Showing headlines posted by Julie188

When thinking of an open source developer, most us of probably think of a male in his 30’s, overweight, long beard, and socially awkward. While this is just a stereotype and not a true reflection of all open source developers, there is some truth in the weight category and I have some T-shirt statistics that make the case.

Stephen Spector writes, "I am in the process of finalizing a new trademark and legal policy for the OpenStack community and I have been working on the rules that allow anyone to take the software from our open source project and distribute, resell, etc using our OpenStack trademark." He's discovered that the only item a community can own in a legal sense is the trademark, but it gets tricky. What usage of open source software should require the trademark -- and at what point is the code so modified that it shouldn't carry the mark?

"I'm about ready to throw in the towel on Android tablets out of sheer frustration. As a Linux user and Android fan, I've been patiently waiting for a decent iPad competitor to hit U.S. shores. The Galaxy Tab looked promising, until Verizon and Samsung stuck a $600 price tag on the tablet," Brockmeier writes. If you want to buy an Android tablet, and buy it this holiday season, you are stuck with choices that are always hobbled, disappointing or way too expensive like the Tab. Why aren't the Android vendors taking this more seriously?

If you love your Apple iPad but wish you could run your favorite 'nix applications on it, StarNet Communications has an app for that. StarNet has built an app called iLIVEx. It turns the iPad into an X terminal that runs Linux and Unix apps hosted on remote servers. The app was released on Thursday. Even better, iLIVEx users get a free account to run StarNet's virtualized Linux desktop on their Windows and Macs (and Linux) PCs, too. Could be a cheap and easy way of spreading Linux joy to those still under the yolk of a PC platform dictatorship.

We seem to be seeing a rise again in the discussions surrounding free and open source software licensing complexity, and the fear that open source may "infect" or "taint" your software. Just yesterday I received email from a marketing department of yet another company with source scanning tools that ensure against open source “contamination” and “unclean IP”. Let’s get a few things out of the way. This is not an open source problem. If you program in C++ and have third-party ISV library code available, then someone could inadvertently copy source code. Or remove a copyright notice. On top of that, managing a complex sourcing of software is not that difficult.

As of Red Hat's news last week, there are now four competing standards for building so-called open source clouds. It's shaping up to be quite a battle of the titans. Contenders are: Amazon Web Services via Eucalyptus Systems; Rackspace and OpenStack, Cloud.com and Cloudstack; Red Hat's DeltaCloud. Companies like Intel, Dell, Citrix, HP, IBM, Cisco are all lining up behind one or more. But some experts says that the ultimate standard may not even have shown itself yet.

Two law professors from UC Berkeley have come up with a novel idea to protect open source developers from patent bullies. They call it the Defensive Patent License. They hope the DPL can address the objections FOSS developers have with patents the way the GPL addressed them for copyright.

Red Hat touts version 6 as introducing "as many features as possible to reduce reliance on physical hardware." Enterprise Linux is supported for seven years after release, so this will be the dominant version for the next 10 years. Support for RHEL5 ends in March 2014.

The popular Linux distribution, Fedora 13, has been released to its final beta and is chock full of features for enterprise use. Code-named Goddard, the beta version was released on Tuesday with the final version slated for May 18.

Venture Capitalists, drooling over the financial success of Red Hat, are investing a serious chunk of change into other OS projects geared to the enterprise. In turn, those projects are adopting business models that look a lot like their proprietary counterparts.

Beyond expressing a preference, does anything else need to be done to make sure that governments that say they are going "open source" really do so?" Quotas -- dictating specific percentages of open source usage -- seem an obvious answer, but in countries that have tried them, open source has not necessarily flourished. One country where quotas on open source use have been instituted is Hungary. While some in the open source community have held Hungary up as an example to Europe and the rest of the world, there are others in the open source community there who question if the intent behind the quotas has actually been achieved.