Showing headlines posted by dcparris

Solution providers searching "Mark Spencer" on YouTube will find not only a bizarre clip about a homemade cake and humorous downloads regarding British department store Marks & Spencer, but a sure-fire way to increase sales in the lucrative IP PBX and VoIP market courtesy of Asterisk open-source PBX creator Mark Spencer.

According to reports, developers have completed the first phase of a Microsoft-sponsored open source project to create software that can convert Microsoft Word documents between Open XML and OpenDocument Format (ODF) for Office Applications file formats.

[I can just see someone thinking that they now have an Open Source copy of MS Word because they got the Open Source ODF/OOXML converter. Good thing there are plenty of lawyers to help out the poor sods who misunderstand the title of this one. - dcparris]

There are 139,834 open source projects under way on SourceForge, the popular open source hosting site. Five years from now, only a handful of those projects will be remembered for making lasting contributions--most will remain in niches, unnoticed by the rest of the world. For every Linux, Apache, or MySQL, dozens of other open source efforts fizzle out.

Malware blocking credentials questioned

Windows Vista has only just left the starting blocks but security watchers have wasted no time in challenging claims that it provides improved security defences.…

THE Free Software Foundation is reviewing Novell's right to sell new versions of Linux after the open source community criticised the company for teaming up with Microsoft.

Artistic geeks often find creative ways to combine technology and art. A love for good software and beautiful guitars is what inspired Canadian luthier Mark Kett to begin the Linux Guitar Project.

Bash is one of those Unix things that I am fully aware has a lot more potential and power than I know how to use. Every so often I go looking for another handful of useful things to learn about it: this is a selection of recent ones.

LXer Feature: 01-Feb-2007

Recently publicized Microsoft e-mails about Dell reveal more than Microsoft's thinking about Dell's "betrayal". The e-mails demonstrate Microsoft's warranted fear of the penguin.

Brussels, 29 January 2007 -- The FFII has sent an open letter to all delegations of the International Standardization Organization (ISO) to oppose with contradictions the "fast track" adoption of the Microsoft's 6000-page OOXML specification (ECMA-376) before the deadline of February, 5th. Microsoft's proposal damages the adoption of the existing ISO 26300 standard (OpenDocument) that covers almost the same functionality in just 600 pages.

Open source-based messaging and collaboration specialist Zimbra is picking up more steam in its bid to compete against Microsoft Exchange and Novell GroupWare, with the release of Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) 4.5 today and intentions to roll out a 5.0 update--plus an expanded deal with Red Hat Software--later this year.

Launch of Zimbra Collaboration Suite 4.5 Expands Reach to a Wider Audience

A couple of interesting stories related to open source user-centric identity came my way, courtesy of CNET. The first concerns a donation to the Higgins Project from IBM and the second is about some important interoperability announcements to come at this week's RSA Conference.

The evangelism phase is over; analysts agree that open source no longer has to fight to be viewed as a sound option in corporate IT deployments. The next step, they say, is to widen open source’s footprint further into the corporate application stack.

No more to say

BT says it has done enough to make its wireless Hub comply with the General Public License despite criticism from gpl-violations.org that it is still in breach of the license.

[I guess we'll have to find out what the Courts say - dcparris]

We didn't mean to do it

Microsoft has pulled a patent application for "Object Test Bench" in Visual Studio after it was accused both of copying the idea from the BlueJ community, and of filing the patent application in the full knowledge that prior art existed.

[Busted! - dcparris]

3Comis moving away from proprietary solutions by creating what it says is an open platform for its enterprise-class switches and routers.

Linux distributor Terra Soft, makers of the Fedora-based Yellow Dog Linux (YDL) distribution for the PPC platform, recently announced plans to provide a complete Linux distribution for the TPPC64, a single-board computer developed by Themis. Terra Soft, which once specialized in Linux support for Apple computers, has found several new PPC Linux niches since Apple's unexpected transition to Intel processors.

TWO pioneers of the open source movement, the Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group, have merged to form the Linux Foundation, which intends to speed the growth of Linux.

CodeWeavers this month announced version 6.0 of its flagship Windows compatibility product. Now called CrossOver Linux, the new version is the first with official support for games. With its growing application support and foray into gaming, CrossOver Linux 6 is an excellent alternative for Linux users who are stuck with a Windows application at work or at school.

One of the most talked about features of Web 2.0 are what might be called recommendation engines, or social networks that focus on finding and promoting content of some kind, usually links to interesting websites.