Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

While Red Hat welcomed Microsoft's recent decision to comply with the European Court of First Instance's antitrust ruling, Michael Cunningham, general counsel for Red Hat, stated that the company was still concerned about Microsoft's patent model. "We are reviewing the European Commission's announcement in the Microsoft abuse case and congratulate the Commission on the improvements announced [on Monday]," Cunningham said in a statement. "Our enthusiasm is somewhat tempered, however, by concerns that the patent arrangements may have not been made compatible with open-source licensing".

Trolltech is extending its Qtopia embedded Linux development platform with iPhone-like motion control. Thanks to a partnership with motion-control software firm F-Origin, Qtopia developers will soon be able to trick out their mobile devices with interfaces that respond to landscape/portrait rotation, gestures, and gravity.

Ballmer's statement that Linux "uses our intellectual property." -- along with follow-up claims by Microsoft executives that they had found violations of 235 patents in Linux and other open-source software -- caused a sudden refrosting of what had been a slowly thawing relationship between the company and the open-source community. By dangling the threat of patent-infringement lawsuits over the heads of users and vendors alike, "Microsoft opened up a can of worms with the open-source community that they have been attempting to close since then," said Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT Inc. in Hayward, Calif. So the two sides remain wary "frenemies." And their friend-or-foe relationship has continued to evolve in both directions this month.

Pepper Computer, manufacturer of the original Pepper Pads and developer of the Pepper Linux OS, has admittedly seen better days. After months of silence from the firm's executives led forum members to write the company off as dead, CEO Len Kawell has finally responded to users' pleas and posted a summary of Pepper's current state of affairs -- but not before we left a message at headquarters stating our intentions to write up a deathwatch piece this week.

Rupert's just said again what I've been hearing in various places: Vista's awkwardness is going to drive people to Linux. That's something I heard when Specavers moved to Linux. They'd been thinking about moving before, but there was always a barrier - the cost of retraining. That's the theory at least - but let's not forget that home users now effectively cannot get Windows XP. They're pushed towards Vista Home Premium, and that means here's a generation who will go through the Vistification process at home on their own time, at their own expense.

From Tectonic, the South African government accepts ODF as the document standard. The adoption of ODF (Open Document Format) in our government is indeed great news, and hopefully it will have an effect on other developing countries when decisions like these are made. What disturbs me though, is the criteria for what qualifies as an open standard, according to the MIOS document.

What’s the lowest price you can find for a desktop PC? Next time you run out of baked beans, beer or …. big bunches of bananas (Alliteration too!) and nip to that shopping behemoth known as Tesco, you’ll be pleased to hear you can fill your basket with a PC for £139 as well! However this isn’t just a PC like any other … it’s running Ubuntu (V6.06).

Novell today appointed Tim Wolfe as president, Novell Americas, responsible for the execution of Novell's strategy across the Americas. Wolfe, who brings nearly three decades of software, technology and consulting leadership experience to the role, most recently held the position of vice president and general manager of Novell's East region in the United States. He will play a key role in Novell's transition to a greater focus on customers and partners in implementing the company's go-to-market strategy.

About a month ago, Network Appliance sued Sun to try to stop the competitive impact of ZFS on their business. Their objectives were clear - number one, they'd like us to unfree ZFS, to retract it from the free software community. Second, they want us to limit ZFS's allowable field of use to computers - and to forbid its use in storage devices. So later this week, we're going to use our defensive patent portfolio to respond to Network Appliance, filing a comprehensive reciprocal suit. As a part of this suit, we are requesting a permanent injunction to remove all of their filer products from the marketplace, and are examining the original NFS license - on which Network Appliance was started. By opting to litigate vs. innovate, they are disrupting their customers and employees across the world.

R2integrated (R2i) is a Microsoft shop that has discovered how well open source software and communities can build a solid business. Principal Chris Chodnicki says it was a customer request that turned the technology consultancy toward DotNetNuke (DNN), an open source Web application framework. R2i began using and contributing to DNN about a year ago after Snyder's of Hanover asked the company to consider using DNN to build Snyder's corporate intranet. Since then, "We went from this little five-man company to 50 employees, all due to the alignment with this open source product."

Contributed by Alexander Todorov Splitting big files into pieces is a common task. Another common task is to create a tar archive, and split it into smaller chunks that can be burned onto CD/DVD. The straightforward approach is to create the archive and then use ’split.’ To do this, you will need more free space on your disk. In fact, you’ll need space twice the size of the created archive. To avoid this limitation, split the archive as it is being created.

Are you geek enough for Linux? Though it first earned a reputation as a platform for hobbyists and hackers, Linux has come a long way since Linus Torvalds cobbled together the first kernel as a student project. A modern Linux desktop is a sophisticated, user-friendly GUI environment, with features and applications to rival any proprietary OS. In fact, when compared to the mainstream alternatives, there are lots of compelling reasons to give Linux a try.

Europe’s agreement on patents predates the Turobolinux announcement Having watched how Microsoft included patents in its deal with then EU (more on this in the next post), it is worth pointing out that the US won’t extend antitrust sanctions, despite rising opposition and the recent decision in Europe.

A recent bug report for Ubuntu Linux has confirmed that both the Feisty and Gutsy versions of Ubuntu cause some unnecessary wear and tear on a hard drive. The bug report reads: “I run feisty (beta) on a Dell Inspiron 9400 with a Hitachi HTS541616J9SA00 hard drive. After booting, the drive's power management settings are such that it spins down A LOT. At this rate the drive will be dead after 2.5 years, and I don't even use this computer for more than a couple of hours each day.” Definitely an interesting sounding find. But what exactly does it mean? That's what I thought when I read it, so I did a little research. Feel free to comment and correct me if I've gotten anything wrong.

We've been covering the development of GIMP 2.4.0 for a number of months, and GIMP 2.4.0 is finally available! GIMP 2.4.0 is so new that their website hasn't been updated yet, but if you check out the GIMP FTP it is available for download as of October 23. We have some screenshots from an earlier GIMP 2.4 testing build.

-Levanta today announced that it has closed an $8 million funding round to help further accelerate its move into Linux data center automation. “Due to escalating management costs, enterprises are not able to truly reap the cost benefits of Linux on commodity hardware,” said Ed Ekstrom, ex-founder of LANDesk and current managing director at vSpring Capital. “Levanta, with its deep domain expertise and focus on Linux, is uniquely positioned to address this problem. We are pleased to see that Levanta’s products continue to deliver significant ROI to its customers.”

Nokia's recent announcement of the upcoming N810 Internet Tablet is very exciting news for mobile Linux enthusiasts. We have already covered the initial announcement, but this followup discusses some additional details about the N810 operating system and development platform that have been revealed by Nokia's Maemo team.

Red Hat today announced that three leading Italian organizations, including CSI-Piemonte, one of the top fifteen software and services companies in Italy, Iride Energia, a leading thermal and electric energy provider in Italy and the City of Marsala have found success with Red Hat solutions. Each has experienced heightened performance, cost-savings and increased reliability with solutions including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat Support.

Andrew Morton, sometimes referred to as the colonel of the kernel, is Linus Torvalds' right hand man when it comes to getting out new kernel releases. Morton screens patches that are candidates for being merged into the kernel. He distributes them to kernel maintainers, watches discussions and feedback from key kernel developers and in general applies a layer of organization to a sometimes chaotic process. In this interview with InformationWeek editor at large, Charles Babcock, he talks about recent kernel development including an assessment of recent patches and tools.

Linux users from around the world are filling out the Linux Foundation's desktop survey. But what John Cherry, the foundation's director of global Linux workgroups, wants to know is, "Where are the responses from the North America?" About midway through the survey, there have been what Cherry calls "extraordinary numbers. With over 10,000 respondents in so far, the survey has been taken by 6,206 English speakers; 3,684 Russian speakers; 1,198 French speakers; but only 118 Spanish and 51 Japanese speakers. The curious thing about the English language users is that 63 percent of the English responses have come from Europe, with only 22.9 percent from North America."