Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Two hot issues are making the rounds. First, Debian and Firefox are having a spat, and the end result may be that Debian will distribute Firefox under a different name. Second, the war betwen Linus Torvalds and other Kernel developers and the Free Software Foundation over GPLv3 is continuing, with Torvalds saying he's fed up with the FSF. Here is my take on both, and related issues.

The KDE contributors conference part of Akademy 2006 in Dublin kicked off Saturday morning bright and early, much to the dismay of those who had been out late the evening before at the registration desk, conveniently located in a pub.

The emergence of the Internet has given creators the opportunity to collaborate in ways that have never before been available. Using the Internet, collaborators can edit documents in real time, discuss those changes with other collaborators and readers around the world, and with a single click distribute the end result to countless readers. But how does one of these collaborators enforce rights in the resulting works?

Sun Microsystems, Inc., hosted an open source education symposium, spotlighting more accessible education resources, featuring the Open Source Solaris Operating System. The discussion focused on collaboration and community, in an effort to rethink traditional education models.

IBM swung a haymaker at SCO on Sept. 25. The corporate giant asked the U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City, Utah for summary judgment against all of SCO's claims. The SCO vs. IBM case is over three years old. Although The SCO Group Inc. has had little success in persuading the court or the buying public that IBM did indeed take SCO's Unix intellectual property and place it within Linux, the company has stayed its course.

Software as a service (SaaS) has been one of the most widely talked about topics in IT circles over the last few years for a number of reasons. Rightly, one of these reasons has been the benefits SaaS can deliver to businesses; another has been the hard work of some of the leading proponents of this delivery model in getting the message out there.

Non-patentable shared "open energy technology" has the potential to have a profound impact on the reduction of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, in the same way that open source software has changed computers and the Internet.

Platform Computing has introduced Platform Open Cluster Stack (OCS), a modular and hybrid stack that integrates open source and commercial software into one cluster operating environment.

There's no shortage of messaging and collaboration suites trying to unseat Microsoft Exchange, but many of the suites are still playing catch-up with Microsoft in terms of features. Zimbra, on the other hand, seems to be on par with Exchange in many ways -- and ahead of Exchange for hosting providers and in collaboration features.

Claiming that, from an open source standpoint, things haven't changed with its recently acquired Berkeley open source embedded database, Oracle Corp is now releasing its next version under the same licenses.

Both Linux and Solaris Support Available

With arguments about changes to the GNU General Public License (GPL) still sizzling, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has released a discussion draft of the new version of the GNU Free Documentation License (FDL). Many of the changes to the FDL mirror those to the GPL, including increased clarity of language and changes in wording to make internationalization clearer. In addition, the draft expands the license to make it suitable for audio and video, defines fair use, and introduces the Simpler Free Documentation License (SFDL), which is presented as a more straightforward alternative to the FDL. However, it seems questionable whether these changes will be enough to silence previous criticisms.

Voice recognition has been a dream of many for the last 10 years. It's an illusive goal because interpreting speech is very complicated and takes a lot of computing power. Rob Reilly reviews one Linux application trying to meet the challange.

Jeremy Utley has announced the release of Cross Linux From Scratch (CLFS) 1.0.0, a book that teaches how to make a cross-compiler and the necessary tools to build a basic system on a different architecture: "The CLFS Development team is pleased to announce the final release of CLFS 1.0.0, code-name 'Bender'. This release features Glibc 2.4, GCC 4.1.1, Binutils 2.17, and supports the x86, x86-64, SPARC, PowerPC, PPC64, MIPS, MIPS64, and Alpha, including multilib on those architectures that support it. Cross-building is also supported, even from non-Linux host systems such as Solaris, *BSD, and OS X."

The Metasploit Project is one of the most popular penetration testing suites available. If you're responsible for the security of networked systems, you'll want to become familiar with Metasploit Framework, so you can test your client PCs before someone with malicious intent does it for you. I'll walk you through an example exploit of a Windows XP system to show you how effortlessly Metasploit can penetrate remote systems.

The surest way to beat the competition is to start fast and stay ahead. That strategy made Taleo a 2006 Enterprise All-Star Award winner for the virtualized application infrastructure it completed in June 2005.

The German unit of French server maker Bull said this week that it would be offering Xandros Server on its servers. Bull will also support the desktop variant of Xandros, called Xandros Desktop, on the PCs it distributes and supports in Germany.

Since the level of software piracy in Indonesia remains the third highest in the world after Ukraine and China, a senior official says the country should "go open source".

The Free Software Foundation is seeking to counter recent claims of prominent Linux programmers who have argued vehemently against new features in an update of the widely used General Public License.

Red Hat was grilled by Wall Street today on plans its for JBoss after profits took a nose-dive in Q2. Chief executive Matthew Szulik fielded question after question on finances, business and technical tactics for the recently acquired company by an analyst crowd clearly trying to figure out its impact on Red Hat.