Showing headlines posted by dcparris

So far, Hewlett-Packard prefers the earlier GPL, raising the specter that two versions of the license will survive.

[Look, businesses have to realize that freedom trumps profit because freedom ultimately offers profit. Software patents just kill the golden goose - dcparris]

As the US computer manufacturer SGI reports, one of its Altix 4700 systems has outpaced the previous STREAM Triad benchmark record by a factor of 4, achieving a sustained memory bandwidth of 4.35 terabytes per second.

The ongoing discussion about the Reiser4 filesystem [story] continues on thelkml. Jeff Garzik discussed the complexity introduced by a plugin layer [story], suggesting it is really a second VFS, "furthermore, it completely changes the notion of what a Linux filesystem is. Currently, each Linux filesystem is a tightly constrained set of metadata support. reiser4 changes 'tightly constrained' to 'infinity'. While that freedom is certainly liberating, it also has obvious support costs due to new admin paradigms and customer configuration possibilities."Linux creator Linus Torvalds weighed in on the discussion, "as long you call them 'plugins' and treat them as such, I (and I suspect a lot of other people) are totally uninterested, and in fact, a lot of people will suspect that the primary aim is to either subvert the kernel copyright rules, or at best to create a mess of incompatible semantics with no sane overlying rules for locking etc."

It's been nearly a year since OpenOffice.org 2.0 was released, so I sat down with Louis Suárez-Potts, chair of OpenOffice.org's community council and community manager, at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, Ore., last week to see what's on the OpenOffice.org development roadmap. Suárez-Potts says that development is moving along nicely, but it will probably be a while before we see OpenOffice.org 3.0.

Novell has decided not to use proprietary Linux modules such as the NVidia accelerated driver. My first reaction was that Novell was being needlessly idiotic. Then I readthis article on OSWeekly.com, by Matt Hartley. It calls out the leading Linux distributions for failing to band together to pressure hardware vendors to pre-install Linux. I've been saying basically the same thing for the past few years, so I heartily agree with this article. It was then that it occurred to me that Novell may have made the right decision, even if for the wrong reason.

Care2x is an open source web-based hospital information system (HIS). The development of Care2x started back in 2002 by Elpidio Latorilla. The software is released under the GNU General Public License. The latest version 2.2 is maintenance release. The most noticeable things it features are:New graphical installer (based on MirrorMed's installer).MySQL 5 support.Main menu visibility according to the user's permissions.Improved Arabian and Italian translations.Improved Turkish ICD10.

I've been covering the Free Software Foundation'sDefective By Designcampaign against Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies since its planning stages. Starting from scratch, in less than three months, the campaign has grown to 7000 members. This number is impressive, especially since the campaign introduces a degree of activism previously unknown in the free and open source software communities. What strikes me, though, is that, for all the loathing of DRM, how rarely the reasons for opposing it are spelled out. In some cases, the reason may be that people consider them too obvious to be worth mentioning, but, too often when I've probed, people haven't even heard of the possible objections. These objections begin with the fact that the case for DRM has yet to be made, and continues with arguments about consumer rights, privacy, competitiveness, and industry standards.

The eighth annual O'Reilly Open Source Convention wrapped up Friday with a half day of talks and a farewell address by Eben Moglen, general counsel for the Free Software Foundation and chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center, on the importance of software licenses. Moglen's talk provided a perfect end to an excellent conference.

Actuate's use of open source to enhance its own closed-source wares is fair play, according to Keith Gile, principal analyst at Forrester Research. "If all a developer wants is BIRT, then that is available for download with no strings attached."

IBM's virtualization technology has achieved one of the computer industry's most stringent security certifications. The Common Criteria's Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) is one of the highest levels of security certification for logical partitioning.

Monday, July 31, 2006: India will host the Fourth International GPLv3 Conference in Bangalore on 23 and 24 August 2006. A part of the world-wide drive to create awareness about the upcoming version three of the GNU General Public License (GPLv3), the two-day conference is expected to draw delegates from across the communities -- legal, bureaucrat and academia. While the first day will see Richard M. Stallman and Eben Moglen, the original architects of the GPLv3 license, communicating latest updates on the GPLv3 final draft, the second day holds panel discussions on localisation, awareness and adoption of GPLv3 and threat of Digital Restrictions Management (DRM).

Admins, as a general rule, spend far too much time and energy trying to keep spam out of the networks. Until technology is developed to reach out and touch spammers — forcefully — spam will be an unfortunate and expensive fact of life. Fortunately, some simple hacks can be applied at the server level to derail a significant amount of spam. For Postfix admins, for example, there is the Postgrey Greylisting Policy Server.

Linux has had NTFS support for many years now, but as a reverse engineered filesystem, progress hasn’t exactly been fast.

A Mozilla Firefox exploit has been found that can hijack the Web browser and monitor submit-and-click events.

Traditional printed books beat ebooks in almost every respect except one: portability. While it's nice to relax on the sofa with a book in your hand, lugging a 500-page hardcover volume when you are on the move isn't all that appealing. But if your favourite book is available in an electronic format, you can easily turn it into an ebook and read it on your Pocket PC or Palm OS device.

Oracle's chief hints at possible redistribution of Red Hat Linux by the database giant.

Pervasive Software has decided to exit the business of providing support for the PostgreSQL open-source database, one of the first failures in the current rush to open-source business models.

Software in the Public Interest is pleased to announce that it has appointed new Officers following the election of three new members to the board of directors.

"Open source is not just a matter of altruism--it's also good economic sense," said Sun Microsystems' Simon Phipps (pictured) in a recent speech. "Sun has now contributed more lines of open source code than any other organization, including the University of California, Berkeley," he said.

[Interesting. Some will want to brush up on their reading comprehension skills before attempting this one. - dcparris]

My favorite non-IE based alternative browser has reached the 200 million download mark.