Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

When I've written about the inevitable march of Open Source, there are a couple of things I've failed to note, or that I just got wrong. Where I got it wrong was in equating open technology and the trends in that direction with Open Source, as defined by the OSI. Sure, the downward price pressure in software makes the current open source ecosystem viable, but that's not nearly the same as saying that trends towards openness will necessarily result in an Open Source end. The truth is, there is a wide range of points on the open spectrum.

"This patch implements a new version of RCU which allows its read-side critical sections to be preempted,"Paul McKenney said in a posting to the Linux Kernel mailing list. He described theRCU code contained in his 9 part patchset,"it uses a set of counter pairs to keep track of the read-side critical sections and flips them when all tasks exit read-side critical section." Ingo Molnar responded very favorably to the patch,"cool! Now after 2 years of development and testing I think this is one of the most mature patchsets on lkml - so i'd like to see this designated for potential upstream inclusion. I.e. everyone who can see some bug, please holler now."

After having spent the past year and a half living and working in the commercial open source software world, I still marvel at how “the community” supports and makes possible the creation of high quality software. At first glance, a commercial enterprise that produces open source software may look like an absurdly small number of people supporting a large number of projects and a huge number of users. But an open source project team isn’t just comprised of the people within the walls of a building in a particular office park. It also includes all the contributors, anywhere in the world, in the project’s community.

The Dribble, Freshrpms and Livna teams, already joined by some Fedora contributors, are proud to announce the RPM Fusion project. RPM Fusion aims to bring together many packagers from various 3rd party repos and build a single add-on repository for Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We aim to provide support for all 'current' versions of Fedora including devel, for i386, ppc, ppc64 and x86_64.

Novell was not pleased with our understanding of Moonlight, but its rebuttal failed to impress. Worse — it only confirmed and reaffirmed most of our suspicions. It even introduced new serious issues. "Using Moonlight, Silverlight will run on any Linux distro supported by Mono, which is most of the major distros. It’s true that, under the terms of our agreements with Microsoft, only SUSE Linux Enterprise will be able to bundle Moonlight into the distribution."

I initially spoke with John Flores, a system administrator with the University of Texas at San Antonio, earlier this year for a broad SearchEnterpriseLinux.com article on Linux support. The article focused on the good, the bad and the ugly of working with commercial Linux distributors, as well as with the alternatives like CentOS and Debian. Flores sampled the server side of Xandros’ offering, Xandros Server, and saw that the vendor’s strategy was geared towards users who wanted to migrate from Windows with as little a learning curve as possible. He was hooked. Windows didn’t stand a chance.

[Whatever you think of Xandros, it's better than running Windows :-) – Sander]

I spent some time this week playing with and learning about the concept of public computing -- computers placed in public locations, primarily for accessing the Internet. There is a Canadian company that has really nailed the whole concept. Userful Corp. out of Calgary (www.userful.com) has a product called the Discover Station, a Linux-based computer that is designed from the ground up for public computing.

Power.Org will sponsor the first Power Architecture Developer Conference in the Austin Convention Center September 24-25. The vendor-neutral convention will gather Power.org's corporate members with developers, hardware and software solution providers, academics and designers to show how open collaboration can break down barriers to innovation. The two-day event will include technical sessions, hands-on labs, keynote addresses and vendor demonstrations.

IBM added a delicious twist on its new commitment to help OpenOffice.org battle Microsoft Office by donating code that was originally derived in part from a Microsoft-developed technology. IBM’s iAccessible2, code-named Project Missouri, is a specification for technology used to help the visually impaired interact with Open Document Format (ODF)-compliant applications and was developed in part using Microsoft Active Accessibility (MAA) as a starting point.

With an incremental update to its Solaris 10 OS, Sun is extending the platform's virtualization capabilities to accommodate Linux and Solaris on the same computer. Sun will add to the Solaris Containers capability, which has bolstered server usage by allowing for multiple instances of Solaris on the same server, said Dan Roberts, Sun director of marketing for Solaris. With Solaris 10 8/07, being announced Tuesday, users can run Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS Linux, and Linux applications via Solaris Containers for Linux Applications.

Since launching Yellow Dog Linux for the Playstation 3 (PS3) last year, Terra Soft has been busy expanding its presence in the Cell processor ecosystem. To get an update about what the company has been doing, we contacted Terra Soft's CEO Kai Staats via email in Nakuru, Kenya. Staats is there working with the Pistis Orphanage & Academy to complete some important projects for the children's home and school.

Five fresh rumors have arisen surrounding the secretive Google Phone, but unfortunately none point toward a potential release date. The most interesting rumor is that the Google Phone will not be running on Windows Mobile like all over HTC-produced smartphones and Pocket PC Phones. Instead, it will get treated to a Linux system similar to that offered on certain Motorola phones.

The energy efficiency battle between Linux and Windows is intensifying, with each claiming to be better at cutting power consumption and avoiding environmental damage. The Linux Foundation has already clarified its plans to bring improved power management to the operating system through its Green Linux Initiative. The working group is making it easy for kernel developers, hardware manufacturers, system vendors, distributions and end users to collaborate on the requirements for more effective power management in Linux.

Shopping for a home computer involves more than just choosing hardware — buyers must also pick what kind of operating system they want to run that new machine. And for most people, that's long meant choosing between Microsoft's Windows, which runs on PCs, or OS, the system that operates Apple's Macintosh. Enter Linux, an operating system created by Finnish university student Linus Torvalds as a hobby. Once only a toy for geeks, Linux now is vying for a place in the consumer operating system market.

[Not "news" really, but these kinds of stories are appearing more and more on non-tech sites. – Sander]

Now that Oracle 11g has hit shelves, the question many IT shops ask themselves is which hardware and operating system does Oracle run best on? When it comes to Oracle server platforms, Donald Feinberg, a Gartner Inc. analyst, said it's really a toss-up between Unix and Linux. "In general, Oracle runs well on any Linux-capable hardware," he said.

Law suits sparked by patent infringement claims are risky ventures. They hardly ever make either party look good, and they are anything but sure bets as revenue producers - unless you're an attorney. Therefore, when they do happen, those involved usually go out of their way to keep all but the essential facts of the case from public view. Not so with the current sue-me-sue-you spat between Network Appliance and Sun. Here we have Dave Hitz of NetApp and Jonathan Schwartz of Sun arguing their cases blogospherically and in conflicting detail.

The Open Source Initiative's chairman, Michael Tiemann, announced Friday that the organization's licensing board have officially approve the version three of the General Public License and Lesser General Public License as OSI-approved.

I am always looking for other jobs, not because I am unhappy or really ready to get one, but because I always want to see what’s out there. When it comes to meteorology jobs or science jobs in general, any good ones want you to be comfortable with linux. Linux is the way of the future and we need to accept it.

The rumors about VMware putting ESX Server on dietary supplements have been confirmed. The virtualization darling today revealed ESX Server 3i - a super-thin hypervisor that will be built into the memory of servers from companies such as Dell, HP and IBM. We've been writing about the so-called ESX Lite for some time now, particularly in conjunction with Dell. The Round Rock-based server maker plans to ship an appliance-like machine later this year that will include a hypervisor in flash memory.

SCO wanted a jury to hear its side of the story in its Novell lawsuit, but U.S. District Court Judge Dale Kimball has ruled that he, and he alone, will hear the case. In his ruling on this, Kimball wrote that SCO had no "just reason for delay of entry of final judgment in light of the strong policy against piecemeal appeals." After all, Kimball continued, "The court finds no compelling reason to separate these remaining claims for an immediate appeal given that the remaining claims in the case will be ready for appeal in two to three months. Regardless of the outcome of the upcoming trial, there will undoubtedly be an appeal at that time."