Showing headlines posted by grouch

The company is called Ohloh, and was named after the first surfboard in Hawaii. Its mission will be to analyze open-source software projects and provide customers with detailed information about them, including how much it would cost to duplicate the project given an average programmer salary of US$55,000 per year. The Linux kernel, for example, clocked in at nearly 4.7 million lines of code, has had 1,434 man-years of coding effort put in so far, and would have cost approximately US$79 million in salaries.

[This is the second story of this startup, and I still don't trust the founders. No reflection on the author of the story, as it is a very good report, but I don't think Ohloh ever read David A. Wheeler's Linux Kernel 2.6: It's Worth More!. I'll trust Mr. Wheeler's well documented analysis long before taking the word of former MS execs. Their undocumented, asserted figure is only about 13% of what Wheeler estimates. Maybe this partially explains the incredibly low quality of MS software; after executives get done dipping in the revenue, the leavings for programmers are 13% of what is needed.-- grouch]

The SCO Group Inc. is appealing a U.S. magistrate's ruling that stripped many of its claims in a $5 billion lawsuit against IBM Corp.

Novell will try to recover from earlier Linux fumbles by releasing major updates on Monday, adding Xen virtualization software to its enterprise server product and glitzy graphics to the desktop counterpart.

In "Last.fm makes Internet music social," Dmitri Popov extols the wonders of Last.fm, a "social" music site that lets users create Internet radio stations that fits their tastes. Last.fm provides a free player for Linux, but if you want to use Last.fm with your favorite Linux player, you'll need the LastFMProxy written by Vidar Madsen.

Despite being on record as disliking public speaking, Mark Shuttleworth was in Dublin last month to give the keynote speech at this year's ApacheCon Europe. His theme was the future direction of open source software (OSS), and the issues developers should focus on to ensure the OSS movement’s continued success.

The Mozilla Foundation is wary of entering into too many sponsorship deals however, as they've learnt from Netscape's experiences.

Many governments and organisations are moving towards open standards and frameworks. To assist users in understanding open standards the International Open Source Network has released FOSS: Open Standards, the latest in its series of "e-Primer" books.

[Free book, foreword by Peter J. Quinn. -- grouch]

Open source start up Pentaho Corp grabbed $8m in venture funding to drive development of its rapidly evolving business intelligence suite.

A doctoral thesis submitted to the University of Zurich in Switzerland has focused on the question of what makes developers of open-source software tick.

The KOffice team today released the second bug-fix release in their 1.5 series. Several crash bugs were fixed, as well as a PowerPC issue in Krita and of course many smaller issues. There are also updated languages packs and a totally new language: Traditional Chinese.

Open source legal expert Eben Moglen's Software Freedom Law Center has given the OpenDocument Format its stamp of approval, declaring the office productivity format free from legal encumbrances.

HP, Blueloop And Omni demonstrate how up to 10 users can share a single linux desktop computer.

This new record beats the previous 2-core HP/Itanium2 and Oracle 10g performance record for Linux by 58 percent. It also beats the previous 2-core HP/Opteron and Microsoft SQL Server performance record and is less expensive by 23 percent.

Jitterbit, Inc. and salesforce.com, an on-demand business services, announced that Jitterbit's open source integration suite is now available through salesforce.com's AppExchange and can integrate directly with Salesforce implementations.

An innovative expert help service is turning heads in cyberspace. Richard Frank caught up with Capetonian co-founder, Helmar Rudolph.

VPSLink, of http://www.vpslink.com, today announced the addition of Gentoo Linux to its VPS product line. Gentoo is now available on all VPSLink hosting plans as a Stage 3 Install. VPSLink is committed to providing cutting edge technology at ultra-competitive prices.

The Smart Package Manager hopes to beat the native package management applications for distributions like Red Hat, SUSE, and Debian at their own game. Still in beta, it has support for most major GNU/Linux package and repository formats, with a modular codebase that hints at further compatibility. Smart introduces many innovative and useful ideas, but its killer feature, with which it purports to excel beyond its counterparts, is the algorithms it uses to select packages and versions that best resolve dependencies and ensure cooperation between the hundreds of applications and libraries on a user's system.

Due to maintenance, many Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation servers will be offline for much of tomorrow.

[Oops. That's today. Sorry for getting this out late. -- grouch]

Indian neighbourhood now wears the red cap.

MySQL has published its first "end of life" timetable for its open-source database and will no longer provide free updates for some older versions of the product starting next month, it said this week.