act as a reseller for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other Red Hat solutions when specific defense and security markets are serviced by the Thales group.

If you are not familiar with the Core series of books from Prentice Hall PTR, I recommend that you quickly remedy the situation. My personal favorites are, "Core Java 2, Volumes I and II " by Horstmann and Cornell. Special mention goes to Wesley Chun for his great introductory Python book, "Core Python Programming", the 2nd edition of which is said to be coming out Summer 2006.

While Microsoft supported the proposed directive, Mr. Rocard wanted to very clearly exclude software from the scope of patentability. Mr. Rocard had a special message for Microsoft and EU commissioner Charlie McCreevy: "You will discover that we were right."

Computerworld reports that Sun Microsystems is planning to release more of the company’s core code--including the Java Enterprise System, the N1 Grid computing system, and more--as open source over the course of the coming year.

The goal, according to Sun, is to put its products in the hands of developers who might not otherwise have the budget to purchase the software. By making the products open source, developers will be able to download and use the products for free--and hopefully drive service and support contracts back to Sun in the future.

The chief of CRM vendor RightNow Technology extols the cost-saving advantages of an open-source corporate IT environment.

If Mike Hearn, Hongli Lai, and the rest of the Autopackage team realize their goals, the future of package management in GNU/Linux will be greatly different from the present. Existing package management systems will remain for libraries and system utilities, but a separate tool will manage desktop applications. Packages will be installable for either the entire system or just the current account. Installation will be more convenient, too, with graphical tools designed for usability and tools for both end users and developers documented to professional standards.

Java Enterprise System, Sun N1 management software and Sun developer tools are available for development and deployment at no cost, and Sun will integrate this software and the Solaris OS into a new product.

Business Objects and Red Hat agreed to join one another's technology partner programs as a part of a pact to co-market business intelligence tools on Red Hat's Enterprise Linux platform.

[Ed: Not that Business Objects is the only player on the BI field, but are the others going as far as Business Objects? - dcparris]