Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

The BBC iPlayer has been a hot topic on everyone's lips. It's late, doesn't work very well yet, presents some ISPs with a big economic problems, and is limited to Windows XP users running Internet Explorer. That last point has proven particularly sticky for the Beeb's spinners in the last few weeks, but in reality reveals as much about Microsoft's plans for DRM as it does about any supposed "corruption" of the BBC by some Gates-backed Sith.

Swisscom IT Services, a subsidiary of the largest telecommunications provider in Switzerland, is using a wide variety of solutions from Red Hat for its Linux software infrastructure. Swisscom is using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Cluster Suite, JBoss Enterprise Platform and other Red Hat offerings in multiple data centers. It provides outsourcing information technology services to more than 50 customers.

A U.K.-based embedded software consultancy says it recently implemented a Linux driver and other software for a marine-based military application involving high-speed, fiber-optic networking. Pebble Bay Consulting Ltd. says it helped U.K.-based defense contractor Kaon implement an "embedded Linux" solution for an unspecified military customer. Pebble Bay's role reportedly included re-writing a Linux driver, creating an FPGA (field-programmable gate array), interface, and creating a user-space API (application programming interface) library.

Open source is changing not just how companies make software, but how they sell it. Alfresco's Matt Asay explains the new sales cycle and the skills that today's software sales people need to close deals.

In Part 1 of this series, I explained my reasoning behind creating an open source strategy. In Part 2, I will discuss our progress. Our first step was to create an inventory of the open source products that we use at my IT shop. We have a few areas within the organization that were early adopters of OSS and have a variety of products in use. When polling the staff for OSS products, I expected to find between 20-30 actively being used. I was shocked to find that we have around 100 different OSS products in our inventory (not including the ones packaged within proprietary closed software products). What an eye opener!

Very little, in my opinion. While Matt Asay sees the deal as "a big win for open source... mostly because it pegs the value of an open source company quite high" I'm not sure that's true in this case. I've got to agree with Raven Zachary over at The 451 Group when he writes that "It wasn’t open source that provided the 150x multiplier." Yes, the open source Xen project is at the heart of XenSource's business, but Citrix did not pay $500m for the Xen project. As Savio Rodrigues notes if Citrix was after Xen it could have got its hands on it for a lot less than $500m

Linux buffs tend to scoff at one of the major reasons that Windows users like me haven't switched yet: We don't want to give up our favorite applications. With countless open-source options, plus a rising number of commercial apps for Linux, their argument goes, we can certainly find a replacement for whatever software we're running on XP or Vista. I spend a good chunk of keyboard time dealing with text in varied forms, so one of my top requirements is a robust application that can elegantly handle plain ASCII text and rudimentary HTML.

The offer of pre-installed Linux by mainstream PC makers doesn't mean the open-source operating system is poised to sweep aside Microsoft’s; but while its cost advantages may never be compelling, finance departments must prepare to consider the merits of switching their own operations to Linux – and to hear a stronger case for its company-wide adoption.

Some quarters in the software industry still carry a bias against the credibility of open source security applications. Open source network gateway developer Untangle did not expect to find its request for certified testing of the popular open source virus security product ClamAV shunned. When it was, Untangle decided to do its own test. "We found that ClamAV was the quickest with the least drained resources. We also noticed that same thing with other types of open source security products," Dirk Morris, Untangle's founder and CTO said. "I didn't believe that open source was better. Now I do."

A new business model has emerged based on the concept of products that are community-based and available with the source code at no cost – the open source movement. The open source effect is now making itself felt in the integration marketplace, where Mule from MuleSource has become established as a popular ESB and integration platform. As businesses look to become less dependent on software vendors to solve their integration issues there is a groundswell of support for open source solutions.

"I will predict that virtually every open-source company (including Red Hat) will eventually be acquired by a big proprietary software company.", Thus spake Tim O'Reilly in the comments to one of his other posts. In other words, why don't I just give up, sell out, and go home? I guess I would if I thought that Tim were right. He's not, not in this instance.

Sonos has integrated Sirius radio playback into its Linux-powered whole-house audio equipment. The commercial-free service can be trialed for 30 days by selecting a menu option on the Sonos Digital Music System's PDA-like controller (pictured at left), the company said. Sirius is best-known for its satellite radio product, which competed with XM Radio before the companies announced a merger earlier this year. However, Sirius also offers an Internet radio product.

The good part of *NIX-like systems is that some basic concepts are extremely well designed, starting with the filesystem philosophy and the security metaphor. Therefore, using Linux or BSD on your home desktop or on your laptop instead of Windows is not only a question of ideology or price — it's a matter of good taste. There are however a few places where something is under-optimal, not because GNU/Linux or *BSD are following "ancient *NIX principles", but simply because *NIX operating systems were designed in the times of the mainframes and minicomputers, where everything was a server, and usability issues like those raised by nowadays desktop/laptop computers were not considered.

In the aftermath of federal district judge Dale A. Kimball's recent ruling, which determined that Novell, not SCO, is the rightful owner of the UNIX copyrights, the once-mighty proprietary UNIX vendor is on the verge of annihilation. As SCO's grasp on survival weakens and the company braces itself for descent into financial oblivion, much can be learned by reflecting on the circumstances of the case. A close reading of the ruling provides fascinating insight into the details of SCO's battle and sheds light on the peculiar events through which SCO has branded itself with the bitter taint of infamy.

A clever group of whippersnappers have got the right idea when it comes to home entertainment, namely, LinuxMCE-based systems that don't break the bank but offer a pretty stacked feature set. Fiire, a company which manufactures and sells modular media boxes and remotes aimed at unifying your media center has a few items it'd like you to see. The whole shebang is based around the FiireEngine, a $799 box that acts as a central hub to your media world.

On April 1 this year, I wrote a spoof headlined "Ballmer joins Linux Foundation board." Considering the statements that were reported last week as emanating from the executive director of the same foundation, Jim Zemlin, I wonder if my tale will still be considered a spoof after a few years.

Ignore the myths. Open source security technology is an affordable and robust option for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). While some buyers might think security is best left to vendors of proprietary software like Symantec or SonicWall , experts says open source software can give SMBs the protection they seek.

Open source in the enterprise is growing steadily, but for what applications? eWEEK IT expert Kevin Closson, chief software architect for PolyServe-HP, answers the question. Open-source databases like PostgreSQL, Ingres and MySQL are becoming serious alternatives to Oracle for enterprise applications.

Many Linux distributions can run large Web sites, but are you prepared to bet your online business on a free Linux distribution? eWEEK IT expert Stephane Saux, IT director at the San Francisco Chronicle, has some answers.

In Linux you run processes in two different modes of execution. There is userspace (aka user mode) which you run your everyday applications, like Firefox, Pidgin, irssi. From the kernel’s point of view, this is unprivileged mode, meaning user space applications don’t have access to hardware, or bits of the system critical to its function. The next mode is kernelspace, in this mode a process runs in privileged mode, giving it access to hardware and low-level system processes. In this article I show how to write a kernel module.