Showing all newswire headlines

Larry Augustin presided over the spectacular boom and bust of computer maker VA Linux Systems. Now he's back, with software.

A letter to the LJ community from our new Editor in Chief.

It's hard to describe how excited I am to be coming on board here as Editor in Chief of Linux Journal. Some of you may know me from the time I spent as Editor in Chief of LinuxWorld Magazine

I'm sometimes surprised at the complex solutions administrators come up with to keep out users whenever that course becomes necessary when a simple, built-in solution to their problem already exists. In this article, we'll look at a few different mechanisms used to keep out intruders either temporarily, or on a more permanent basis.

SugarCRM has added to its suite of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) products with the release of Sugar Enterprise Edition. The upstart CRM provider said the new offering is designed to extend the reach of its platform into a wider range of business environments.

Company is offering free version of Suse Linux Enterprise Server with its latest GroupWise collaboration server.

Online music site Independent Music Online promotes various free, libre open source software (FLOSS) projects on banner graphics throughout its site, including Mozilla Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, and jlGui. And not only does this music service "walk the walk," it also "talks the talk": Independent Music Online itself is thoroughly powered by FLOSS. The Ind-Music.com servers run Mandriva, Apache, and PHP, and all of its music is in the popular, free (and digital rights management-free) Ogg Vorbis audio format.

In June this year, University of South Africa senior lecturer, Bob Jolliffe, served patent "request to surrender" papers on Microsoft's legal representatives in South Africa, urging the software company to give up its patent on wordprocessor documents stored in a single XML file. To date Jolliffe has The patent (ZA200303346), titled "Word processing document stored in a single XML file that may be manipulated by applications that understand XML", implies that Microsoft invented the idea and method of XML word-processing, an absurd claim according to critics around the globe, but one which passed through unchallenged at South Africa's patent office. In South Africa, patent applications are not examined for their novelty or inventiveness by the patent office. It is up to members of the public to challenge a patent, during its up to 20-year lifespan, before it is subjected to review. If the patent is left unchallenged, it could prevent later versions of open source wordprocessors from working with Microsoft Word documents created in XML.

For the past few years, I've meant to attend the Open Source Convention (better known as OSCON) in Portland, Oregon, but never quite made it. Besides the promotional material put forth by O'Reilly Media, the organizers of the convention, I've heard the tales of the convention over the past seven years. The post-convention stories of this convening of open-source fans have been quite interesting. This was clearly the place to be, the techie convention to top all others.

Microsoft's Linux and Open Source Software Lab serves as both a place to examine the threat posed to Microsoft products by open source offerings and a venue for testing software from Microsoft and others that's designed to span that divide. The lab is home to hundreds of servers and desktops that run dozens of different types of Linux and Unix.

China Standard Software Company - or CS2C - have announced that they are to cooperate on the development of Linux server and Linux desktop offerings aimed at the Chinese market.

What happened to Tux? Soon after Sunspirestudios took Tux Racer commercial in 2001, our beloved open source Tux seemed to vanish from the program. Did he lose control and fly off a cliff? Was he a victim of a kidnaping plot from Redmond? No matter -- thanks to the PlanetPenguin Racer (PPRacer) project, Tux is back with a vengeance, in a significant upgrade over what the open source Tux Racer offers.

Receives 'Product Excellence' Award for 'Best Security Solution'

If bringing total democracy to electronic voting can only happen via software source code that can be viewed by all, the Australian Electoral Commission is happy to oblige with its next-generation election application

Although Skype, which provides Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephony services and PC-to-PC calling, turns two years old on August 29, it remains unclear what kind of business this relative newcomer will turn out to be. Skype could remain a mere fad for techies, become a next-generation communications platform or evolve into the next eBay or Google, say Wharton experts

Systems vendors used the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo to show a deepening commitment to community-developed software, a trend that should help alleviate IT managers' concerns about where they will find corporate support for Linux or open source deployments. "Finally, HP and IBM and the like are coming at it from the right direction," says Al Tobey, senior Unix engineer at Priority Health in Grand Rapids, Mich. "They're starting to see the revenue stream show up on their financials and they're saying, 'We need to do this from the top down.'"

User group president Jonathan Oxer says the trademark application is to protect the name from abuse. "At this point, the exercise is not about extracting fees from people," he says. "It's an extremely small number of people that are likely to have to licence it. It's about establishing the trademark. This is the reality of working in the commercial world that we're in now."

In the beginning was Slackware, and it was good. But that was just the beginning. Ever since then, Linux distros have exploded at dazzling pace. And at the center of much of that creative explosion is Debian. It is simply everywhere. Mepis, Knoppix, Linspire, geez you name it, and if it's not SUSE Novell or Red Hat, there's a good chance that the spirit and code of Debian lives at the heart of that distro.

This is a call for sponsors to donate locations, work and money for debian developer gatherings. SLX Debian Labs has funded and organized numerous developer gatherings in the past (e.g. for debian-edu, debian-installer or the release team). They are highly effective to solve problems in small groups and normally more fun then working at home alone.

If I were a student today (or professional developer), I know where I would build my skills! Earlier this summer, evans data reported that in the enterprise space, more development is now taking place on java than on .net. furthermore, java users are more likely to take advantage of open source and develop on Linux. Here is an interesting case in point on developers embracing open source and Linux.