Showing headlines posted by zigzag

Novell's unrequited romance with Linux and free software is over. Having completed its $2.2 billion takeover, Attachmate is dividing the spoils. Novell and its legacy networking business will survive in Utah. NetIQ will inherit Novell's identity and security management solutions, and SUSE has been given autonomy and control of Novell's open source projects from its base in Nuremberg. Mono has been cast adrift, and the worst aspects of Novell's attempt to sell off a large part of its patent portfolio to a consortium led by Microsoft have been scuppered by the US Department of Justice and the German Federal Cartel Office. But there are still questions left to answer.

Groklaw began life in 2003 as the personal blog of Pamela Jones, better known as PJ. "At the start, I was just trying to learn how to use blogging software," she has said. "I was startled to learn anyone was reading what I wrote... I started covering the McDonald's 'I'm fat and it's your fault' litigation and Martha Stewart and just whatever was in the news, just to have something to write about as I learned how blogging worked."

The best games are a learning experience, an exercise in strategic thinking, memory retention, what-if scenarios and problem solving – not unlike programming itself. Each piece in a game like chess has a limited number of moves, yet the game itself is a world of possibilities, and like a chess player, a programmer has to think ahead, so it isn't really surprising that many coders approach programming as if it was a game of chess, and are also gamers.

In the beginning, the idea that software should be free was deemed unrealistic and laughable, and then unworkable. Now, for the most part, it is deemed acceptable and desirable – not just as a workable approach to writing software, but as a means of writing better software.

At the same time "both Nokia and Intel were working on separate handset UIs using Qt, the former proprietary, the latter open-source. A better worked example of squandering your leadership role and wrestling yourself to the ground is hard to see." "This is why Elop needs to fire lots of his senior managers, and beat a 'one company' message into everyone. Nokia deserve their trial by fire – and I hope the people who truly screwed up the amazing Linux opportunity that was the N900 get shut down in the process."

The vast majority of computer users don't know or care about the underlying technologies that drive the gadgets and utilities they access on a daily basis. Most of these users run Windows and have little idea of what to do when things go wrong. Perhaps the drive won't boot or files are corrupted, random messages pop up, the registry or the file system is broken. The problem may be blamed on a root kit, a broken program, or a virus. Sometimes the data is lost, and sometimes the user gets lucky with a rescue disk supplied by one or other of the anti-virus vendors.

Rosegarden allows recording, arranging, and composing music. Multiple tracks can have effects added and then be mixed down for burning to CD or for distribution on the web. The built-in notation editor supports printed output via GNU LilyPond

LibreOffice will be uncompromisingly free software, and as one developer observes, "it is hard to think of anyone of any note in the community that isn't involved," including developers from Red Hat and Debian. The hope is that OpenOffice / Libreoffice "will go where people want it to go, because it hasn't been going where people want it to. Initially the focus will be on cleaning up the code, adding polish and increasing usability." In the longer term, the project will be much more ambitious. If LibreOffice takes off, which it has every chance of doing, the test for the developers will be to prove that a distributed free software development model not only gives the developers greater freedom and initiative, but also produces results.

The inspiration behind PcLinuxOS, also known as PCLOS, is Bill Reynolds, who is known to fans of PCLinuxOS as Texstar. PCLinuxOS began as an offshoot of Mandrake/Mandriva, to which Texstar had been a long time contributor of third-party packages. The objective was to build a fast, reliable distribution of Linux, that was both a Live distribution on the model of Knoppix and a fully installable and flexible Linux desktop, driven by Reynolds' passion to make the perfect software package. "I love to package," he explained. "It is like a puzzle where all the pieces have to fit together or the code doesn't work. That is my favourite part of doing PCLOS."

Open source is more than just a means by which software companies can maximise their profits and raise the bottom line. Copyright assignment can be ethical, and can unify a project under common ownership, or it can be misused to impose control and bypass the GPL, indemnify the code against patent infringement, and subvert the developers' intent in contributing to an 'open source' project.

The HURD was meant to be the true kernel at the heart of the GNU operating system. The promise behind the HURD was revolutionary – a set of daemons on top of a microkernel that was intended to surpass the performance of the monolithic kernels of traditional Unix systems and in doing so, give greater security, freedom and flexibility to the users – but it has yet to come down to earth.

OpenOffice.org is a flagship for free and open source software, released under free software licenses and achieving downloads in the hundreds of millions. OO.o is a success by most measurements, but there have long been murmurings of discontent among developers resulting in complaints of "non-responsiveness and lack of leadership" on the project. The argument is not that the project is a failure, but that OpenOffice.org could be so much more, given a less top down approach to project management and a looser rein on developers' ability to get involved.

Lightweight desktops have a multitude of uses, on netbooks, for mobile devices, for older hardware, for users with limited requirements of their systems, for connecting to applications in the cloud, and for bare knuckled programmers who prefer to work closer to the metal.

The search for the next-generation video codec for the open web has reached an impasse. Few of the options are truly open or free, and those that are free are not being pushed by the major forces.

Mandriva began life in July 1998 as Linux Mandrake in France in Gael Duval's bedroom after he ported a KDE 1.0 desktop onto Red Hat Linux 5.1, uploaded the result onto two FTP servers, went away on holiday, and came back to find that he had a popular and successful Linux distribution on his hands...

If you click on http://www.sun.com, you get redirected to http://www.oracle.com. Sun is no more. The network is no longer the computer. The "Dot" in .COM is now a database. I'm really sorry to see Sun go. I have a long and varied history with Sun. What went wrong?

The first free Unix-like operating system available on the IBM PC was 386BSD, of which Linus Torvalds said in 1993: "If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never have happened..."

FreeBSD is the most accessible and popular of the BSDs, has code at the heart of Darwin and Apple's OS X, and has powered some of the more successful sites on the Web, including Hotmail, Netcraft and Yahoo!

Slackware is the most stripped down and UNIX-like of Linux distributions and is designed to be a workhorse for developers or sysadmins, who do not want "to be met with GUI greeters, setup wizards, beginner-oriented defaults, and enabled-by-default automatic updates."

Moonlight was written in three weeks in June of 2007 by a group of Mono developers working round the clock to fulfil a promise made by Miguel de Icaza. Despite such heroics Moonlight continues to face resistance from the wider developer community...