Showing headlines posted by bstadil

There are important business benefits that Open Source programs bring to the table, not the least of which are potentially substantial cost savings and the access to and right to use the source code of the software.

[ED- Waring. This is an article for lawyers and Australian at that but well balanced -bstadil]

Sun Microsystems Monday urged a Massachusetts state official to rethink an opinion that Microsoft's Open XML (Extensible Markup Language) meets the state's parameters for an acceptable open document format just because it has been submitted as an open standard.

An OSDL survey reveals that Linux desktop users want better e-mail, native Linux versions of Windows applications, and better USB and network printing support.

There has been a lot of attention to the legal encumbrances in Microsoft's new MS XML format. In this article we'll look at the technical side, and try to show you how the design of these formats affect interoperability. After all, that is the purpose of open standards.

The Mono project has issued a new release aimed at taking the software out of the development environment and onto production systems. Release 1.1.10 contains tweaks such as auto-configuration and the ability to work with virtual hosts

Tectonic columnist Richard Frank asks whether Linux is ready for the mainstream when a current distribution can't recognise his laptop's floppy drive.

Mandriva and LaCie introduce a mobile USB hard drive pre-loaded with a specially tuned version of the award-winning Mandriva Linux operating system: the GlobeTrotter2.0 in 40GB or 80GB.

The PHP development team is proud to announce the release of PHP 5.1.

It looks like a vending machine but it doesn't spit out chocolate or coffee. Instead, it's providing free, open-source software (Foss) in more than 30 locations in South Africa.

Don't you hate it when the word completion feature wants to finish your words for you? Or do you love it? Learn how to customize (or kill) Autocorrect in OOo and live in word-processing peace.

Estonia's latest local elections, held online nationwide, included the use of open source software in electronic voting. However, experts caution that the use of Linux on Web servers does not equate to publicly viewable voting code, and the system's reliance on the Internet raises red flags

The rivals of Microsoft Corporation in Europe have joined forces and asked a European Union court for permission to join EU regulators in an antitrust dispute with the company

Despite the addition of new features, "Firefox has not fattened up with its success; it's still lean, mean, fast, and clean. The core application itself is less than 5MB

Microsoft and Google are on a crash course in an escalating competition to reign supreme as the center of computing. What will the future of computing look like as free web-based services and open-source software increasingly compete with Microsoft's core product line of operating systems.

Wait. Go - no, wait. The analyst firm felt its earlier recommendations had been "misinterpreted in some instances".

[ED- I was surprised it took MS so long to put the thumb screws on Gartner. -bstadil]

An attorney specializing in intellectual property law and an anti-software patents activist say there are significant defects in Microsoft's Office open XML format initiative.

The next annual central meeting of the KDE community, aKademy 2006, is looking for a location. The main goal of the event will be to shape the upcoming new major step of the K Desktop Environment, KDE 4

I'm in the market for a new desktop machine. Performance isn't the goal -- low noise and lower power consumption are. Aside from too-little memory, running Ubuntu on a Mac Mini seems like a good option, especially for the price. Am I missing anything?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), along with two leading national class action law firms, today filed a lawsuit against Sony BMG, demanding that the company repair the damage done by the First4Internet XCP and SunnComm MediaMax software it included on over 24 million music CDs.

Microsoft will on Tuesday announce it is opening up access to its Office file formats to competitors, as part of a move to ensure the software giant does not lose lucrative government markets for its Office software.

[ED-I bet the binary component of the format will be intact so this is mostly a feint, Note the 18 month leadtime before it will be made available. bstadil]