Showing headlines posted by tadelste

On virtually any street in Shanghai or Beijing, you can buy a Hollywood DVD or hot new CD for $1 or less. Vendors peddle Microsoft Office, Windows XP, and every other popular software applications out of cardboard boxes jammed full of discs. Entire markets in the major cities are dedicated to selling knock-offs of designer goods for pennies on the dollar. If you're interested in high finance, $200,000 worth of annual derivatives data is available from online vendors for $500 a year. According to Jones Day intellectual property rights lawyer Xiang Wang, the Chinese case law on many aspects of intellectual property rights is not yet well developed, and cases can take years to settle. The Business Software Alliance—a trade group including software giants such as Microsoft, Apple, and IBM—alleges that 90 percent of all software used in China is pirated and that software vendors suffered $3.5 billion in losses last year due to Chinese piracy. The Chinese government has started to realize that this is an obstacle to economic development. And if anybody pays attention to economic development these days, it's China. Now, China is beginning to look at open source software as a way out of the intellectual property quagmire that doesn't involve paying high costs. Linux is a keystone in this strategy.

The South Korean postal service is migrating around 4,700 desktop computers from Microsoft Windows to Linux. The migration is expected to save the government-run organisation 850 million won (£450,000) per year, according to an article in The Korea Times last week. The computers, which are in 2,800 post office branches, are provided to allow the public to access the internet free of charge. Korea Post also plans to be using Linux for its internet banking and payment system by the end of the year, according to the report. The South Korean government has funded a number of open source initiatives over the last few years. In 2003, the government announced a plan to replace a significant proportion of proprietary software on PCs and servers with open source alternatives by 2007. Earlier this year, the government said it would provide more than £1.5m to government agencies to encourage them to adopt open source software.

Although the city of Munich aims to deploy as much open-source software as possible, it has no intention of abolishing Microsoft products altogether, according to Schiessl. "We will continue to use the company's products in areas where it makes more economic sense, for instance, to run department-specific applications on Windows than on Linux. Contrary to what many people have said and written about our decision to use open-source software, we have no political mandate against Microsof

Software Freedom Day (South Africa) is almost upon us, and there are plenty of geeky events happening around the country and the continent, intended to spread the good news of free software and introduce non-geeks to the welcoming world of open source.

BRUSSELS, Belgium -- Microsoft Corp. has filed a second appeal against a European Union ruling ordering it to share code with open-source software companies, officials said Wednesday. The company's spokesman Tom Brookes said the new appeal before the EU's second-highest court comes in the wake of a June agreement with the EU head office to let the courts decide the source code issue. He said Microsoft planned to defend its view that the interoperability protocols -- server software which helps Windows-powered computers communicate with other computers and software -- are Microsoft's intellectual property and should not be shared or given away for free.

Version 2.12 of desktop for Linux and Unix is released with two new applications, a new theme engine and improved multimedia performance.

More than at any other time, database professionals are being aggressively challenged by mushrooming volumes of data in corporate business systems. While some industry analysts project data growth at an average rate of 42% a year, that figure is conservative in some installations where growth rates are several hundred percent, with no end in sight. What's to blame for sky-rocketing data volumes? First, corporations have realized the golden nugget potential of all the data floating around in their transactional systems and are utilizing data warehousing more than ever before. The strategic use of data is high on the mind of nearly every CIO and business executive, so in response, transactional data is stockpiled into data warehouses where business intelligence users constantly aim their analytic queries to produce forecasts that are used to make key business decisions.

Version 2.12 of the GNOME Linux desktop will be released on Wednesday, featuring two new applications, a new theme engine, and improved authentication, according to project director Davyd Madeley. What's more, the look and feel of the desktop is vastly improved, thanks to the new Clearlooks-based theme engine, Madeley said in a pre-release "tour" on the GNOME website.

Leslie Franke writes: "I recently created a Rapid Web Development and Testing with Mozilla Firefox presentation. The S5 slide show is a basic overview of Firefox's built-in web development tools, as well as some useful web developer extensions that are available."

More coverage and deeper insight on the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' declaration to standardize on the OpenDocument file format...

The Boston Globe
Why OpenDocument Won (and Microsoft Office Open XML Didn't)
why-opendocument-won
by David Wheeler

Uganda's first ever Software Freedom Day celebration is set to take place on Saturday, with a focus on the use of (Information and Communication technology) ICT in development.

Lately, certifications seem to have lost some of their allure. A study by Foote Partners LLC, a research firm in New Canaan, Conn., shows that for the 12-month period that ended April 1, noncertified workers received a larger average pay increase than those with certifications -- 3.6% compared with 2.9%. Some say the study shows a shift in the value IT executives place on certifications. "It's being put in its right place," says Robert Miano, president and CEO of Harvey Nash USA, the U.S. arm of London-based Harvey Nash PLC, a global recruitment company. "Certifications are going to stay, but they're not as highly regarded as they have been in the past."

The sponsored research approach may not have played well for Microsoft, but IBM wasn't deterred this week as it trotted out two new sponsored reports heavy with praise for the total cost of ownership (TCO) benefits of Linux over Windows and Solaris. The two reports, one of which was an update to a Robert Frances Group TCO report penned in 2002, were conducted by RFG and Hayward, Calif.-based Pund-IT Research. Overall, the reports showed Linux had continued to lead in TCO benefits over the competition and that it had expanded into new roles in companies that had previously allocated Linux to so-called "edge" uses like e-mail and Web serving.

There's a fundamental barrier between fans of open-source software and the world of Microsoft Windows, and no, it's not the $299 list price of Windows XP Professional. It's actually a very real communication problem based on differences between Windows and Linux's file systems—the structures that operating systems use to file away data on a computer. Think of the file system as a simple spreadsheet: It associates a filename with an index in a file allocation table. When you ask your computer to open a document, the OS checks this table to determine where on the hard drive it stored the file, down to the precise sector on your disk. Windows uses a file system called NTFS, today's Linux distributions primarily use ext3, and like two warring tribes, the two barely speak. Fortunately, there's a handy tool from Paragon Software Group called NTFS for Linux, which acts like an interpreter for these battling nations.

The free software foundation said on Tuesday it would start adapting rules for development and use of free software by including penalties against those who patent software or use anti-piracy technology. Free software needs to be licensed under specific rules to guarantee that it can be freely studied, copied, modified, reused, shared and redistributed. The Linux operating system kernel is one of the best known examples of free software.

Adoption of Linux on the desktop may begin in basements and bedrooms throughout the world, and gradually trickle up to large enterprises, says Matt Asay, a Novell Inc. technology evangelist and one of the people behind that company's Linux and open source strategy. SearchEnterpriseLinux.com recently spoke with Asay about his predictions for the path of Linux desktop adoption. Asay also offered some insights into Novell's desktop Linux strategy. Here are some excerpts from that conversation:

The Free Software Foundations are proud to announce the creation of the global "GPL Version 3 Development and Publicity Project". The project will bring together thousands of organisations, software developers, and software users from around the globe during 2006, in an effort to update the world's most popular Free Software licence. The GPLv3 promises to be one of the largest participatory comments and adoption efforts ever undertaken. The sister organisations in the United States and Europe are also happy to announce a total grant of 150,000 EUR from Stichting NLnet to support this truly-unique project. The global process will be overseen by the Free Software Foundation with support from its legal counsel the Software Freedom Law Centre (SFLC). Free Software Foundation Europe will be coordinating the European activities closely with both organisations and contributing to the global communication effort.

Trolltech, provider of leading technologies for Linux and cross-platform software development, today announced that its Qtopia software for Linux-based mobile phones is the application development foundation for Cellon International’s new C8000 handset platform. Cellon International, the world’s largest independent design house for wireless devices, has used Qtopia to build, customize and extend the Linux-based software applications and graphical user interface (GUI) for the C8000. A major European Vendor has already shipped the first mobile phones built on the C8000 platform in the third quarter of 2005. “Cellon produces handsets for some of the largest and most well-known brands in the world, including Alcatel, Philips and Siemens, and we are honored that they selected Trolltech’s mobile application platform for their Linux-based phone design,” said Trolltech CEO Haavard Nord. “Linux is an ideal operating system for Cellon’s complex, full-featured phones, and Qtopia gives them a proven technology for developing customized, innovative applications and user interfaces for this platform.”

Many of you might have questions around successful business models. Recent Forbes article on SourceForge and the blog on SugarCRM's functionality differences between open source and pro versions raise interesting questions. If you are contemplating on a new open source venture - my recommendation is not to differentiate (functionally) between the commercial and open source versions, like in the case of MySQL's dual license. From my conversations with CIOs, enteprise architects and IT developers there are three major reasons for adopting open source: 1. No vendor lock-in and proprietary code 2. Freedom to change or enhance - free in libre 3. Cost effective - pay for tangible services and not for the software