Showing headlines posted by tadelste

One of the people who encourages work in advocating Linux in government is Con Zymaris. I had the good luck to catch up with him last week. Here's an update and some inside information on Linux and open source down under. For starters we'll get an update on the complaint with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) and find out what Microsoft's doing in other places to deter Linux.

Two non-profit organisations have denounced Microsoft over the name of its forthcoming Windows Vista operating system. WorldVistA and the Vista Software Alliance both back the VistA application suite, which was originally developed by the US Veteran's Administration. The software brings electronic health records and hospital automation to institutions that take care of veterans, but its use over the years has expanded to other areas of the healthcare industry. VistA is in the public domain, meaning that it is not governed by any licence. This makes its use even less restricted than it would be under an open source licence. Earlier this week the two organisations sent out a press release with unusually harsh language about Microsoft's naming decision. WorldVistA is particularly upset about the timing of Microsoft's announcemen

Despite the European Parliament’s recent rejection of a controversial software patent regulation – which saw small, independent software developers breathe a collective sigh of relief – there could be more such regulations on the horizon. “If the community patent directive is passed, then software will be affected, and software patents will come into existence,” warned Péter Balsai, president of the Association of Hungarian Linux Users. Balsai argued that the EU directive on software patents, which the European Parliament rejected on July 6, will be replaced by a broader common patent directive that will incorporate computer-implemented inventions.

In keeping with its On Demand model, IBM is positioning itself as a problem-solver for customers, even if that means installing other companies' products. After six months and some 300 customer engagements, trying out a new sales and services approach that concentrates on industry-specific solution sets, IBM has decided to realign its global Linux-related sales and marketing teams around this model. The Linux teams are now concentrating on selling and marketing 17 solution sets that address IT and customer business problems, rather than focusing on selling specific products.

VMware, in light of increasing competition for Microsoft and XenSource, last week announced at LinuxWorld that it is opening up its source code to independent software and hardware vendors. The move is intended to create an open virtualization platform and make VMware the center of it. The company announced it is working with AMD, BEA Systems, BMC, Dell, Emulex, HP, iBM, Mellanox, Novell and Red Hat, among others. VMware will provide its partners access to its ESX Server source code through a program called VMware Community Source, which will allow them to collaboratively develop ESX Server. The VMware Community Source program is intended to accelerate the development of virtualization software, expand its interoperability and supportability by creating standard interfaces and make virtualization technologies more widely available. The virtualization vendors stirred the pot at LinuxWorld in San Francisco last week.

First of all, some people are worried that they will not be able to use Linux hosting because they run Windows on their PCs. However, what operating system you run on your own PC is irrelevant to which web hosting environment you can use, because the latter is run remotely on a web server, where your website files will be uploaded. Linux and Microsoft Windows are two different operating systems. Windows is a well-known household name and does not require much introduction. Linux is a new version of the Unix operating system. Both these operating systems make excellent environments for web hosting. However, there are some differences between them.

Both OpenOffice.org 2.0, and its commercial big-brother StarOffice 8, were expected to be available this summer, but both office-suite arrivals have been delayed. Last February, Sun Microsystems Inc. released the beta of its office-suite, StarOffice 8. It was then slated for a mid-year release.At the same time, OO.o (OpenOffice.org) 2.0, the open-source office-suite, which is the foundation for StarOffice, was nearing completion. By late May, it was in late beta. OpenOffice development ran into some problems with the open-source development community with its use of features that would only work with Sun's proprietary implementation of Java. This disagreement was, however, quickly smoothed over. Subsequently, many observers thought that OpenOffice.org 2.0 would appear in early summer and that StarOffice 8 would arrive in July. That hasn't happened. So, why the delays?

Blake Ross is sprawled in a chair at a coffee shop near Stanford University, his long legs, clad in baggy Tommy Hilfiger jeans, stretched underneath the table. He looks like any other college student who happened to stroll off campus. Yet as much as Ross blends in with the Stanford scene, the 20-year-old has also become a standout in the technology industry. At 17, he helped create the Firefox Web browser, which has since grown into the biggest threat to Microsoft's Internet Explorer since the Redmond, Wash., company battled and defeated the Netscape browser for Internet supremacy. Now three years later, Ross has dropped out of college to build an Internet software company — just as Bill Gates, whom Ross is often compared to, did to start Microsoft Corp. His goal is modest, motivated by his mother and 81-year-old grandfather: to make software less clunky, more people-friendly. And it's clear he possesses at least the vision and technical skill to pull it off.

In a weblog posting, Yahoo! employee Jeremy Zawodny has revealed that Yahoo! is looking to hire some XUL hackers. The job description appeals to candidates who have experience in cross-platform C/C++ development in addition to Mozilla technologies like XUL, JavaScript and XPCOM. "Hopefully, you've already written your own XUL application and used an XPCOM extension as a part of that application," the job description says. "If you've ever submitted a patch to the Mozilla code base that's a huge plus." Yahoo! currently uses XUL and related technologies for its Yahoo! Toolbar for Mozilla Firefox. According to a May post at SiliconBeat (a technology weblog run by the San Jose Mercury News), Yahoo! is "exploring using XUL to build a Firefox version" of Yahoo! PhotoMail, which currently only works with Microsoft Internet Explorer. Launched earlier this year, Yahoo! PhotoMail (the PhotoMail site is pretty useless if you're not using Internet Explorer) aims to make it easier to send photographs via Yahoo! Mail.

Will podcasting meet the same fate as Webcasting? Doc goes back to territory he covered extensively the last time the record industry successfully throttled a business that threatened it. And we're not talking about Napster, either.

Microsoft seems to have been the main beneficiary of the UK government's drive to put council services online. Research from the Society of IT Managers (Socitm) reveals that local authorities are increasingly opting to use Microsoft Windows applications, particularly in new installations. The research also revealed that contracts for applications specific to local government are concentrated in the hands of a select circle of companies. (Editors Note: Local governments have not responded to policy changes made at higher levels of government. However, the author has ignored major Linux wins throughout the globe at local government levels.)

Rather than just making machines that run Linux for every type of customer, IBM is taking a vertical-market approach, with new product offerings that focus on For the automotive industry, IBM is offering something it calls Infrastructure for Automotive Common Environment (ACE), which includes Linux technologies geared at automotive design and production. For retail, its Total Store Solutions - a package that includes Linux PCs and servers built for point-of-sale, self-checkout and store inventory management tasks, with third-party wireless and other technologies included. In the finance realm, IBM is offering Front Office Optimization for Banking. This package includes Linux-based server and PC applications that cover all aspects of running a bank, from teller position machines to customer service call centers and other areas.

Nope. It's not a garden garnish. GNOME is a desktop software project designed to look familiar to anyone who has ever used a computer. Aaron Weber distills what the GNOME desktop is, what apps users will find as well as what platform development tools developers will find, and the resources to help you get started using it. Aaron is a coauthor of Linux in a Nutshell, 5th Edition.

Linux and open source software is traditionally good for developers and system administrators, and recently good for business users. When will it be good for multimedia users? A handful of projects are making video production and editing possible (and useful)--PiTiVi and GStreamer among them. Jono Bacon examines the present and future of video production with Linux and open source software.

inux developer Red Hat (redhat.com)will finance outside programmers' efforts to obtain patents that may be used freely by open source developers, the firm announced Tuesday at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo. Open Source Developer Labs has simultaneously launched a patent commons project, providing a central list of patents that have been donated to the collaborative programming community. The threat of patent-infringement lawsuits has caused many open source programming advocates to turn against the patent system altogether. The initiatives show a new proactive stance on the part of the open source community to combat the threat of patent-infringement lawsuits. "We're watching a groundswell of alternative ideas coming forward to try to counteract some of the patent terrorism that's coming up in industry," says Steve Mills, general

The Open Source Business Conference, set for Nov. 1-2, 2005 in Boston, will explore Linux- and open source-related business topics, including emerging trends, intellectual property, and other issues. The second annual event targets IT business executives, venture capitalists, attorneys, and others using open source software in enterprise or embedded systems.

Mozilla put out a call Wednesday afternoon to seek out beta testers interested in testing out the basic functions of Thunderbird, the group's open-source e-mail client. The quality assurance arm of the organization has asked that all interested persons subscribe to the Tbirdtesters mailing list.

A friend of mine who watches these things tells me that Microsoft in the past would have shut down sales of pirated Windows copies on eBay — but isn't any more, essentially allowing the eBay marketplace to discover the "true" value of the OS.So, three somewhat overlapping questions... 1. (Maybe I should know the answer to this already, but I don't) Are sales of these copies violating Microsoft's rules? 2. Is there really a new Microsoft practice involved here? Meaning, are they passively sanctioning a Windows market flourish outside their authorized retail and OEM channels? 3. What, if anything, has happened, and why?

Opinion: The Zotob attacks could have been prevented by proper Windows patching, or they could have easily been prevented for less by using Linux in the first place.

In 1969, UNIX was created at Bell Labs. For decades, the source of the AT&T dialect of UNIX came from the researches of workers in department 1127. When the "Baby Bells" split from "Ma Bell," department 1127 survived. When AT&T and Lucent split, 1127 survived. But the new reorg at Bell Labs finally breaks up what's left of 1127 entirely. Theory people will go to one place, systems people to another, I'm told. I'm not sure what happens to those who fall in neither camp. There was no malice, so far as I can tell — just an administrative reorg forced by recent cutbacks and layoffs and departures that left the whole research area with too many managers and too few researchers. Ken Thompson retired to California. Brian Kernighan is a Professor at Princeton. Doug McIlroy is a Professor at Dartmouth. Rob Pike and Dave Presotto and Sean Dorward are at Google. Tom Duff is at Pixar. Phil Winterbottom is CTO at Entrisphere. Gerard Holzmann is at NASA/JPL Lab for Reliable Software. Bob Flandrena is at Morgan Stanley.