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In the field of mathematical software packages, applications such as Wolfram Research's Mathematica, and Maplesoft's Maple system instantly spring to mind. These are both highly popular, proprietary, commercial, integrated mathematical software environments. Other types of mathematical software packages generally receive much less publicity.

Canonical announced a few hours ago the immediate availability of a new Linux kernel security update for the following Ubuntu distributions: 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake), 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron), 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex), 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) and 9.10 (Karmic Koala). The update also applies to Kubuntu, Edubuntu and Xubuntu and it patches 10 important security issues (see below for details) discovered in the Linux kernel packages by various hackers. Therefore, it is strongly recommended to update your system as soon as possible!

Bradley Kuhn, the technology director of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) expressed dismay this week after learning that Black Duck Software was granted a patent that covers software methods for detecting and resolving open source software licensing conflicts. Kuhn, who plays a major role in the SFLC's GPL enforcement efforts, contends that Black Duck's patent is far from novel and describes techniques that he has been using for licensing compliance analysis for over a decade.

The hiring of Linux-savvy and revenue-minded exec-slash-blogger Matt Asay as the new chief operating officer of Canonical looks like a very good — and telling — move for the Isle of Man- (really London-but-don't-tell-anyone) based company that oversees the growing-by-leaps-bounds-and-all-other-ways Ubuntu Linux distribution and surrounding universe.

An open source app store from a Linux vendor is a good idea, right? As it turns out, Linux vendors selling their open source partners solutions directly isn't always a recipe for success. Just ask Red Hat, or its rival Novell. In 2007, Red Hat launched an effort called the Red Hat Exchange (RHX), a marketplace for selling open source solutions from Red Hat's partners. RHX was in part Red Hat's response to competitive pressure from the Novell Market Start program. Now in 2010, neither of those sales programs is still operational.

Inside Contactless, a manufacturer of near field communications (NFC) chips, is releasing "Open NFC," an open source version of its NFC protocol stack for mobile platforms including Linux and Android. Meanwhile, Juniper projects that NFC will play a growing role in a mobile-ticketing market that will reach 15 billion tickets by 2014.

The Linux kernel supports a variety of virtualization schemes, and that's likely to grow as virtualization advances and new schemes are discovered (for example, lguest). But with all these virtualization schemes running on top of Linux, how do they exploit the underlying kernel for I/O virtualization? The answer is virtio, which provides an efficient abstraction for hypervisors and a common set of I/O virtualization drivers. Discover virtio, and learn why Linux will soon be the hypervisor of choice.

Presenting New Community Distributions at FOSDEM’10, 6-7 February, Brussels, The final version of ZCP 6.40.0 release, scheduled to be launched in March 2010, will be available through the Canonical Partner repository for the popular Ubuntu distribution.

Gnome 3.0 promises to give Linux the desktop polish it needs. It's been a long time in the coming but this year Linux will get a makeover, thanks to the Gnome project. In September the Gnome team, makers of one of the most popular desktop interfaces for Linux, will release version 3.0 of their desktop environment and they are promising "big user-visible changes".

Building on the success of its first contest, the Linux Foundation has announced the launch of a second "We're Linux" video contest. The non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting Linux says that videos entered into the contest should demonstrate what Linux means to its users and should inspire others to try it. Amanda McPherson, vice president, marketing and developer programs, said that “We have been inspired by the creativity and level of participation we have seen for the ‘We’re Linux’ video contest and want to provide a forum again this year for people to share".

Asay's job will be make sure operational activities match up to the company's strategic goals and make sure that day-to-day operations go smoothly. He will also head up Canonical's marketing. Asay is extremely well known and respected in open-source business and technology circles.

[However, Pamela Jones takes exception to Asay's defense of Microsoft in her NewsPicks comment on this story. - gus3]

Is Canonical serious about pushing Ubuntu into businesses? The company’s latest corporate move provides a clear answer. Indeed, Canonical has hired Matt Asay — one of the open source industry’s best-known names — as its new chief operating officer. The move comes amid a CEO shift and several major product initiatives at Canonical. Here are some perspectives.

Oracle has announced the latest release of Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse 11g, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware. Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse is a free set of certified plug-ins that enable developers to build Java EE and Web Services applications for the Oracle Fusion Middleware platform where Eclipse is the preferred Integrated Development Environment (IDE). This release delivers an extension to Eclipse with unique Oracle WebLogic Server features, WYSIWYG Web page editing, SCA support, JAX-WS Web Service validation, an integrated tag and data palette, and smart editors. Also new with this release is Oracle's AppXRay feature, a design time dependency analysis and visualization tool that makes it easy for Java developers to work in a team setting, greatly reduce runtime debugging, and improve code quality.

It seems as if most people are for OpenSource but against any other form of distribution/development. For example, Microsoft maintains ownership of the software that they sell on store shelves. No one owns a copy of Windows except for Microsoft. Well, good for them, but when Microsoft's products became dominant due to market demand people starting making noise because Microsoft wanted to put their own software on their own software (Internet Explorer on Windows)... so even though it's Microsoft's property on both accounts, they apparently did wrong by bundling the two together? Now, in the realm of current events we are seeing something similar with Google.

This posting is actually responding recent entry in Martin's Blog OpenSolaris 2009.06 domU on opensuse 11.2 dom0 Martin states:- Then I tried out a number of current linux distributions, but except for openSuSE none had a dom0 kernel out of the box which really is a shame. Seems I need to look more closely into KVM with virtio support. Via article bellow i try to explain that due to efforts of Jan Beulich and Andy Lyon xenified aka Suse Kernel 2.6.31.8(9) may be built on any Linux and along with the most recent stable Xen Hypervisor (3.4.2 and higher) port provide Xen Environment supporting OpenSolaris PV Guests , including the most recent unstable builds like 129,130,131 ( i mean vncserver behavior on OSOL PV DomU and GDM/VNC setup ).

Melody is an open source content management system for bloggers and publishers where its community of users and contributors is its most important feature. This article covers the salient features of Melody and how a vibrant community is the foundation on which all successful products and services are built today. The article also guides us through the setup process for pre-1.0 build of Melody, while the full 1.0 revision shouldn’t be more than a few months around the corner.

Microsoft will no longer offer Linux or Unix versions of its enterprise search products after a wave of releases set to ship in the first half of this year, the company announced in an official blog post Thursday. After Microsoft bought Fast Search & Transfer in 2008, it said it would continue offering and updating standalone versions of the company's ESP platform for Linux and Unix, wrote Bjorn Olstad, CTO for Fast and a Microsoft distinguished engineer. "Over the last two years, we’ve done just that." But the products being released this year will be the last containing a search core compatible with Linux and Unix, he said.

After more than four years at Alfresco, I have joined Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, as its chief operating officer. I am excited, humbled, and, candidly, torn by this opportunity. In late 2005, John Powell and John Newton, the co-founders of Alfresco, took a chance on me, an open-source evangelist at Novell. I was the 13th employee and the company's first U.S. employee. My prior history had been with embedded Linux (Lineo) and semiconductors/silicon (Mitsui), but they gave me the chance to grow as general manager of the Americas and later as vice president of business development.

I don't know if you realize it or not, but you are doing some pretty good things. It took me a while to grasp it...this "global community" thing. It took longer than it should have. But about 3 years ago, I got it. We're all tied together, separated by land and sea; surely, but tied together none the less. I used to see us as individual pockets of people doing stuff, some great stuff...still I didn't see the connection. Silly me.

The last chapter of Sun Microsystems has now been written. It wasn't unexpected but there was still something jarring about typing in Sun.com earlier this week and finding myself on the Oracle website. The deal in which Oracle acquired Sun had been in the pipeline for months but this brought home, with finality, that this was indeed the end of an era.