Showing headlines posted by tadelste

Microsoft is once again in the race to supply government agencies in the state of Massachusetts with its Office productivity suite, the state's governor has said.

The state was threatening to disqualify Microsoft as a software supplier to state agencies because it failed to support open standards in its Office productivity suite. Starting in 2007, the state requires that all newly created documents use open standards.

[Ed: Evidently, it ain't over until it's over. I wonder which member of the GOP got to Romney on behalf of Redmond. Oh well, a Byrd in the Bush for freedom. - tadelste]

The download site for Firefox is performing well following the release of a widely-anticipated update of the open source web browser. Firefox version 1.5, which was released Tuesday night, features "dozens of enhancements," according to the Mozilla Corporation, including improvements in popup blocking, RSS integration and updating.

So here we have an entire industry exerting considerable effort to exclude a whole class of customers, because we use a computing platform that they cannot control. Sure, Microsoft will be happy to screw over its end users by including all manner of DRM nastiness. But in the end it won't matter anyway- customers who choose to view their legally-purchased DVDs on Linux will easily, if illegally, find a way. What sort of madness is this?

The RIAA - Hollywood - DRM - Linux Suicide Pact

Lockheed Martin is to use Linux as the operating system for the missile defence program Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) program, dubbed 'son of Star Wars'.

Mozilla Reorganizes
Firefox 1.5 is available now at getfirefox.com and mozilla.com. The Mozilla site is the "new home" of Firefox and Thunderbird, replacing Mozilla.org as the download address for Mozilla's browser and open-source e-mail application.

A Mozilla spokesperson said Mozilla.com is now home to Mozilla, a taxable corporation spun out from the Mozilla Foundation in August. Mozilla will handle all of the consumer-facing software from the open-source group, as well as merchandise such as Mozilla T-shirts.

The people behind the latest version of the Linux desktop environment, KDE, say the main benefits will be better standards support in its Web browser, Konqueror.

The KDE project team said on Tuesday that the browser in KDE 3.5 has passed the Acid2 test from the Web Standards Project (WaSP). This test examines a browser's support for W3C recommended standards including CSS1, HTML4 and PNG.

BOSTON -- OASIS, the international e-business standards consortium, today announced that its members have approved XML Catalogs version 1.1 as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification. XML Catalogs defines mechanisms to facilitate machine processing of XML entities associated with external identifiers, allowing references to web resources, such as files, images, stylesheets, and schemas, to be mapped to other resources.

The CSIR Satellite Applications Centre's mapping technology, built on open source software, tells users where fires are breaking out across South Africa in near real-time.

While there certainly has been little reason to doubt where IBM stands on ODF, it was reassuring to see it pledge its support today in a letter delivered to Massachusetts Secretary of Executive Agency Finance and Administration Thomas Trimarco. The letter is signed by IBM's VP of Standards and Open Source, Dr. Robert Sutor (it was Bob, you may recall, who hosted the Armonk Meeting back on November 4.

Bob's letter doesn't hesitate to establish IBM's right to make its opinion heard. It opens as follows:

With all the recent activity around document formats and the strong leadership position taken by Massachusetts, I'm writing to you to reaffirm IBM's full support for the OASIS OpenDocument Format for Office Applications (ODF) standard. IBM, with our nearly 5000 employees in Massachusetts, is pleased to continue our active participation in the open, community-driven OASIS standardization process as well as our support for this important global standard in an upcoming version of our IBM Workplace product. Massachusetts is one of the epicenters of IBM software innovation, which will continue to be a key growth engine for our company. Lotus, Rational and Ascential all call the Commonwealth home and are developing the next generations of customer solutions based on open standards.

Diggable

NEW YORK The rules governing the use of most free software programs will be revised for the first time in 15 years in an open process that was to begin Wednesday.

First Public Discussion Scheduled for January

BOSTON and NEW YORK, Nov. 30 /PRNewswire/ -- The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) today released a document specifying the process and guidelines for revising the Foundation's GNU General Public License (GNU GPL). The FSF will release the first discussion draft of the new license for comment at the International Public Conference for GPLv3 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on January 16 and 17, 2006.

"We want to decide our IT strategy in Mannheim and not have Microsoft make the decision for Mannheim," declares Gerd Armbruster, the IT infrastructure manager at the German city. For in Mannheim, open standards — not cost — is the main driver of the software strategy.

Welcome to this year's 48th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Andreas Schuldei sent out a [1]reminder for the DebConf call for papers. Martin Krafft [2]announced a [3]bug squashing party that lasts until December 14th and rewards 25 bug squashers with a [4]book.

This mail is being written to let you all know about a pending transition underway in the Xorg packages.

IBM plans to announce on Wednesday that it's giving away software to help customers and business partners adapt software written for Sun Microsystems' Solaris operating system to its open-source rival Linux. The Migration Kit helps people assess software written in C or C++ programming languages and move it from Solaris to Linux.

IBM is an aggressive Linux booster, though it competes with its own AIX version of Unix. Sun supports Linux, but prefers customers to buy Solaris support contracts.

Many of you no doubt have tried out the Beta and Release Candidate builds. Here’s a list of things to do and see with Firefox 1.5.

There will be no new open license for Microsoft's XML Office format after all. Instead, Microsoft simply states that it won't sue for use of its XML Office format patents.

Build a low-cost, terabyte-sized backup server using Linux and back up your digital audio files, digital images and digital movie recordings.

Web browser news can rarely be described as hot, but today's launch of an update to Firefox managed to creep into the red on our news thermometers.

That's because since the Stuff team adopted the version 1.0 of the browser at the expense of Internet Explorer almost a year ago, we've found our web surfing an infinitely more agreeable experience.

Wireless cards can be quite a bit of trouble for Linux users. Very few manufacturers have any interest in writing Linux drivers or releasing information about their cards so other people can use this information to write Linux drivers. There is a small selection of Linux-compatible Wi-Fi (wireless networking) cards, but they tend to be rather expensive. Worse, you don't get very much choice about which wireless networking chipset is built-in when you buy a laptop.