Showing headlines posted by dcparris

Novell has been polling the public for the last month to find out what Windows-only applications, if ported to Linux, would increase the likelihood that people would switch to Linux. CoolSolutions site editor Scott Morris reported on Wednesday that more than 10,000 votes have been counted since the first week of January.

LinuxCertified has announced its next "Linux Fundamentals" course. The two-day introduction to Linux will broaden attendees horizons with a detailed overview of the operating system.

Last year, Dreamworks produced Madagascar, an entertaining and amazing cartoon in which some funny animals escape from a New York City zoo and end up in Africa. The special effects we all could admire in those movies had something in common. They were made by using Linux.

The KDE project Tuesday announced immediate availability of KDE 3.5.1 -- a maintenance release for the latest generation of the popular free Linux/Unix desktop. The new offering provides corrections of problems, in addition to enhanced support for existing translations and new translations, the project said.

With a name like LinuxChix, you might almost think this is a flippant group. It isn't. On the contrary, its taking on the very serious job of empowering women in technology - and extending their participation - in the world of Free/Libre and Open Source Software.

[Ed: Good intro to LinuxChix Africa. I was disappointed, however, that they didn't mention any connection to the orginal Linux Chix. - dcparris]

Ken Starks is a man with a mission: He wants to see Linux succeed on the desktop. To that end, Starks has been beating the drum for Linux on his Lobby4Linux Web site the past year or so. More recently, he has launched something called The Austin Project, which has since been renamed to Linux4Austin. The project aims to bring desktop Linux to the attention of the masses with a radio ad campaign.

RALEIGH – Red Hat is lending its support to the One Laptop Per Child Initiative, an effort to provide $100 laptops to students in developing nations and emerging markets.

The Free Standards Group (FSG), a not-for-profit organization that develops and promotes open source software standards, today announced Debian founder Ian Murdock has been appointed its chief technology officer and elected chair of the Linux Standard Base workgroup. As founder of Debian -- one of the most successful open source projects in history -- and commercial custom Linux platform provider Progeny, Murdock brings unmatched experience building open source communities, driving technical consensus and solving Linux distribution challenges. His experience will immediately enhance the open standards initiatives of the Free Standards Group and the Linux Standard Base.

The state has appointed a new CIO and made it clear that his job will be to forge ahead with implementing the controversial OpenDocument format.

When Massachusetts CIO Peter Quinn resigned his post in December, citing political turmoil that threatened to derail the state’s adoption of an open-standards format for software, the behind-the-scenes battle between open-standards advocates and proprietary vendors went public. On one side sits Microsoft Corp. On the other side are open-standards advocates and vendors. They’re fighting for fair competition that doesn’t give Microsoft undue advantage because of what critics charge are the company’s long-standing relationships with most state governments.

[Ed: The real lesson here is for public officials to stand firm. Be sure to cover your bases, but definitely stand firm. - dcparris]

Google is preparing its own distribution of Linux for the desktop, in a possible bid to take on Microsoft in its core business - desktop software. A version of the increasingly popular Ubuntu desktop Linux distribution, based on Debian and the Gnome desktop, it is known internally as 'Goobuntu'.

Open source is a communist regime imposed upon us by the Free Software Foundation and its evil minions. Firefox is a load of rubbish that lied its way to its current market share. <b>Jason Norwood-Young</b> takes issue with the latest blogging fad – telling the world that open source is the root of all evil.

[Ed: I am more than familiar with the old "GPL = Communism" line. We know that Proprietary licenses come much closer to that description. It was the Firefox myths that blew me away. Did you know Firefox is supposed to be "bug free"? - dcparris]

An annual survey of 300 futurists, academics and business people from 28 countries by the Global Future Forum has found that future technology needs answers to ethical questions.

LinuxAsia 2006, Asia s premier open source conference and exposition, will be held in New Delhi on February 8-10, 2006. The event is of particular interest to the India market as open source solutions are being built on all of India's major languages and are cost-effectively meeting a broad range of economic and social needs.

Motion Picture Association of America admits to copying film without permission

[Ed: We knew the MPAA was a brood of vipers! Where's good 'ol John the Baptist when you need him? - dcparris]

New Zealand and Australia are lagging behind Europe and North America in the adoption of open source software (OSS), according to a report from research firm Forrester. However, local OSS experts believe Forrester’s figures understate the true picture.

An estimated 1,000 patents spanning software, hardware and networking are destined to be sold to the highest bidder in San Francisco by a merchant bank this spring. Ocean Tomo is hosting the first in a series of two planned patent auctions this year, in a move the company believes will help - not hurt - innovation in IT.

Mozilla has announced that over 20 million internet users have downloaded the Firefox web browser since the release of version 1.5 on 29 November last year. The company claims to have seen strong demand for the browser, with " hundreds of thousands" of people downloading the new version of Firefox every day since its release.

Andrew Tridgell was named this week as the winner of the annual Free Software Foundation award for his work as originator and developer of the Microsoft-replacing Samba project as well as his development of rsync.

The Royal Bank of Scotland Group is moving its content management systems over to the open source application server Zope.