Showing headlines posted by tadelste

Dave Rosenberg writes about Monday's National Association of State CIOs’ (NASCIO) annual conference writes: At what point does Microsoft's PR team stop Alan Yates from speaking publicly? Yates, GM, information worker business strategy is hell-bent on making disparaging remarks about open source without facts or statistics to back them up.

"Clearly, it's changing the landscape of the technology industry for better and worse,"

Some groups want to remove intellectual property completely, but Yates said commercial companies such as Linspire produce operating systems based on Linux, the most widely used example of open-source programs. He said such companies stand by their products and provide a balance between the open-source and proprietary sides, a middle ground of sorts

But Yates said government agencies and organizations need to understand the benefits of using open source and balance that against implementation costs. He said they need to understand licensing privileges, indemnification issues and an ecosystem of service providers, among other considerations.

After a series of acquisitions and mergers, auction house Bonhams needed to reconcile four different business management systems. To achieve this, it selected an IBM eServer xSeries solution running Linux, offering reduced administration and maintenance activities and a scalable architecture.

A vulnerability has been identified in VERITAS NetBackup servers and clients, which could be exploited by remote attackers to execute arbitrary commands. This flaw is due to a format string error in the Java authentication service "bpjava-msvc" that does not properly handle a specially crafted "COMMAND_LOGON_TO_MSERVER" command (port 13722), which could be exploited by remote attackers to execute arbitrary commands with root/SYSTEM privileges.

The Apple Power Mac G5 Quad features two 2.5GHz, dual-core PowerPC G5 processors to increase the power at the top of its business range

Last week the OpenOffice.org project turned five. Today the team release the long-awaited OpenOffice.org 2.0 office. For South African users the good news is that this release is immediately available in seven of the country's official 11 languages with the remaining four planned for November.

GNU Bayonne 2 offers a GNU GPL licensed scalable, media independent software environment for development and deployment of telephony solutions for use both with current, and next generation VOIP telephone networks.

In this installment of his FAQ, Mark covers the thinking behind the default Ubuntu brown, and the secret of the naming convention, and other quirks that make Ubuntu what it is.

Yes, yet another Ubuntu release -- this time for the server. But don't expect Ubuntu's track record of runaway success to sway server administrators, though.

A vulnerability has been identified in XMail, which may be exploited by malicious users to obtain elevated privileges. This issue is due to a stack overflow error in the "AddressFromAtPtr" function that does not properly handle an overly long hostname portion of an e-mail address passed to the "-t" command line option, which could be exploited by local attackers to execute arbitrary commands with "root" or "mail" privileges.

Microsoft has launched an attack on existing open source "licensing proliferation" claiming that the system is confusing and unnecessarily challenging for software developers.

Jason Matusow, director of Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative, told vnunet.com that the large number of open source licences currently in use is counterproductive.

The Mozilla Foundation has earned around $30 million from Google for its placement as Firefox's default browser. Funding has helped Mozilla hit the 100 million mark has happened despite some growing pains.

Developers and DBAs are invited to get to grips with the hottest Oracle middleware and databases. Oracle also gets into the developer spirit with blogs and podcasts of the event.

Firefox has been adding new features in an effort to match IE; now, the browser is catching up in a more unfortunate way -- with vulnerabilities. Our own security guru Russ Cooper recently reported in his weekly Security Watch newsletter (sign up here) that the Web is awash with code that can attack Firefox and its Mozilla brethren. There are two fixes: patches and disabling International Domain Name (IDN) support.

A basic introduction to what CUPS is and why you might want to use it rather than LPD.

Camino contributor Samuel Sidler has recently been posting details of checkins to the native Mac OS X browser at the Camino Update weblog.

It's an unlikely matter for the United States and other nations to lock horns over: the administration of names and numbers used to reach Internet sites. But this seemingly trivial function is occupying a lot of time among government representatives traveling from continent to continent. A United Nations body wants to wrest power over these things from their current master, the Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The United States says that with ICANN in charge, things are running just fine (which they aren't). Many people condemn one side or the other for trying to carry out a power grab, or call the engagement a lot of hot air.

Editor's Notes: We believe Sun Microsystems qualifies for the job of recognizing poor governance since they have lived with it for so long. Now, Basheera Khan writes: "Sun Microsystem's chief open source officer Simon Phipps has issued a call for greater governance in the open source world."

Speaking at EuroOSCON, currently underway in Amsterdam, Phipps said: "It's become obvious to me what we are at a turning point in free and open source software, in terms of thinking about licensing, governance and standards."

"Phipps cited poor governance as the greatest vector for disease in open source projects, and described governance as a whole as the overlooked corner of the open source world."

Well Basheera, Simon should know, since his colleagues are experts at running a company into the ground."

Dan Mosedale has announced that nightly builds of Lightning are now available. Details of the builds, which are not yet suitable for day-to-day use, are on the Lightning nightly builds page of the Mozilla Wiki.

Linuxchix Africa and Kasi Open Source Software (KOSS) will conduct a "train-the-trainers" workshop in Johannesburg next week in an effort to reach out to women who have been previously sidelined in open source initiatives.

A new project has been launched by the Free Standards Group in order to promote standardization of desktop Linux distributions. The aim of the standardization is to widen the adoption of Linux as a desktop operating system. The group has launched the LSB Desktop Project, which has been adopted by all the major Linux distributors.

As well as distributors Red Hat, Novell, Mandriva, Linspire, and Xandros, LSB Desktop Project members also include IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel on the hardware side, as well as Adobe Systems, RealNetworks, and Trolltech on the software side.