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Developing with Legacy Systems Part 2. The most common applications sector where the integration of long-standing legacy applications is a still vital requirement is, of course, the broad reaches of the financial services community. When such an application has established itself and proved not just its capabilities but its reliability and overall efficiency to the business those businesses are loath to change it. In the finance market, "if it ain't broke don't fix it" is still a good maxim where changing an application, let alone conducting a rip and replace exercise just because there is a newer alternative, carries with it the significant risks that any change can induce.

In a few years time, it will be impossible to study the history of home computers since everything at the time was proprietary; both in terms of the physical hardware, and all the software that ran upon it since most of it is encumbered by software “protection” to prevent copying.

The tech giant on Wednesday reaffirmed its commitment to the open source developer community, in the wake of Red Hat's Fedora Legacy Project disbanding. In the past month, Novell's Open Suse supplanted Ubuntu as the No. 1 Linux choice, according to the download access-tracking DistroWatch.com. Fedora? It fell to No. 3.

Bug stamp-out list for January 5, 2007

Open source database company MySQL has decided to stick to the current General Public Licence (GPL) rather than move to an upcoming revision, pending broader industry acceptance. MySQL, one of the most successful commercial ventures to use the open source GPL, has modified its licence terms from "version 2 or later" to "version 2" only, according to Kaj Arno, the company's vice president of community.

Streamtuner is a point-and-click GUI browser for the thousands of Internet radio streams available today. It lets you play streams and manage your favorites in a single window -- like a Linux tuner for Internet radio.

Jeff Garzik noted that the hardware documentation for the Promise SX4 chipset is being opened up and therefor the sata_sx4 driver is a good candidate for improvements,"I would like to take this opportunity to point hackers looking for a project at this hardware. The Promise SX4 is pretty neat, and it needs more attention than I can give, to reach its full potential." He notes that it is an older chipset that's probably not sold anymore, that the ATA programming interface is similar to that in the sata_promise driver, and that it contains a fully programmable on board DIMM and on board RAID5 XOR. Jeff went on to explain:"A key problem is that, under Linux, sata_sx4 cannot fully exploit the RAID-centric power of this hardware by driving the hardware in'dumb ATA mode' as it does.

A 64-bit live CD version of Slackware-based Bluewhite64 Linux 11.0 was released this week by its project team, featuring a 2.6.17 kernel optimized for SMP and the KDE 3.5.4 desktop. Version 11.0 was released as a regular installation CD last October.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project will showcase its self-powered, low-cost, XO laptop computer at the 2007 Computer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week. The project aims to distribute -- free of charge -- millions of Linux-based laptops to needy children around the world.

Matt Asay, formerly the man in charge of Novell's Linux and open-source strategy, thinks that Novell may be getting ready to buy up Altiris or XenSource sometime soon. In his blog, AC/OS, Asay wrote on Jan. 3 that "Word on the street is that the company has $200M or so burning a hole in its pocket, with Altiris and XenSource as potential acquisition candidates."

Nearly half of all enterprises will be running mission-critical business applications on Linux in five years' time. That's according to survey of IT directors, VPs and CIOs carried out by Saugatuck Research, which questioned 133 businesses worldwide. The company predicts a steep rise: only 18 percent of businesses will be using Linux in business-critical roles by the end of 2007.

The KDE community is getting ready to set a major milestone for the free desktop with the upcoming release of KDE 4. This will mark a new level of user experience, technical excellence in the framework and opportunities for free software on the desktop. The KDE contributors conference, which is part of Akademy, the world summit of the KDE community, will be the place to present the newest developments, long-term strategies or interesting input from the surrounding communities, projects and societies. Be part of it, present your thoughts, ideas and work at Akademy 2007 in Glasgow, Scotland.

With the latest release of its Web browser in June, Opera Software introduced widgets -- small Web applications that run in their own windows on the desktop. Now the company is turning to programming contests to promote their creation.

A couple weeks back I asked a friend, Song Kewei at the OSS Promotion Union , to tell me who he thought the top 10 Open Source professionals in China were. He gave me a list, which I will keep confidential, and from this list I hope to begin giving readers an idea of what type of people are the champions of the Open Source Community in China.

Exploits and unpatched critical vulnerabilities put the users of Internet Explorer at risk 77 percent of the time last year, according to the latest number crunching by Brian Krebs of the Washington Post's Security Fix blog.

In this guest op-ed piece, Carla Schroder explains how 2006 was the Year of Linux. Really, no kidding.

In a brand new series of People Behind KDE we meet a coder from the KDE heartland, Germany who enables us to communicate with the global developer community through Konversation. Someone who is not satisfied with a static terminal window, tonight's star of People Behind KDE is Eike Hein.

The final version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.0 will ship next month, confirmed the software company, which continues to dismiss suggestions that Oracle is stealing its Linux customers by offering lower support costs. Red Hat Enterprise OS Marketing Manager Nick Carr said that the proposed schedule for a downloadable version of RHEL 5.0 is looking good for mid-to-late February, but added that OEM partners may not start to put the operating system onto new servers until later.

Wind River Systems, which deals in Device Software Optimization (DSO), has announced that suppliers of embedded computer technology Kontron has joined its partner program as a strategic partner and will bundle Wind River's Carrier-Grade Linux with Kontron's next generation of Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture (ATCA), MicroTCA and Advanced Mezzanine Card (AMC) platforms.

In 2005, two former Merrill Lynch techies, young and living large in New York City, left their jobs to start a company based on their favorite pastime: playing with yo-yos. YoYoNation is more than just an online retailer -- it is a community for all things yo-yo, with a mission to make New York the "center of the yo-yo universe." This particular universe runs on open source software.