Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Google evangelist Chris DiBona and venture capitalist and former Oracle president/COO Ray Lane will be among the headliners at an Open Source Summit Feb. 15 in Pittsburgh, Penna. The summit will discuss "how the open source movement is changing the rules of the game for everyone in the software marketplace," an event spokesperson said.

Although Linux might be making big inroads in some vertical markets, Microsoft Windows keeps enjoying virtually complete domination of the legal software space, with the small exception of some embedded appliances, concurred participants in this week's LegalTech show in New York City. "Microsoft is actually terrified of Linux in most vertical markets. But the legal market isn't one of them," said Whit McIsaac, moderator of a conference session called "Implementing Strategic Plans--Successfully Deploying Change in the Law Firm."

Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!

The RAR and 7-Zip file compression formats originated on Windows, so support for them on Linux is not as automatic as it is for old Unix holdovers like Gzip and TAR. But with the right software, you can handle these compressed files without much trouble.

I spoke with some guys at the AlwaysOn show yesterday who have an interesting business model aimed at tech support professionals. Spiceworks have a radically different take on free software. They allow anybody to download their application which monitors devices on the network. It incorporates a ticketing system and also the ability to share experiences in a forum environment with other Spiceworks users.

TimeSys Corp is sponsoring The Open Source Summit, presented by The IndUS Entrepreneurs (TiE) Pittsburgh.

When MySQL files for IPO, we'll get to view their financials. We'll get to compare their performance metrics against Red Hat (which, until now, has been the only pure-play OSS player with public financials) and traditional vendors. I'm willing to bet that their metrics will be (surprisingly) close to metrics from traditional software vendors.

PyDEV is a plugin that enables developers to use Eclipse for Python and Jython development, making Eclipse a first-class Python IDE. The software offers features such as code completion, syntax highlighting, syntax analysis, automated refactoring, template system, source code quality checking, and a debugging environment.

Embedded Linux specialist TimeSys is among the sponsors of a Pittsburgh conference exploring the strategies and economics of open source software. The "Open Source Summit" will feature discussions of corporate open source initiatives, adoption, licensing, and business models, and will be held the evening of Thurs., Feb. 15.

Frustrating hardware compatibility issues on Linux may become a thing of the past thanks to an offer by the Linux kernel development community to develop drivers for manufacturers free of charge.

How big a role can Open Source play in helping developers build security and identity management solutions? Well, Liberty Alliance, a group of G1000 end users and vendors working on federated identity management and web services, wants to find out. The group has launched openLiberty.org, an online portal to offer tools and community support to devs using Open Source to build identity-based applications.

A preview of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, which won't be released for about a month, is available via the latest Scientific Linux 5 (SL5) alpha live CD/DVD, released this week. Built from source packages for RHEL 5, SL5 sports a 2.6.18 kernel and either the KDE or GNOME desktops.

UKIAH, CALIF. -- East Kern County Integrated Technology Association (EKCITA), a federally funded technology project in Tehachapi, California, has selectedMendocino Informatics to build a rural health information exchange. EKCITA (www.ekcita.org) is a public/private partnership formed by the Tehachapi Valley Healthcare District, two Rural Health Clinics, and fourteen private medical practices. The goal of the EKCITA community-wide electronic medical records system is to improve quality of patient care and chronic disease management in the rural region of East Kern County.

Red Hat Magazine--January Features

The Software Freedom Law Center's (SFLC) request for a re-examination of Blackboard's patent for elearning systems has been granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office. Another request for re-examination by Desire2Learn is also pending. Speaking for the SFLC, Richard Fontana expresses optimism that these requests will either overturn the patent claim or else narrow it to the point that it no longer poses a threat to free software learning systems.

Its products are free. Its work force is largely volunteer. Its meetings are open to anyone. It's a nonprofit. It may be the hottest tech company in America.

Part of the early received wisdom about open-source was that it couldn't last: why would people donate their time and expertise to creating something for no return?

This is Part 3 of a series that pits Microsoft's new Vista OS against Linux's fair-haired boy, Ubuntu. At the conclusion of Part 2, our fearless curmudgeon had just finished configuring his test system to dual-boot Vista Ultimate and SimplyMEPIS 6.01, an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution with a KDE desktop.

In a message posted to the Linux kernel mailing list yesterday, kernel contributor Greg Koah-Hartman announced that kernel developers will be providing free Linux driver development services for companies. This service will help the Linux community create stronger relationships with hardware vendors while reducing the barriers that presently impede ubiquitous Linux hardware support.

The fact that OpenOffice.org Writer is more than a word processor is an open secret. Designed to write long documents, Writer is in many ways a document processor comparable to FrameMaker, suitable for designing books and dissertations while falling short of a complete desktop publishing solution. For this reason, it includes a number of tools for tweaking lines of text, including Tools> Language> Hyphenation and the tools for adjusting character width and letter space for individual characters. However, by far the least understood of these high-end tools is Writer's ability to adjust line-spacing.