Showing headlines posted by dcparris

Boingo Wireless becomes the latest firm to use open source to bypass licensing complexity for partners: When you hear open source, you think about software that has broad interest for either horizontal (think Firefox for everyone) or large niche (think Gimp for photo editing) communities. Many well-known open-source projects involve hundreds of regular developers, some who are employees of firms like HP and IBM, and thousands of occasional projects. Boingo Wireless’s release of the Boingo Embedded Wi-Fi Toolkit has little to do with projects like Firefox or Gimp, although the principles of implicit broad use licensing without advance separate permission and sharing of revisions in the codebase are what makes Boingo’s new effort open source. The software will be available at Sourceforge by the end of May.

Open-source stacks are poised to shake up the world of government security certifications, such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Federal Information Processing Standard 140-2 and the National Information Assurance Partnership’s Common Criteria ratings.

InQub Ltd offers personal remote KDE desktops on Kubuntu using NoMachine's NX technology for bandwidth savings and connection encryption for a small monthly charge. Each account is comes with 1 GB of home directory storage and is customisable by the respective user. This service represents an interesting approach of working with KDE without installation and maintenance issues, especially for GNU/Linux newbies and users travelling a lot. Users can get a week's free trial of the service.

It's hard to imagine that Sony, a company that continues to actively block unlicensed applications on the PSP, will welcome the homebrew community with open arms when it ushers in the PlayStation 3. But, according SCE network system development manager Izumi Kawanishi, the console will ship with a built-in Linux OS, complete with compilers and other tools.

[Not to sound cynical or anything, but just be on the lookout for rootkits... - dcparris]

At JavaOne, CEO Jonathan Schwartz and Senior VP Rich Green say they will look to the community to determine how best to open-source Java.

[Now I can breath a little easier. Just make sure it's an FSF-approved license so they can start focusing on other important projects. - dcparris]

RMI activation daemon and persistent naming service tools are now included. Print service discovery, single document print jobs and support for client-formatted print data through CUPS has been added. Support for custom mouse cursors, system clipboard and selection access has been implemented.

Nokia says it will offer an upgrade for its 770 Internet tablet that will bring better memory performance, VOIP capabilities and a pre-installed Google Talk client.

TimeSys says its online support service for embedded Linux developers now supports the latest multi-threaded processors from MIPS Technologies. Initial LinuxLink support for MIPS's 34K core family is based on Linux 2.6.15, with a bump up to 2.6.16 planned this month, TimeSys says.

SAN FRANCISCO, JAVAONE(SM) CONFERENCE, May 16 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW), the creator and leading advocate of Java(TM) technology, today announced that Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) 5 is now available for redistribution by GNU/Linux and OpenSolaris(SM) operating system distributors under the new Operating System Distributor's License for Java (also known as the "Distro License for Java" or DLJ).

[So why am I still skeptical? - dcparris]

Sometimes, you can't get what you want. That's the point Robin "Roblimo" Miller makes in his pained confession at NewsForge, that when it comes to the video production that makes up 10 percent of his work time, it's best done using Camtasia, a proprietary Windows-only program. Argh!

The existence of legal systems without robust enforcement of copyright law, in countries where software development is a highly robust enterprise, is a serious threat to the free software model.

[Here's an interesting perspective on copyright and FOSS at the international level. - dcparris]

As Cyber Cynic Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols predicted, someone has come up with a way to get Microsoft Office to read and write the open-standard Open Document Format. Would you believe a Microsoft lapdog organization is whining about how unfair this is to Microsoft?

A Dow Jones Newswires reporter took a shot at switching from Windows to Linux on a Sony Vaio machine, and found he could do some things much better than others.

Ansoft Corporation has released Nexxim v3 and Ansoft Designer v3 for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux v.3 and Sun Solaris 8 and 9 operating systems. Nexxim is the company's circuit simulation software for high-performance IC design and signal-integrity analysis. Ansoft Designer provides an integrated schematic and design management front-end for complex analogue, RF and mixed-signal applications.

A new model for sustainably implementing computer laboratories in underprivileged schools is being piloted by Tuxlabs, a division of the Shuttleworth Foundation. Tuxlabs has partnered with a Sowetan entrepreneur, who will sell services in a school's open source laboratory to the community once the school day ends.

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., May 15 /PRNewswire/ -- Fortify Software Inc., a leading provider of security products that help companies identify, manage and remediate software vulnerabilities to mitigate enterprise security risk, today announced that Fortify has joined the FindBugs project as a sponsor, and is helping to expand the functionality of the open source tool, which has had over 200,000 downloads.

Those outside the inner circle of "Free Software" digerati seem only ever to focus on the "free" component, mistaking it for software that is provided with no moolah changing hands.

Adds Dozens of New Worldwide Partners in Q2

Midsize Enterprises to Benefit From Automated Application Recovery Capabilities

The new program may be more germane to IT professionals at small and mid-size businesses, suggested Adam Braunstein, an analyst at Robert Frances Group. Most large companies are already involved in some open source projects, so the ground-level questions have been answered.