Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

Microsoft said Tuesday that it struck a patent cross-licensing deal with Japanese electronics manufacturer JVC that includes net payments from JVC to Microsoft. Under the deal, both companies will exchange patent information related to the development and manufacturing of consumer products. More specific terms of the agreement were not disclosed. Microsoft, however, did say that the deal's balance of payments tilts in its direction. "Microsoft is being compensated by JVC," Microsoft said in a statement. The statement has raised speculation that Microsoft may be charging JVC for its use of the Linux operating system in some of its products. Among other things, JVC uses Linux in its streaming video networking gear.

Yes, Gentoo has some issues concerning the Gentoo foundation. Yes, we are actively working on straightening out these issues. No, Gentoo is not dying. Developers are still coding, servers are still humming and moral among developers that I work with is high. The state of the foundation is not something that will stop the kernel team from releasing kernels, the KDE team from working their butts off so KDE 4 compiles on everyone’s machine, or the release team from creating and testing the forthcoming release.

I’ve largely stopped reporting bugs to Ubuntu because of the condescending and dismissive attitude from their developers. Today I stumbled across what unfortunately seems like another typical example of what happens when you report a bug to them: aumix in Ubuntu 7.10 was compiled wrong, such that it won’t even launch. Recompiling the source package without making any changes to the source fixes the problem. Instead of just doing that, the Ubuntu developers spent far more time and effort bickering on the bug report and justifying their inaction by referring to official protocol.

PackageKit aims to take the pain out of the package management on GNU/Linux systems and create a system that can compete with Windows and Mac. Development is proceeding at a rapid pace and it is set to be available in Fedora 9. To find out more, we talked to Richard Hughes, project creator, and Robin Norwood, the Fedora feature owner; as always, you can catch some screenshots at the end!

A North Dakota judge issued a ruling in Sierra Corporate Design v. Ritz that has some pretty stunning implications about the use of the "host -l" command when accessing DNS records. In the judgment (which was prepared by the plaintiff's counsel and sent to the judge), the use of the "host -l" command is tantamount to computer hijacking and hacking.

A team of engineering students at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich. is designing a digital stethoscope based on uClinux. The team, called "Rhythm Reloaded," released a project proposal on the open source device, which runs Freescale's Coldfire MCF5275 CPU. The Rhythm Reloaded team is building the stethoscope as part of a senior design project. The team hopes its device will be the first electronic stethoscope able to record, filter, and store computer audio data from a medical patient.

After the filing of the Verizon / BusyBox suit, and after reading about any number of other, similar incidents where a company showed what could only be seen as flagrant disregard for the GPL, I had to ask myself: Why do people do this? Are companies really that naive about the GPL, or do they just think they can get away with anything? I've gone back and forth about this, and I've come to the conclusion that GPL violators, or "freeloaders," aren't all of one mind. There's more than one way for a given vendor to run afoul of the GPL, and I've tabulated three that seem to be the most common.

Due to patent concerns, we won't be able to include any games in Fedora which meet the following criteria: A game where "targets" move across the screen to a predetermined point or line, where the player hits a button/key/mouse click as the target(s) crosses that point or line, and gets points.

[Why does this stupid patent exist at all? It should have been laughed out of the PTO on first sight. - Sander]

KDE 4.0 was released last week and all hell seemed to break loose. What I view as a solid first step in a very positive reaction was met with some applause, but generally scorn and complaints. I think some perspective is needed, and I humbly offer to try and provide some. I’d like to take issue with some things I see that are just plain wrong.

Yes, you read right, Microsoft will be represented at the next SLUG meeting. We've confirmed that Microsoft will be visiting SLUG on Friday 25 January. If you can't make it to the meeting, please post your questions at out wiki.

The first day of the KDE 4.0 Release Event in Mountain View, California, got off to a great start on Thursday, with attendees fuelled by a hearty breakfast provided by Google. Then, the "un-conference" was ready to get underway, and within minutes the first topics were added to the whiteboards. Meanwhile, the room filled with people from across North America and worldwide, all with an interest in KDE. Read on for more details.

I waxed poetic about PCLinuxOS 2007 a few months ago when I compared it to Mint (and even earlier about version 0.93a). After 8 months, Texstar and the "Ripper Gang" are in the process of releasing another version (about time...). The new version, PCLinuxOS 2008, will ship with KDE 4, but at the time of writing, the final isn't out yet. They recently released a so-called "MiniMe" version of the final product with KDE 3.5, and it's better than ever- to the point that I would actually use it.

Jack Aboutboul at Red Hat clued me into an interesting open-source ecommerce platform today. Called Magento, it's built by Varien and is "a feature-rich, professional open-source eCommerce solution offering merchants complete flexibility and control over the look, content, and functionality of their online store." Put in English, Magento is an open-source solution for setting up and managing an online store.

One of the most frustrating parts of the Linux world is printing. If the printer is a postscript one then there are no problems at all and printing is as easy as just identifying the printer as a single line in a printcap file and away you go. Most modern, low end printers and color printers are not postscript and to make matters worse, their drivers and method of printing are dependent on the windows operating system for much of the work. Fortunately manufactures are slowly (oh, so slowly) recognizing that there are other operating systems than windows and are providing crude drivers so their products can at least produce an output under Linux.

GNU Xnee is a suite of programs that can record, replay and distribute user actions under the X11 environment. Think of it as a robot that can imitate the job you just did.

If you're reading this blog entry, you've probably been following the battle between ODF and OOXML. If so, you may be thinking of that conflict as a classic standards war, but in fact, it goes much deeper than that label would suggest. What is happening between the proponents of ODF and OOXML is only a skirmish in a bigger battle that involves a fundamental reordering of forces, ideologies, stakeholders, and economics at the interface of society and information technology.

Under the banner of "Hana Linux" - literally "One" Linux - the two countries have agreed to work on a groundbreaking IT development project that might shatter the final Cold War boundary. South Korea is one of Linux's biggest converts. Since discovering the free operating system in 2003, officials have unveiled plans to switch all government-run offices to Linux. Now under the terms of the agreement signed between the two states, South Korea will set up Linux training centres in North Korea.

Limo, and in a slightly different way Android, have killed the standards-based approach to open source development in mobile. 2008 signals the start of fundamental changes to the mobile software market as the industry begins the next generation of Linux platform deployments.

First distributives [sic] developed on the basis of Linux OS within the program to equip Russian schools with the open source software have been handed over to the informatics teachers in the Perm Region. The developers are sure their product will not only protect teachers from copyright advocates but might result in the technical literacy of pupils to improve.

There's nothing like an EU Commission investigation to get Microsoft to open up a little, is there? Today Brian Jones has two announcements, that Microsoft is making binary Office formats (.doc; .xls; .ppt) available under the Open Specification Promise. You won't have to email them and be evaluated any more. From what I've heard, the way it worked was that only companies and governments could get them before. Of course Jones tells it a different way, as I'll show you. The second announcement is about yet another translator project, an open source "Binary Format-to-ISO/IEC JTC 1 DIS 29500 Translator Project".

[Does this mean we'll finally get nested table support for MS formats in OpenOffice.org? - Sander]