Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

It was a short presentation that focused dryly on "opportunities" for open source in something he called the "service-driven data center." But when he turned to the need for Linux to inter-operate with Windows in this service-driven data center, Novell's chief executive Ron Hovsepian delivered an apology - of sorts - for his company's controversial marriage to Microsoft in 2006. Speaking at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), Hovsepian said he could have done a "better job" of communicating about the deal and suggested he got caught up in thinking about customers, instead of the perception and possible fallout from dealing with Microsoft.

Just two days before Microsoft and Novell signed a controversial deal in 2006, the two sides still hadn't figured out a way to make peace over Linux without violating the licensing terms that govern the open-source operating system. The terms of the GNU General Public License made it tough for Microsoft to get paid a royalty for each copy of Linux that Novell sold and also made it tough for Microsoft to offer patent protection to Novell without giving it to all users of Linux. But, just hours before it hoped to announce a deal, Microsoft workers thought up an end-run around the provision. Instead of protecting Novell, Microsoft hit on the idea of offering legal protection to Novell's customers.

Back when I worked in the Network Operations department at one of my previous jobs, we used to chuckle when a customer would call us reporting that “the Internet is down.” Now, I realize that there are otherwise intelligent computer users out there who don't understand why that might cause a technician to chuckle, and I'm not trying to make fun of them. But you've got to know that help desks get this type of trouble report more frequently than they should. I've known quite a few hardware technicians or software developers who were very good at what they did, but who didn't have the first clue as to how to diagnose a network problem. To them, the Internet, and networking in general, was just “Pure Freaking Magic”. Actually, it is magic, but it's not a magic that we can't learn to troubleshoot. So, let's begin.

Yow to create symbolic links from the command line. Making shortcuts to the files you use most can make your life easier.

Document Freedom Day (DFD) is a global grassroots effort to promote and build awareness of the importance of free document formats in particular and open standards in general. If you have ever received a document from a friend that your software could not open, then you know the frustration of proprietary formats. Document Freedom Day promotes open formats so that users can freely exchange their data no matter what software program they choose to use. Complete interoperability is the ultimate goal of those who support open standards.

A few months ago, we made a legislative attempt (zh_TW) to ask Taiwanese government in their procurement plans to prioritize machines supporting 0-keypress usb-key booting. It was not about forcing the government officials to use Linux on usb keys. It was not about forcing them to use Linux at all. It was a humble request that there be a way to set up the BIOS so that usb keys can be the first boot device without user intervention just like cdroms or floppies have always been, that these machines have a useful second life as donations to remote villages when they finish their services in the government. Microsoft adamantly objected (zh_TW), giving misleading arguments that distort the truth. Our attempt failed, but it revealed that MS is really afraid of usb-booting.

The article is in German, but here's a computer translation: A majority of the delegates felt the regulation suggested by the European Commission only as genuflection before the large software producers, who would have achieved to improve their market position. A legal jungle would have developed. Experts like Richard Stallman warned at that time: "By such software patents the writing of a program becomes so dangerous, as if you would go over a mine field." Over many months the delegates, under it responsible the Austrian Green to EH Lichtenberger, belonged expert and also patent advocate for instance from IBM and Siemens. Finally they came in the end that by the introduction of the patents smaller software developers would be clearly disadvantaged. Because many of them could their developments the licenses not afford and would have ever more limit.

Altera, the world’s second-best-known FPGA company, has struck a deal with Wind River Systems, the world’s second-best-known embedded-software company, to port Linux to Altera’s NIOS II processor. And since NIOS is free, you’ve got yourself a free 32-bit microprocessor capable of running a genuine full-on multitasking Linux operating system. Naturally, there’s a catch. In fact, there are two. First off, NIOS is free only if you’re already using Altera’s FPGA chips (more on this later). Second, the Linux itself isn’t free; Wind River charges a significant amount of money for access to the software, and even more money for annual support. That’s right – the microprocessor is free but the open-source software costs money. One wonders how such a paradox came to be.

opensourcereleasefeed has a interview with Fred Trotter on CCHIT certification/HIMSS and the new Health IT landscape with respect to Free/Open Source: "If you care about FOSS generally, I need you to show up at the HIMSS meeting. If you care about FOSS in Health IT, it is especially important that you be there. I believe that FOSS is the only real hope for untangling the mess that is Health IT. If you find any of these arguments compelling, show up. If you cannot show up, call in. If you cannot call in, then comment on the openhealth mailing list. HIMSS has consistently refused to consider FOSS players as real constituents. They are essentially a proprietary vendor lobby on par with the Business Software Alliance. My blog post points to some very specific examples of this....I can tell you that in Health IT, FOSS is the future."

This week, I present two Studio Dave mainstays, the 64 Studio media-optimized Linux distribution and the Ardour digital audio workstation (DAW), both of which are in the late stages of development toward milestone releases. I invite my readers to take a look at what's coming our way in 64 Studio 3.0 and Ardour3. The obligatory warnings: please note that this software is in a pre-release state. Testers are welcome, but don't expect the stability or finished feature set of a final release. You will be using the software at your own risk.

The Eclipse Foundation will soon be unwrapping the first release of Swordfish, an open source Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) run-time framework that's taking aim at the market's many proprietary approaches to SOA. Swordfish enterprise service bus (ESB) is built on existing standards like OSGi, JBI, and SOAP with the goal of creating a open, industrial-strength platform for SOA projects.

Back in February we talked about the work that David Airlie is doing to rewrite the ATI Radeon driver for Mesa. Soon it now looks like this rewritten code may land in the mainline Mesa code-base once a few more items are addressed...

A new survey out from the Internet Society (ISOC) and reported by Network World would have you believe there is no business case for the move to IPv6. And, despite the flaws in the survey (as clearly pointed out by a number of readers in a variety of places, both on Network World’s site and Slashdot), I would argue that they are right.

The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several. The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” But it makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem. Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.

[Not directly FOSS related, but a truly fantastic read in light of our discussions on (the quality of) journalism that we had in the forums recently. -- Sander]

As Mark Shuttleworth preps a new "Karmic Koala" Ubuntu distro suited to life with its head in the Amazon clouds, Thorsten von Eicken has lent a helping hand. Von Eicken is the CTO and co-founder of RightScale, a Santa Barbara, California outfit offering what it calls "a fully automated cloud-management platform." In other words, it helps you deploy and run your server apps on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and other so-called infrastructure clouds from companies such as Flexiscale and GoGrid.

A possible IBM acquisition of Sun Microsystems Inc. might have its good points. But users and analysts also have concerns that can be summed up in two words: uncertainty and fear. Sun may be a diminished company these days, but it remains an influential one. Through its open-source products and the massive development communities that have been built up around them, Java and MySQL in particular, Sun has a pull that rivals those of companies with far larger and healthier balance sheets. But with the reported acquisition talks between IBM and Sun, there are questions about what IBM might do with Sun's technologies, especially its open-source ones. For instance, the potential deal is getting mixed reviews from Java users.

Once you have a database set up, sooner or later you will want to edit its tables or add a new record. You have four ways to do so. If you created a database using an existing OpenOffice.org Calc or MS Excel spreadsheet, you must edit the spreadsheet itself—in Base, the database will open read-only, and you will be unable to edit it. For other databases, you have three choices: editing the tables directly, using the form wizard to create a form or using the design view to create a form. Whichever way you create a form, you can then use it as a more user-friendly way to edit your database.

This afternoon AMD has released the Catalyst 9.3 driver for Windows along with ADL, or the AMD Display Library. The AMD Display Library is a cross-platform library that provides a single SDK to access graphics hardware information. In the past AMD has provided a few SDKs for obtaining this information on Windows, but this is the first time we are seeing such support on Linux.

Fresh from the disappointment of failing to deliver Australia's first Android phone, Kogan has announced a range of netbooks using the same brand name. The Agora Netbooks start at $A499, and like many such devices use an Atom CPU, in this case the 1.60GHz N270. Another interesting point is Kogan's choice of operating system: the Ubuntu-based gOS. If gOS isn't to your taste, support is available for those wishing to install a different operating system. According to Kogan officials, Ubuntu Netbook Remix, KDE4, Windows XP and Windows 7 all work "very well" on the Agora Netbook.

Free and open source software continues to gain traction in the South African government with more than 90 percent of CIOs and IT managers in favour of using OSS in their departments. And Arno Webb, head of the State IT Agency's (Sita) open source programme, says that while open source migrations have been slower and not as widespread as originally hoped, government is now firmly on a path to wider open source use. We speak to Webb to gauge government's open source progress.