Showing headlines posted by henke54

Linux’s main merit, as a kernel and an ecosystem, is its open source nature. That means the software that runs on it has little choice but to be open source. This doesn’t mean closed-source software is unavailable on Linux—just that it’s got the deck stacked strongly against it. Because of this, software companies who don’t primarily deal in open source have shunned Linux. It’s something of a chicken-and-egg argument to say who shunned whom first. And perhaps it’s academic: does it matter who took the first step away from the table? Still, here’s the key problem: There’ll always be a big gap between Linux advocacy and Linux reality as long as it remains biased toward the near-complete exclusion of binary-only / closed-source / proprietary software on Linux.

From the Chinese pirate masters of the non-sea-faring variety comes ... Ylmf OS! Not happy with pirating Windows XP itself, these creative Chinese have gone one step further and hacked Ubuntu to look exactly like Windows XP. Why have they moved to Ubuntu? Because their previous release -- a pirate version of Windows XP itself -- is being cracked down on by Microsoft.

Evidence of GPL Violations and Copyright Infringement Found in TVs, DVD Players, and Dozens of other Electronic Devices New York, NY, December 14, 2009//Best Buy, Samsung, Westinghouse, and JVC are among the 14 consumer electronics companies named in a copyright infringement lawsuit filed today in New York by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC). The SFLC is a non-profit law firm established in 2005 to provide pro-bono legal services to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) developers. The suit was filed on behalf of the Software Freedom Conservancy (Conservancy), the non-profit corporate home of the popular software application BusyBox and many other FOSS projects, and Erik Andersen, one of the program's principal developers and copyright holders. The suit charges each of the defendants with selling products containing BusyBox in violation of the terms of its license, the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2).

THE GERMAN GOVERNMENT has decided to spend a lot of its citizens' tax money helping them recover from malware directed at Microsoft machines. Spiegel Online reports that the government wants to prop up another industry giant. The German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) plans to team up with Internet service providers (ISPs) to establish a call centre helping Windows users who have malware problems. Starting in 2010, ISPs will track down customers with infected PCs. These customers will then be directed to a special website offering advice on removing the malware. If this does not work there will be a call centre where a staff of about 40 will try to fix the problems. There is no indication about how much the German government intends to spend on the project.

Oct. 30 (Bloomberg) -- To find the latest threat to business-software makers like SAP AG and Oracle Corp., go to an unlikely location: a 150-year-old farmhouse in Belgium. That’s where closely held Tiny Sprl, run by 30-year- old Fabien Pinckaers, develops free business applications that are picking up customers during the recession.

Samsung Electronics, the world’s No. 5 smartphone manufacturer, plans to discard the Microsoft Windows Phone operating system to increase phones on the Android platform and with its own smartphone operating system. Among the 40 kinds of Samsung smartphones that will be released next year, the portion of Windows Phones will be around 50%, down from 90% in 2008, and Android-based smartphones will be around 30%, or over 10 kinds of models, according to a recent report by HMC Investment Securities, a Seoul-based brokerage firm. Samsung expects to discard the Symbian OS from 2011 and reduce the portion of Windows Phones to 20% in 2012.

Novell and Microsoft have each filed summary judgment motions in the antitrust litigation about WordPerfect that Novell brought against Microsoft. In addition, we find out what happened regarding the Bill Gates deposition. And neither party can find certain documents that might be in the Comes collection. I wonder if you can?

Here’s how the software business really works: A software company charges your firm an enormous upfront licensing fee and locks you into escalating costs for decades to come, often using a set of hardball tactics.

Linux has shot itself in the foot quite often. How? 1) Lack of Linux vendor support 2) Lack of Linux advertising and marketing 3) Too much bad techie attitude 4) Too much infighting 5) Not enough developer co-operation

The Dutch police are going for an open source solution. Today, Red Hat, the leader in open source solutions, announced that the Dutch Police cooperation “voorziening tot samenwerking Politie Nederland” (vtsPN) has selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5) and Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite Server to manage the rollout of the Linux based systems, to make it easier, faster and more scalable.

Intel and Microsoft have announced a new port of Silverlight to Linux, specifically for the Intel-sponsored Moblin operating system running on Atom-powered devices such as netbooks. The port enables Intel to include Silverlight as a supported runtime in the Atom Developer Program, which will feed an iPhone-like App Store. Microsoft has already provided Intel with Silverlight source code and test suites. Intel will build an optimized Moblin version of Silverlight, which Microsoft will supply to OEMs. There are a couple of surprising aspects to the announcement. One is that a Linux implementation of Silverlight already exists, the open source Moonlight project. We asked Microsoft’s Brian Goldfarb, director of the Developer Platform Group, why Moonlight was not being used for Atom devices.

A few weeks ago, I switched my development environment from Windows to Linux, on a project which was developed so far on Windows only. In this post, I want to describe the issues that brought me to this switch, a short overview how I did the actual port, and some observations on Linux for developers. This is the first post in a series of at least two, the second post will describe the tools I use on Linux right now.

Stanford photo scientists are out to reinvent digital photography with the introduction of an open-source digital camera, which will give programmers around the world the chance to create software that will teach cameras new tricks.

Mérida, July 29, 2009 (Venezuelanalysis.com) - This week the Venezuelan Education Ministry began its program, dubbed Project Canaima, to provide primary schools with mini laptops, and incorporate the technology into the education system. While schools are on vacation this week, the ministry will be conducting workshops for teachers on using the computers as educational tools. Starting in September, when the school semester begins, the ministry anticipates providing 50,000 laptop computers to over 1,150 schools nationally.

A developer is reporting that Google has banned his tethering application from the Android Market, one of the first hints that the store may not be as open as Google has promised. WiFi Tether for Root Users, an application developed by Seth Lemons and a partner, has been banned from the market for violating the developer distribution agreement. The application lets users connect their G1 Android phones via Wi-Fi to their laptops and then access the Internet from the laptop using the phone’s cellular connection. In a letter to Lemons’ partner, Google states that the application violates the developer distribution agreement. It cites a section that says Google may remove an application if it violates the device maker’s or the operator’s terms of service. The letter then points to T-Mobile’s terms of service, which expressly forbid tethering phones to a computer. T-Mobile is the only operator in the U.S. to sell an Android phone.

Microsoft and TomTom have settled their patent lawsuit in a way that leaves Microsoft's FAT patents active as a threat to other companies. Since I last wrote on this topic, TomTom brought a counter-suit against Microsoft, attempting to get the software giant to license four mapping patents that TomTom claims MS infringed. Tomtom apparently had previously been attempting to convince Microsoft to license. So, it's hard for me to find sympathy for either player in these lawsuits, but there's lots of sympathy to hand out to the software industry, justice, and Linux – all losers in this deal. Justice lost because there's been no trial to overturn the FAT filesystem patents. As venture capitalist Larry Augustin wrote: "Those of us who have PhDs in computer disciplines and have studied operating systems and file systems, don't see anything particularly innovative in FAT or its extension to support longer file names, FAT32."

Recently my local LUG (LILUG) invited Eric S. Raymond (ESR) to come and speak. For those of you who are not familiar with ESR, he is one of the three largest icons of the Open Source/Free Software movement. Needless to say, it was an honor so see him speak. For the most part, his talk was quite tame but one of the points he raised seemed quite controversial. According to him the GPL and other viral licenses are no longer needed as they do more harm than good to the community. I don't want to put words into his mouth so I've transcribed what he said during the talk. You can view the ESR Q/A talk in its entirety, this specific excerpt is about 45 minutes into the video.

A group called The Open ISES Project (openises.sourceforge.net) created an open source medical dispatch system called Cards 911, a document for use by emergency dispatchers. It gave them a script to follow when an emergency call came in. The answers would lead the dispatcher to different parts of the document using hyperlinks. The entire document was created in OpenOffice Writer. This was a document with hyperlinks in it that helped a dispatcher help the caller as quickly as possible. It was open source and available for free. Lawyers for a company called Priority Dispatch Corporation sent a legal nastygram listing out ten patents that the company held, which the lawyers implied the Cards 911 project violated. The lawyers demanded that all physical and electronic copies of the documents be destroyed.

The simplest alternative would be for Mozilla to sell Firefox's default search space to someone else. "There are probably other search engines that would pay us more money," Baker says. Yahoo! (YHOO) and Microsoft's MSN, Google's two main search rivals, come to mind, but Baker says smaller search engines wouldn't be discounted should such a situation arise. Firefox's valuable real estate would likely fetch a premium from any contender seeking a quick way to gain ground on Google. One player Baker won't identify "offered a blank check to replace Google," she says. She notes it wasn't Microsoft.

The Open Source Initiative (OSI), one of the principal advocacy organisations on open source software, has unanimously approved the European Union Public Licence (EUPL) version 1.1 as an open source licence, on 4 March. "This is very good news", commented Karel De Vriendt, head of the European Commission's e-Government program (Idabc) that is responsible for the development and maintenance of the open source licence. "OSI's decision certifies that the EUPL is 100 percent compliant with their definition of open source. This will help to convince European public administrations which are developing software for their e-Government systems, that the EUPL is a true open source licence." Version 1.1 of the EUPL was published by the European Commission on 9 January. The licence is available in all official languages of the European Union, and all these 22 linguistic versions have identical value. This means that developers who want to use the licence can pick whichever language version they prefer.