Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The MS/Linux patent wars begin . . . By agreeing to license Microsoft's intellectual property, SuSE distributor Novell has created a potentially fatal division in what's called F/OSS, the Free/Open Source Software movement. What has Novell done, and why is it so potentially damaging?

What should the Linux desktop of 2007 and beyond be like? That's what the OSDL wants to know in its latest Linux Client Survey, which runs from now until Dec. 1. The results will help the OSDL's Desktop Working Group work on the areas of development that are critical to users.

When I'm not hacking or writing about hacking, I'm brewing beer. When I say I'm brewing beer, I don't mean that I'm taking some syrupy stuff and adding it to boiling water and hoping for the best. I mean I'm buying various types of grains, various types of hops, some yeast, and potentially some other additives to help balance my brewing water or the pH levels at some point in my brewing process. Now, you can't go throwing all of this stuff together in random quantities and expect to hit your target flavor or style of beer. You need a recipe. This is where QBrew comes in. QBrew is an open source application to aid you in developing a recipe for home brewed beer.

[Now that is my kind of Open Source Software! Free Beer..get it? ;-) - Scott]

Asterisk, the leading open source telephony platform, is flourishing and AstriCon – the annual Asterisk conference and exhibition – has become the place to learn about it. Developers, resellers, IT managers and contact center managers grabbed their ten gallon hats and headed to Dallas to learn or to showcase their own Asterisk innovations. There were sessions for all levels, novice to expert, and intimate networking opportunities to meet a literal “who’s who” of open source telephony.

Virtualisation slashes development timesOne of the oft-quoted advantages of virtualisation is the re-use of existing server resources, a capability which need not just apply to servers working in a production environment.

With Firefox 2.0 out the door last week, Mozilla is turning its attention to version 3.0, with a goal to deliver the new browser about this time next year. Among the features Mozilla wants for Firefox 3.0 is Places, the revamped bookmark tool that was dropped from 2.0 development in April. "We definitely didn't want to add [Places] until it was ready for prime time," says Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's director of engineering

The Cape IT Initiative (CITI) are launching their latest new business acceleration initiative, VeloCITI. The idea is to select IT businesses with innovative and sustainable ideas and provide the support to get the companies up and running.

And so, last week, “Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc. ... announced a set of broad business and technical collaboration agreements to build, market and support a series of new solutions to make Novell and Microsoft products work better together. The two companies also announced an agreement to provide each other’s customers with patent coverage for their respective products. These agreements will be in place until at least 2012”. I doubt it's as simple as that.

Sound eXchange (SoX) is a command-line sound sample translator. This Swiss Army knife of sound tools can be used to convert file formats of your audio files, and to apply sound effects such as echo, fade-in/out, and chorus to jazz up your music with just a few keystrokes.

Fighting fragmentationThe biggest obstacle in Java's path to becoming the dominant software architecture for mobile phones has been its fragmentation - both in terms of technical features and the various licensing schemes adopted by its early exponents. The past two years have seen the handset makers and large operators increasingly taking the steering wheel of the mobile Java movement, seeking to create unified platforms and work around the confusion caused by Sun's halfhearted open source approach.

The Beta sessions of the first South African LPI level 3 exams will be taking place in early December in Joburg and Cape Town. The exams can be written free of charge and registration is open to anyone with an LPI level 1 certification.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Work on porting kdegames applications to SVG and other general improvements continues at a fast pace. Work continues on video support in KPhotoAlbum. Krita gets a new star shape tool. Okular gets support for freehand ink overlays in presentation mode. Kate gets syntax highlighting support for ActionScript and RapidQ code. Mailody continues to mature as an alternative email client. Strigi refactors to allow searching within multiple simultaneous indexes, with preliminary interoperability with Akonadi on the horizon.

NetBSD 3.1 has been released: "The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that version 3.1 of the NetBSD operating system is now available in both source and binary form. NetBSD is a general-purpose Open Source operating system that provides interfaces for running a wide range of applications on a big number of different hardware platforms, all from one source tree. NetBSD 3.1 contains many bug fixes, security updates, new drivers and new features like support for Xen3 DomU."

Dell gets honest about its support for the Linux Desktop, A new trendy Linux-based Smartphone is on the way, then we get all excited about the new version of Amarok and talk the heck out of Novell and Microsoft’s new partnership. THEN!..We interview one of the guys from TVease and talk about their awesome Linux based Media center, follow that up with a listener question and so much MORE!

We've known that a major part of the Microsoft/Novell Linux co-operation agreement was about patents. What we didn't know, however, was what technologies would be covered, and what ones wouldn't, by the agreement. Now, thanks to Jason Matusow, Microsoft's director of corporate standards, we now know what's what.

For weeks the rumor mill has been full of guesses about what Oracle's big Linux news, if any, might be. None of them, however, were correct. In the end, Oracle has announced a competing support program for Red Hat Linux. It will be most interesting to see how things will evolve from here. At least nobody is complaining anymore that you can't get support for Linux. Oracle's program is easy to understand: Oracle starts with Red Hat Linux, removes Red Hat trademarks, and then adds Linux bug fixes... Every time Red Hat distributes a new version we will resynchronize with their code. All we add are bug fixes, which are immediately available to Red Hat and the rest of the community.

While gNewSense enjoys its initial introduction as a fully free as in freedom distribution, it seems at the same time an existing GNU/Linux distribution has turned to slavery. Excuse me a moment, while I remove the metaphorical knife from my back before continuing. Never before has the contrast between software freedom and intellectual slavery been more clear thanks to the proud efforts of gNewSense, and the craven ones of Novell.

Web 2.0 words -- from ajax to wiki

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says competing Linux vendors such as Red Hat and Oracle have strong incentives to follow Novell's initiative in reaching a patent liability settlement with Microsoft.

..The two companies also announced an agreement to provide each other's customers with patent coverage for their respective products. These agreements will be in place until at least 2012. Under this new model, customers will realize unprecedented choice and flexibility through improved interoperability and manageability between Windows and Linux.

[Here is your chance to tell Novell what you think of their deal with the devil. - Scott]