Showing all newswire headlines

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.

The SoulPad could let users carry their computer's data, applications and personal settings on their mobile phone or digital music player Researchers at IBM are testing software that would let you tote your home or office desktop around on an iPod or similar portable device, so that you could run it on any PC. The virtual computer user environment setup is called SoulPad, and consumers install it from an x86-based home or office PC. SoulPad uses a USB or FireWire connection to access the network cards for connecting to the Internet, the computer's display, the keyboard, the main processor and the memory, but not the hard disk. After the person disconnects the system, SoulPad saves all work to the device, including browser cookies or other digital signatures that a PC keeps in its short-term memory.

I never realized how much publicity a handful of software developers could create with the release of one application. But they sure have made waves. SpreadFirefox.com, the Mozilla Foundation’s official promotion site for its Firefox web browser, reported today that over 80 million downloads have been made of the browser. Yeah. I know what you’re thinking. “This is an open source project, there’s just no way to get 80 million downloads in under a year!” That’s a good point you’ve raised. There is indeed no way to verify the download counter’s accuracy. For the sake of writing this blog entry, we’re going to assume the Mozilla foundation has some integrity, and the counter has not been doctored.

VA Software Corp. in Fremont, Calif., needed to boost its hardware sales and decided to try a different approach. "As we tried to expand our business, the challenge was that we didn't have a large portfolio of third-party applications," says VA Chief Technology Officer Clint Bodell. "Instead of trying to build or buy third-party applications, because of our affinity with the open-source community, we said, 'Why not try to encourage them by providing the technology to bring them along?' " Out of that decision came the SourceForge.net site.

UK companies are increasingly convinced that open source technologies will play a major role in their IT strategy. In an online survey of 140 senior technology executives, conducted by the National Computing Centre, more than 50 per cent have either adopted or are planning to adopt open source. Three out of five said open source will become a fundamental component in their core IT systems, and three-quarters said their organisations' IT strategy will include open source over the next five years.

... a sensitive issue in the open-source community. According to Mitchell Baker, president of the Mozilla Foundation in Mountain View, Calif., "Anytime money gets into the picture, people get suspicious." Baker was explaining to an audience of open-source developers at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Ore., earlier this month why she feels her nonprofit organization needs a for-profit sister company to promote and manage the world's No. 2 Internet browser, Firefox

A discussion was raised as to whether or not GIT [story] would be a service that should be provided by development websites likeSourceForge. Linus Torvalds suggested that this would be a good match-up. "The git architecture is admirably suited to an _untrusted_ central server," Linus explained, "ie exactly the SourceForge kind of setup." He went on to explain, "with git, developers don't have to trust SF, and if SF is down or something bad happens (disk crash, bad backups, whatever), you didn't 'lose' anything - the real development wasn't being done at SF anyway, it was a way to _connect_ the people who do real development."