Showing headlines posted by tadelste

Twelve years of civil war has left the tiny east African country of Burundi with practically no ICT infrastructure. Open source pioneer and chairperson of the East African Center for Open Source Software, Victor van Reijswoud, intends to set up a branch in the capital, Bujumbura, to encourage OSS use in business, government and education.

Oracle has bundled a set of its web-service-enabled middleware to help customers deploy the infrastructure needed for service-oriented architectures (SOAs). The company's SOA Suite consists of Oracle's Fusion Middleware and is designed to support IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic and JBoss application servers and messaging buses in addition to its own Oracle application and messaging software.

The first Technical Working Group for KDE is now being formed, with elections due over the next few weeks. The Group will help the hundreds of KDE contributors come to technical decisions and smooth processes such as major releases. It will also provide technical guidance to KDE contributors. Seven members of the KDE e.V. will be elected for an initial six months. After this period the Group will be evaluated, and if it proves successful elections will take place once every year. All members of the KDE e.V. are invited to take part in the election. If you are a contributor to KDE and you would like to take part in the decision making process, you are welcome to apply for membership. Further details can be found in the Technical Working Group's charter. Read on for a little more background.

The Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, controlled by ground systems that were among NASA's heaviest use of open source to date when launched in 2003, are still working on the Red Planet, long after their mission was slated to end.

For some solution providers, providing customers with solutions based on open-source software is becoming not only an option to consider when doing development projects, but a primary focus. Cignex Technologies, a solution provider and consulting firm in Santa Clara, Calif., has seen open-source technology projects become a major part of its business since the company opened its doors five years ago.

The movement towards open-source software and standards in South Africa has received another boost from a government project, with the eThekwini (Durban) municipality basing its intranet and internet portal, Durban.gov.za, entirely on open-source tools.

[Ed: From, the "You're Not Kidding This Time, Right?" department we get:]

(BNamericas.com Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)Mexico and Latin America ought to opt for open source software as a means of closing the digital divide, Mexican daily Reforma quoted Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW) president and COO Jonathan Schwartz as saying during a recent visit to Mexico.

According to Schwartz, the principal benefit of open source is being able to avoid paying license fees because the software is developed by a community of manufacturers worldwide.

Co-ordinator of the Free Software and Open Source Software Foundation for Africa, Bildad Kagai, is preparing to hand over the reigns of the regional association to the Meraka Institute at Idlelo2. Lunga Madlala caught up with him.

p2p news / p2pnet: Sam Nurmi, founder of Sweden's largest Swedish web hosting operator, Loopia, says he'd like to help Mozilla's Firefox compete with the likes of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. So he's set up a site tagged HelpFirefox.com. The idea is to sell one million pixels on the page for a dollar each and give the money to the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, which develops Firefox, says The Local.

Opinion: When comparing Windows and Linux patching, there's a clear winner, and it's not Microsoft.(Linux-Watch)

World-renowned IT visionaries Cory Doctorow, noted author and fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Eben Moglen, chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center, will give keynote addresses at the second annual Red Hat Summit in Nashville, Tenn.

The Summit will be held May 30-June 2, 2006 at the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center in Nashville. The event will feature a number of well-known industry speakers, hands-on technical workshops, a technology lab, roundtable discussions, and product demonstrations. It also will feature sessions on key open source issues and technologies -- including security, virtualization, and storage, organizers said.

Commercial Linux distributor Novell has put out its Service Pack 3 for its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 implementation of the Linux 2.6 operating system. The update includes all of the security fixes and patches for SLES 9 since SP2 shipped in August 2004.

Stepping up the community's efforts to get OEMs to offer real options when it comes to the software we get with our computers.

Neuros Audio will reportedly shift two product to Linux, and launch a third based on open source software. Existing Neuros products being transitioned to Linux include a portable media player (PMP) and a media recorder, while the new product will be a music server, according to an article at The Register Previously, Neuros announced plans to switch its 442 to Linux. The 442 (pictured above), a PMP with a 40GB or 100GB harddrive, is the product Neuros is best known for.

IBM has announced its 13th successive year as patents king while cheering a community and government backed program to "improve" the quality of US patents.

Ubuntu Linux founder Mark Shuttleworth will give the annual report on his hot, Debian-based distro at the 2006 Debian Developers Conference (DebConf), set for May 14 through 22 in Oaxtepec, Mexico.

The PHP development team is proud to announce the release of PHP 5.1.2. This release combines small feature enhancements with a fair number of bug fixes and addresses three security issues. All PHP 5 users are encouraged to upgrade to this release.

Dave Pell was nice enough to give me a heads up on Rollyo's new simplified means to create customized Firefox Search Engines.

THE Government should use free and open source software because it enables effective and simplified delivery of messages to local people, an information and communication technology (ICT) expert has said.

“Uganda should emulate Brazil, China, and the US state of Massachusetts who have adopted free and open source software. It reduces the costs of using ICTs and can be modified and translated into languages understandable by the local communities,” Allen Gunn, the executive director of Aspiration, a US-based ICT non-governmental organisation said at a press conference on Tuesday at Kalangala.

Gunn is one of the trainers of 140 African participants at an eight-day training course. The participants are being trained in use of ICTs like the Internet, digital audio and video systems and building wireless antenna networks in rural areas.

The training’s theme is, “Free and Open Software for Local Communities.”

Linux services company Synaq has allied with the South African importer and distributor of Altiris, First Technology, to offer support for Altiris products on Linux in the local market.