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This week’s blog post relates to an area we often dismiss with open source software, money. In fact, the most common thought on money and open source is “hey, it’s free and works.” The reality is of course more complicated and I argue that open source is very expensive for the organizations running a project and sometimes they might not even consider all the costs when considering a new open source project. For this discussion, I am not referring to open source projects run by individuals, but large-scale solutions run by public companies or foundations.

I draw inspiration from the request of a dear member of this little web space, which has given to me the input for this article, to make a bit of clarity about a subject that,for what I’ve saw around during my research on the Internet, seems to have created some difficulties for many people.

The argument i’m talking about is the OCR technology (Optical Character Recognition), that is a “technology ” that can recognize text characters from an image of paper documents previously digitized through the scanner and then transform this into an editable text.

It's been about a month since our Bodhi Linux 1.0.0 (stable) release and I would like to say thank you to everyone that has helped make it a success! I'd just like to take a moment today to share our plans for the future with everyone.

Vertigo is a new fun arcade game for Linux which is based on Ogre3D and BulletPhysics Engine. The game is completely free, open source and cross platform. You are a probe and your mission is to maneuver your way to the other end of the warp tunnel. Your probe is set with 2 shields to protect from fire and ice drones, but only 1 shield is active at a time. You have to flip shields in time to protect yourself, and you can possibly move left and right to avoid some obstacles. It's a pure reflex game, so be quick. Coupled with awesome music score, you will quickly get lost into and want more of it. There is nothing too serious about this game. Just pure fun for quick time pass.

So, let me stress this one more time: if you have two GUI applications, e.g. an OpenOffice Word Processor, and a stupid Tetris game, both of which granted access to your screen (your X server), then there is no isolation between those two apps. Even if they run as different user accounts! Even if they are somehow sandboxed by SELinux or whatever! None, zero, null, nil!

Even I finally got my bellyful of SCO. But there is yet one guy left who still can't get enough. And so it transpires that there are new developments in the never-ending trademark dispute that was initiated by X/Open in 2001 when Wayne Gray tried to trademark the mark INUX. If you recall, the dispute was put on ice back in the summer of 2010, pending resolution of Gray's civil litigation.

PhpMyAdmin is the one of the most popular tools for MySQL database administration. A major reason for this is its portability--phpMyAdmin runs in a Web browser, so you can access it from almost any computer. The program is also robust; phpMyAdmin has enough functionality that you can probably create and run a Web site without knowing any SQL. Being free and open-source never hurt anybody, either.

Medibuntu is a packaging project dedicated to distributing software that cannot be included in Ubuntu for various reasons, related to geographical variations in legislation regarding intellectual property, security and other issues:

Unity provides a complete, simple, touch-ready environment that integrations your applications and your workflow.Unity is designed for netbooks and related touch-based devices. It includes a new panel and application launcher that makes it fast and easy to access preferred applications, such as the browser, while removing screen elements that are rarely used in mobile and netbook computing.This tutorial will explain how to run unity under virtualbox.

This article is going to tell you how to institute 'defense in depth' to ensure PCI compliance on a Linux platform. Before we go ahead with the details, you'll obviously want to know what defense in depth actually means. Now the entire basis of defense in depth is that your integral server has layer upon layer of security that ensures that intrusion is almost impossible.

The Third Humble Indie Bundle that focuses upon games offered by Frozenbyte that are multi-platform and free of any Digital Rights Management, is still for sale at any price you wish (literally). This morning though there's been a surprise announcement by Frozenbyte with some bonuses, including the source-code release of the Frozenbyte and Frozenbyte: Shadowgrounds games!..

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Calligra sees further work on Modern Menu, pdf export, soft page breaks, Autoshapes support, and vertical alignment support amongst continued bugfixing and optimization KMLDonkey fully ported to KDE4 / Qt4, removing all Qt3 support Sound support added for 5 new languages in KLettres read more

Happy easter to all, what’s better than celebrate this holiday taking a look at what have hidden the programmers in our software ? A virtual Easter egg is an intentional hidden message, in-joke or feature in a work such as a computer program, web page, video game, movie, book or crossword. The term was coined—according to Warren Robinett—by Atari after they were pointed to the secret message left by Robinett in the game Adventure.

Today, there are open source Linux drivers for all major Wi-Fi chips, which was unimaginable five years ago. The constant pressure for open source drivers has thus paid off, and this may also work in other areas in the long term.

The axe-holder now is a certain Red Hat, the company supplying the OS behind Google's search engine services has taken Bedrock to court. The allegations now are that the patent right that Bedrock owns is invalid.

Addictive simulation and farming game Family Farm is now available for Linux. The game which focuses on building and maintaining your own farm has RPG elements to it as you can control your character with many RPG attributes like skills etc.Players can create and put themselves in control of a small Family Farm inhabited by various characters, each with different skills and needs. As the family grows, the house can be upgraded and the farm expanded into the surrounding area.

While following some links that I had received from a conversation on Diaspora* Alpha, I ran across the Smart Book, a great product from Always Innovating. While they offer them for sale, they do not yet have a shipping date. Reading their press release, it does not look like they plan to sell them in mass quantities. Imaging having a hand held Internet device, a tablet, a netbook, and screen that can be plugged into another computer, all in one device. Along with all of those features it runs multiple operating systems all at the same time. On top of everything else it is Open Hardware and Open Software. The complete package is listed at $549. I would love to get my hands on one.

Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" is set to be released on Thursday and while there are a number of new features to talk about in this latest release, the Phoronix Test Suite software has been busy analyzing the performance of this latest release. There is open-source graphics driver improvements leading to some performance improvements (such as Radeon KMS page-flipping), the famous ~200 line Linux kernel patch to improve responsiveness, and various other enhancements that catch our fancy in Ubuntu 11.04. However, one area where there is a frightening regression in Ubuntu 11.04 is with its power consumption. For mobile devices in many workloads, Ubuntu 11.04 is consuming noticeably more power than in any of the past Ubuntu Linux releases. Sadly, no one seems to have noticed in time since continuous integration testing on Linux seems to happen so haphazardly right now.

If you've ever missed an important IRC discussion because you happened to be between home and the office at just the wrong time, or if you regularly log on from a number of different locations and don't like juggling multiple IRC nicks, then you need an IRC proxy. The leading open source IRC proxy is Bip, a GPLv2 utility that is provided as a standard offering by most Linux distributions. This weekend, let's set up Bip and stop missing important discussions!

As I mentioned at the end of my last entry, I wanted to install OpenBSD to a bootable USB drive. Did that. It's as easy as installing to any other drive. You just need to look in the dmesg for what the system is calling your preferred target drive (sd2 in my case).