Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

When Scott Thompson left Visa to take the CTO role at PayPal in 2005, the Web company's data centre surprised him. "Wait a minute," he recalls saying, "they run a payment system on Linux?" PayPal runs thousands of Linux-based, single-rack-unit servers, which host the company's Web-presentation layer, middleware and user interface. Thompson says he quickly saw the economic, operational and development advantages of open source and Linux technology. He now sees no other way to do it.

Nicholas Negroponte, the visionary behind the One Laptop Per Child initiative (OLPC), has publicly expressed his disappointment at the lack of orders for his low-cost computer for poor children. The situation has become so dire that Negroponte will announce a "Give one, get one" promotion in the US and Canada. While production of the XO-1 is due to start next month, Negroponte had previously said that he needed 3 million orders to start production.

Much has been written about David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” action and time management system (GTD). Many websites have come into existence to help people organize their lives, projects, and time around GTD methodology. GTD software solutions have been developed as well for people who do not want a web-based GTD system. It is a system geared toward the overly busy, technically bombarded lifestyles many people live today. This installment of Lesser Known Applications for Linux provides approaches to getting things done.

"What is going on whenever someone changes a code is that they make a'derivative work'," began Theodore Ts'o."whether or not you can even make a derivative work, and under what terms the derivative work can be licensed, is strictly up to the license of the original. For example, the BSD license says:'redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met....' Note the'with or without modification'. This is what allows people to change BSD licensed code and redistribute said changes." He added,"it is not a relicencing, per se, since the original version of the file is still available under the original copyright; it is only the derived work which is under the more restrictive copyright."

Most people are content to let their word process or determine hyphenation and text breaks for them. And, most of the time, the result is acceptable if they do. However, just as the default justification can be improved if you want to take the time, so can the text flow. OpenOffice.org has the tools you need, but improving the text flow is as much about knowing the conventions of text flow (what you might think of as the typographical grammar) as the settings themselves.

Ulrich Dreppernoted a difference between the Linuxconnect(2) man page and the POSIX specification. The former states,"connectionless sockets may dissolve the association by connecting to an address with the sa_family member of sockaddr set to AF_UNSPEC." The latter reads,"if address is a null address for the protocol, the socket's peer address shall be reset." Ulrich explained that he preferred the description in the Linux man page, but the Linux kernel seems to actually follow the POSIX specification,"is this functionality which got lost over time? Or is the man page wrong and this never was the case? Is this a worthwhile change?"

Intel plans to launch an effort called LessWatts.org on Thursday, a combination of open-source software and helpful hints to reduce power consumption of Linux servers, PCs and gadgets.

The Microsoft Permissive License, one of two licenses the software maker submitted to the Open Source Initiative for approval as open-source licenses in August, is unlikely to be approved in its current form. There have been two principle objections to the license from the open-source community, Michael Tiemann, the president of OSI, told eWEEK in an interview here at the annual Gartner Open Source Summit on Sept. 20.

The first major update of GNOME, version 2.20, has arrived almost two and a half years after GNOME 2.10, its last big step forward. GNOME 2.20 boasts not just improvements to the desktop itself, but multiple significant improvements to GNOME's applications as well. This release also marks GNOME's 10th birthday. The project was created as an alternative to KDE in August 1997 by Miguel de Icaza, better known in recent years as the lead developer for Mono.

Those of you who have ever tried OpenOffice (and Linux folks probably make up the majority) have to admit that it’s nice, but not nearly as feature rich as it’s market leading cousin Microsoft Office. Not only that, it’s damn ugly in comparison (it reminds me of the old Office 6.x, the one you used to install from 30 floppies back in 1994). Well after reading an article in Computer World, I now “know why:”

From the wholly minimal to the completely ornate, the Linux desktop has never been sexier. You've already seen the Windows and Mac editions of the Desktop Show and Tell, but you haven't seen variety, inventiveness, and all-around desktop eye candy until you've taken a gander at what your fellow readers are doing with their Linux desktops. Hit the jump for a look at some of our readers' best Linux desktop submissions.

Hewlett-Packard, the world's Number 1 PC maker, will try selling pre-loaded Linux on PCs in several countries as it expands a test program -- evaluating a market that some competitors have already entered -- and moves its personal computer business into a new generation of form factors and functionality.

With open source software becoming a household name, another open source movement that may one day see some fanfare is already taking shape. Open source hardware, which I once thought to be little more than a pipe dream left over from a bygone era, is proving to be a dream that it is very much alive and growing. As an example of this trend, MAKE magazine has managed to regenerate a previously static culture of do-it-yourselfers at a feverish pace.

A quick look at how and why yum replaced up2date as Red Hat Network’s package management system, as told by Bret McMillan, a supervising RHN engineer. It’s a quick study of how user need drives innovation and how community collaboration solves problems faster and more completely than individual work.

In "How to sponsor an open source project?", Dave Winer says,I want the OPML Editor to run on Linux... and floats the idea of a bounty for the job, as an open source project. Guidance: I'm looking for ideas, established practices, do's and don'ts for sponsoring an open source project, Dave says.

In this video interview at OSCON 2007 we talked to Michael Tiemann - VP of Open Source for RedHat and President of the OSI.

The only real exchange between peers in a traditional peer-to-peer network is limited to the files being transferred. Tribler is a new P2P network that's introducing social networking concepts to facilitate better interactions between users. Using new algorithms and protocols, Tribler users will also be able to cash in on their generous uploads for faster downloads. The Tribler software is primarily developed by the researchers in the Delft University of Technology and De Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

This afternoon Intel's Chief Linux and Open-Source Technologist, Dirk Hohndel, talked about why Intel's commitment to open-source drivers creates a difference and advantage for Intel's architecture platforms. Nothing groud-breaking or too special was presented, but we have included some of Dirk's slides from this open-source driver presentation. Intel had also mentioned that AMD's (well, referenced as a "major graphics card vendor") open-source driver efforts as "good news."

I read with interest this morning a story in ComputerWorld (more like an obituary) about how SCO said in its most recent SEC filing that there is “substantial doubt” that it will survive. In addition to the meltdown of its lawsuit against IBM, the filing cites its depleted cash position and entry into Chapter 11 as its major woes. While the Net is flush with celebration and legal analysis (and am happy that SCO did not prevail), I think my take on this is a bit more sobering in the bigger picture of our great industry.

Today, Lina Software released the source code for LINA under the GPL v2. LINA enables Linux binaries to run with native look and feel on Windows, Mac, and Linux, without recompiling. This release, along with the launch of our community website, http://www.openlina.org/, invites developers worldwide to participate in the growth of this important technology.