Showing headlines posted by henke54

San Francisco (CA) - At the Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco on April 8-10, 2009, a meeting of the great OS minds will take place. There, sponsored by Intel, will be assembled together the Linux Foundation, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft representatives. For the first time ever, the three-way group will sit down at a single table to debate and discuss the future not only of their respective operating systems, but also the OS industry in general. What will come from such a meeting? I believe truly that only God knows.

The French Gendarmerie's gradual migration to a complete open source desktop and web applications has saved millions of euro, says Lieutenant-Colonel Xavier Guimard. "This year the IT budget will be reduced by 70 percent. This will not affect our IT systems." Guimard this Thursday in the city of Utrecht in the Netherlands gave a presentation on the move from a Microsoft-based to an Ubuntu GNU/Linux-based desktop. The Lieutenant-Colonel was one of the keynote speakers at an annual conference organised by NOiV, the Dutch national resource centre on open source and open standards. Most of these savings are on proprietary software licences. Up until 2004 the Gendarmerie acquired 12.000 to 15.000 licences annually. In 2005 it bought just 27. "Since July 2007 we have bought two hundred Microsoft licences. If one of us wants a new PC, it comes with Ubuntu. This encourages our users to migrate." Guimard estimates Gendarmerie since 2004 has saved 50 million euro on licences for standard office applications, hardware and maintenance.

Open source is an outsider, not part of the establishment. One price it pays for this is not being privy to all the decisions that are made in the field of governmental policy. Too often, established players are involved without any counterbalancing input from the free software side. Generally, we don't see all the machinations and deals that go on here behind closed doors. But thanks to the increasingly-indispensable Wikileaks, we have the opportunity to observe how an organisation close to Microsoft is attempting to re-write – and hijack – an important European Union open source strategy paper. Here's Wikileak's explanation of why this is an important document:

The Linux server market is poised to reach $50 billion dollars in three years. The embedded, mobile and netbook markets have exploded recently, resulting in rapid expansion of Linux use in companies previously who used proprietary offerings. When a market grows this quickly, the need for well trained developer talent rises just as precipitously. The freelance marketplace Odesk recently found that Linux related jobs surged from 128 in 2006 to 2014 jobs listed in its service in 2009.1 The Linux Foundation is meeting this demand with a new training program that will produce developers with unmatched technical skills.

With many retail outlets in South Africa now selling notebook and netbook computers with Linux pre-installed, I can’t really say that I am at all excited by the notion and find myself feeling very apprehensive about the way Linux is being introduced to the local market. My reason for feeling this way stems from the belief that most (if not all) people making the decision to buy these notebook or netbook computers do it based on the price tag, and not because the machine runs Fedora-based Linpus Linux. The salesperson selling this product has no comprehension of the Linux operating system or any of the programs available, and therefore is incapable of influencing the buyer to do it for any other reason.

I want you to know that your comments and emails on the last article asking how the two ISO standards (26300 and 29500, commonly known as ODF and OOXML) are doing these days on the openness graph have been read and appreciated. They are useful. There is room for more commenting, including personal experiences you've had struggling to interact with governmental agencies that make little or no allowance for users of Linux. You can comment on the article itself or email me privately. And now comes news that there is a chance to have input into the next major version of ODF, for now being called 'ODF-Next'. There is a call for proposals that went out Friday from the ODF technical committee, and here's where you go to read all about it and to leave your comments. You can comment here too, of course, but you must input there if you wish your input to be registered and considered. What would you like to see in the feature set of the next major release of ODF? What capabilities does ODF need?

"Lately there has been a huge push by Certified Microsoft Professionals and their companies to call (potential) clients and warn them of the dangers of open source. This week I received calls from four different customers saying that they were warned that they are dangerously insecure because they run open source operating systems or software, because 'anyone can read the code and hack you with ease.' Other colleagues in the area also have noticed that three local Microsoft Partners have been trying to strike fear in the minds of companies that respond, 'Yes, we use open source or Linux' when the sales call comes in. I know this is simply a sales tactic by these companies, but how do I fix the damage these tactics cause? I have several customers who now want more than my word about the security of systems that have worked for them flawlessly for 5-6 years, with minimal expense outside of upgrades and patching for security. Does anyone have a good plan or sources of reliable information that can be used to inform the customer?"

The vast majority of questions I get about combining GPL and proprietary software concern embedded systems, since Linux is a component of so many consumer products these days. It's impressive, for instance, to look at Sony's web site where they fulfill their GPL obligation, and see the dozens of TV models and many other products that contain Linux. So, this discussion concerns primarily embedded systems. (Desktop and server applications really only have one path to keeping Open Source and proprietary products separate: make them physically separate programs, each with its own license. Fortunately, most of the libraries on a Linux system are under licenses that allow them to be combined with a proprietary program without trouble.)

On Tuesday a consortium of technology companies, including IBM (IBM), will launch a new initiative designed to help shield the open-source software community from threats posed by companies or individuals holding dubious software patents and seeking payment for alleged infringements by open-source software products. The most novel feature of the new program, to be known as Linux Defenders, will be its call to independent open-source software developers all over the world to start submitting their new software inventions to Linux Defenders (Web site due to be operational Tuesday) so that the group’s attorneys and engineers can, for no charge, help shape, structure, and document the invention in the form of a “defensive publication.” Linux Defenders will then also see to it that the publication, duly attributing authorship of the invention to the developer who submitted it, is filed on the IP.com Web site, a database used by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and other patent examiners throughout the world when they are trying to determine whether a proposed patent is truly novel, as any patentable invention is supposed to be.

A UK company says its switch from Linux to Windows will save it £1 million (almost $A2.3 million). How does that work? According to a case study published by Microsoft, British tool and equipment hire specialist Speedy Hire has junked the Linux and OpenOffice based systems running in its depots in favour of Windows and Microsoft Office. Why? Because the company expects to save £1 million over five years. Saving £200,000 a year doesn't sound quite so impressive, but we'll let that pass.

I know that this is a Linux blog, and thats what readers have come to expect. But sometimes one encounters stuff that is just too good to pass. So that other day my dad bought a new HP Pavilion desktop, and since I am the geek in residence I ended up setting it up for him. So while I was waiting for Microsoft’s endless configuration and setup screens I decided to dig into the fluffy paraphernalia and promotional material bundled with the Desktop. The first thing that fell into my hand was this Microsoft Vista promotional booklet that had an image of the ideal happy family computing on a laptop. What stood out was that the laptop looked awfully similar to the Macbook Pro! In fact I am 90% sure that its a Mac! Oh and while we are at it, last time I checked Microsoft had a gaming division. So why the hell are they using Playstation joysticks on the last page?

This is so funny. Yet another "history" of Linux. I'm deep into writing an article on the Apple-Psystar litigation, to rebut some of the absolute nonsense I see being written about it, but I have to take a brief detour to share something with you, so you can laugh too. I put in News Picks a couple of days ago the farewell letter of ex-hedge fund manager, Andrew Lahde, who is one of the few who predicted the current Wall Street meltdown, and one of the things he suggested was that great minds get together and come up with a new "system of government that truly represents the common man’s interest....This forum could be similar to the one used to create the operating system, Linux, which competes with Microsoft’s near monopoly."

What does Microsoft do when someone says: No, sorry, we do not want to use your software any more. If that someone is a small business operating in an increasingly cut-throat world, a great deal of pressure can be brought to bear on them to fall into line. But what if that someone is a whole nation, and that whole nation happens to be a world superpower with the resources and will to forge its own, alternative route to technological competitiveness? This is what has happened to Microsoft in Russia, and it all started with a school teacher. Back in 2007, Aleksandr Ponosov (pictured below right), the headmaster of a village school in Sepych, in the Perm region of Russia, was arrested for running unlicensed copies of Microsoft software on his school's computers.

Reader Christian Nielsen wrote from Sweden to tell us he and his girlfriend have named their baby Linux, after the operating system, and attached this darling photo. Nielsen says he and his girlfriend Veronica considered a few names during the pregnancy, "but when he finally arrived none of them seemed right. We both thought that he looked like a little Linux as soon as we saw him and decided to go for that name." You might wonder what the grandparents think of their choice, but Nielsen says it hasn't been a problem. "The reaction from family and friends has been positive -- they all like it.

Symbian has told the world that as open source operating systems go, Linux is unfit for mobile phones. "There’s been a lot of misleading information over the years...about the fitness of Linux for the mobile space," Jerry Panagrossi, vp of Symbian's North American operations, told industry insiders this morning at the GigaOM:Mobilize conference in San Francisco.

In the first week of September 2006, the European Commission signed an agreement to fund a 30 month research project which aims to develop an open-source software system, seamlessly integrated in a software development environment for enabling decentralised, personalised and context-aware knowledge sharing. The Consortium that will carry out the research and development work, consists of Planet AE, Forschungszentrum Informatik an der Universität Karlsruhe, Institute of Communication and Computer Systems, National Technical University of Athens, Technische Universität München, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, CIM College d.o.o, Intrasoft International S.A., Linux Industrial Association (LIPSZ Hungary), THALES Research and Technology France, TXT e-solutions S.p.A.

IBM has launched its latest attack on Microsoft in the enterprise, forming an alliance with three top Linux distributors to promote Microsoft-free PCs around the world. The deal with Canonical (the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu), Novell and Red Hat is designed to promote PCs running Linux alongside IBM business software, such as Lotus Notes, Lotus Symphony and Lotus Sametime. IBM made the announcement at the Linux World Conference & Expo in San Francisco on Tuesday.

I disassembled my BIOS to have a look around, and while I won't post the results here,I'll tell you what I did find. They have several different tables, a group for Windws XP and Vista, a group for 2000, a group for NT, Me, 95, 98, etc. that just errors out, and one for LINUX.

Insisting that they have "repeatedly found them to be detrimental to Linux users, businesses, and the greater Linux ecosystem," today the Linux kernel community has started petitioning for open-source modules and open-source drivers for the Linux kernel. Such modules negate the openness, stability, flexibility, and maintainability of the Linux development model and shut their users off from the expertise of the Linux community. The Linux Foundation, led by Jim Zemlin, has issued a statement in favor of the Linux kernel developers' position. It's unclear why the kernel developers decided to speak out now, though the Linux Foundation indicates that the developers have been subjected to a steady barrage of questions on the topic for years. Apparently, they finally got sick of it.

AMD has now evolved their Linux support by taking it a large step further. AMD is in the process of pushing new high-end features into their Linux driver -- such as Multi-GPU CrossFire support -- and with the ATI Radeon HD 4850 they have even begun showing off Tux, the Linux mascot, on their product packaging and providing Linux drivers on their product CDs!