Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Last week, LWN pointed at a software review claiming that Fedora Core 6 was so bad that the whole distribution should simply be shut down. The failing which led to such a dire prescription was a lack of proprietary software.

Eben Moglen has now stated that GPLv3 will be redrafted to include clear language that will make the Novell-Microsoft agreement an obvious GPL violation, and more: "GPL version 3 will be adjusted so the effect of the current deal is that Microsoft will by giving away access to the very patents Microsoft is trying to assert."

SGI today announced an order with the U.S. Government for a massive SGI(R) Altix(R) 4700 system and maintenance services. The order is the result of SGI's close collaboration with Fed Centric Technologies, a Bethesda, Md.-based company that specializes in supporting the mission-critical applications, infrastructure and professional services requirements of the Department of Defense, intelligence community, the Department of Homeland Security and federal law enforcement communities. Powered by 128 Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 9000 Series Processors, the new system features 4TB of globally shared memory running under a single instance of SUSE(R) Linux Enterprise Server 10 from Novell(R).

Entrepreneurs attending a recent forum in Germany showed how they plan to use clever open source products — commercially — to compete with proprietary software companies. The Open Source Forum gave software entrepreneurs from Europe and the US an opportunity to present their business ideas to venture capitalists and other ICT experts. Their message was loud and clear: open source is a disruptive technology that is here to stay, and it will nibble, or maybe even someday gobble, away at the customer base of big and pricey commercial software companies.

In the mythical land of "Open Source," an egalitarian, global network of software developers sacrificially contribute programming code to the greater good. But in today's real world, open source minds and corporate technology giants are finding they need each other to survive and thrive, says Bob Sutor, IBM vice president of Open Standards and Open Source.

Open-source collaboration software vendor Zimbra is adopting an intriguing approach to taking on proprietary titans like Microsoft and Google, using its channel partners as its competitive muscle. The aim is for Zimbra to step completely out of directly selling the commercial versions of its products so the startup can focus fully on software development and support, according to Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra's ebullient cofounder and chief executive officer.

With the launch of the PlayStation 3, the fate of one of the world’s best-known brands, Sony, hangs in the balance. Although the technology, and the price tag, of the new system will likely lead to it moving at least partially it into the realm of home theater enthusiasts rather than just gaming enthusiasts wanting the latest game system, presently Sony is staking much of its future on that market. For true security, it needs a complete digital ecosystem, and for that, it needs to change its PC strategy.

SugarCRM has become the latest open source vendor to simplify the installation and support of a full software stack comprising its own CRM application and other third party offerings. Thursday, the company unveiled Sugar FastStack, a service to set up and support a stack of its Sugar Professional or Enterprise product.

Advanced Micro Devices heeft onlangs nieuwe display drivers voor Linux uitgebracht. Ze hebben versienummer 8.31.5 meegegeven, kunnen hun werk doen op alle kaarten vanaf de Radeon 9500. Anders dan dat we van ATi gewend waren is er nu slechts één download, die geschikt zijn voor zowel een 32-bits als een 64-bits omgeving. De downloadgrootte daarentegen is gegroeid naar zo'n 55MB.

Bug stamp-out list for November 17, 2006

As the CEO of open source database company MySQL AB, Marten Mickos has overseen enormous growth in his company. Some even say the plucky MySQL is starting to threaten industry heavyweight Oracle, though that contest is still very much David and Goliath. At the very least, MySQL, as a major building block of the LAMP stack, earns bragging rights as the leading open source database.

"I'm not buying a new PC, not yet," said the angry NewsWireless reader. "I need a new computer, and I found one online - but it comes with Windows Vista! I don't want that!" Sadly, it seem that in their enthusiasm to be seen to be as far up on Microsoft's beautiful unique marketing as possible, several online PC stores have been advertising "With Windows Vista!" for their computers. This is, to put it gently, an exaggeration.

Nokia's Network Business Group has selected Red Hat Linux as the primary OS for its carrier-grade server platforms, Red Hat reports. Nokia will integrate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on multiple FlexiPlatform products this year, with Red Hat providing onsite consulting, support, certification, and training services.

Application performance guru Kirk Pepperdine (pictured) added his two cents to the ongoing Web discussions about Sun's announcement last week that it is open sourcing its implementation of Java. He pinpoints the Classpath exception as being the key valve that "leaves business free to build upon yet protects the underlying implementation."

If you've got Java-support in your browser, you can try out several free operating systems at Free OS Zoo. This is an experimental feature, using a system called FLOZ.

[The response-time is slow, but it is still cool to try. - Scott]

Intellectual Property is a term widely abused in the software industry by firms such as Microsoft and SCO using it to scare people into not using certain products in favor of their own. This disparaging tactic has even been given a name: Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD). It seems that anyone nowadays can make bold, unsubstantiated claims of IP infringement without actually having any proof simply to hurt another products reputation and destroy healthy competition. In this article, we will explore what intellectual property is and why every computer user should care when unreputable companies abuse legal systems in order to gain an unfair business advantage.

Feisty Fawn, aka Ubuntu 7.04, is scheduled for release on Apr. 19, 2007. According to Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu's founder, "The main themes for feature development in this release will be improvements to hardware support in the laptop, desktop and high-end server market, and aggressive adoption of emerging desktop technologies. Ubuntu's Feisty release will put the spotlight on multimedia enablement and desktop effects."

An Austin, Tex., network management company has set out to build an open-source community around network inventory management tools. This week at the Gartner Enterprise Networking Summit, AlterPoint, Inc. unveiled ZipTie, an open-source project that the company said it will seed with some foundational technology from its DeviceAuthority network management product, while continuing to sell its more advanced management tools under commercial licences.

South Africa native and current London resident Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical Ltd. and the Ubuntu Linux distribution, told DesktopLinux.com Friday in an interview that widespread adoption of Linux on the desktop -- so long-awaited by many people -- "is just a matter of time, IMO."

Michael Tiemann objects to the distinction between "open" and "free" software we suggested in the article entitled 'Take your covenant and shove it', Samba tells Novell.