Showing headlines posted by dave

Opponents of open-source software applauded a recent memorandum from the Office of Management and Budget that they claim puts proprietary software on competitive footing with open-source software in federal procurements.

Apache, FreeBSD Sendmail are lesser known. The share of the market they have will surprise you

THE PEOPLE at Zend Technologies quietly announced last week the availability of the long awaited PHP version 5. The rise of PHP - the open source, server-side web programming language that took the Net by storm starting in 1998 with its 3.0 release, seems to be unstoppable, if one believes the usage charts at php.net.

Linux vendor Linspire Inc. has released PhoneGaim, a free software program that adds voice-over-IP functionality to the Linux-based Gaim instant messaging client.

I have spent the past week (5-11 July) at the Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre (Libre Software Meeting) in Bordeaux. I attended the Free Software Printing Summit which was one of the topics at the conference, and this message is a short report of the proceedings. I was there representing both Gimp-Print and Debian. What we worked on will have an impact on the Debian printing infrastructure in the medium to long term, and this will affect a potentially large number of printing packages. I hope this is found to be informative. Please send any followups to debian-devel.

Microsoft has removed the free software downloads from Lookout's Web site, a day after it announced it bought the Silicon Valley startup. Before it was acquired by Microsoft, Lookout offered critically acclaimed free software that quickly searched files within Microsoft's Outlook e-mail system.

Peder Ulander, the top marketing executive for Sun Microsystems' Desktop Solutions Group, is leaving the company to join embedded Linux specialist MontaVista Software, CNET News.com has learned.

A group of former Red Hat employees have formed a start-up called Specifix that aims to lure customers who have customized software needs that the more established Linux company couldn't accommodate.

SAN FRANCISCO - Underlining the enterprise capabilities of its free, open source JBoss Application Server, JBoss Inc. on Monday plans to announce J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) certification for the product.

I haven't used Windows very often in the past seven or eight years. I declared my independence on July 4, 1998, and I've never looked back. Recently I was issued a company laptop. It came with Windows XP preinstalled, of course, since it is an IBM ThinkPad and only Microsoft operating systems are available preloaded on IBM (and HP, and Dell) desktops and laptops destined for North American consumers. I decided for various reasons to make the ThinkPad a dual-boot machine. Color me surprised at what I've learned about the Windows platform since. Who knew there is so much free -- as in speech -- software available for Windows these days?

LinuxSecurity.com editors have a seat with Dave Wreski, CEO of Guardian Digital, Inc. and respected author of various hardened security and Linux publications, to talk about how Guardian Digital is changing the face of IT security today.

Behavioral scientists will tell you that in the animal kingdom -- which includes Homo sapiens -- truly altruistic behavior is extremely rare, if it exists at all. Yet even behavior motivated by self-interest can work for the public good. There’s a cadre of historians who believes that the framers of the U.S. Constitution wrote it to protect their own landed interests, for example, yet few would deny that it worked out pretty well for the rest of us.

Open source database vendor MySQL AB is floating a new license exception among members of the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community in a bid to permit bundling of MySQL alongside PHP. In the view of at least one prominent member of the community though, the Free Software Foundation (FSF), backer of the GPL license that is at the root of the controversy, really doesn't represent the needs or opinion of the core base of PHP, the popular open source scripting language.

Jim Stallings, who has been general manager of corporate Linux at IBM, has taken over several other initiatives as well, IBM said Friday.

Two former Red Hat executives said they will launch later this year a Linux platform, called Conary, that will enable customers to tailor their Linux distributions yet still get vendor support. Erik Troan, among the original employees of Red Hat who served as vice president of Product Engineering and director of Product Marketing, and Kim Knutilla, a former Cygnus executive and Red Hat vice president of Engineering Services, this week revealed their platform plans and launched the company they co-founded, Specifix. The company is based in San Jose, Calif. Knutilla is Specifix CEO.

Traditionally, the end of an era is marked by terrible portents and cataclysmic events. As signs go, the sight of Sun's Scott McNealy exchanging banter (and hockey shirts) with Microsoft's Steve Ballmer might seem mild enough, but the shift it represents is indeed epochal. The two companies come from very different backgrounds: Microsoft grew from the world of the first personal computers, Sun from workstations. But as their ambitions overlapped in the networked business world, Scott McNealy's strategy has been increasingly defined by his fierce and vocal opposition to Microsoft, especially once the latter took over from IBM as the driving force in computing.

ELX Linux, the Hyderabad-based Linux distributor, is overwhelmed with the sales of its Biz Desk 4.0 Linux and claims that it is months ahead of the competition. Manojit Majumdar, head-sales, ELX, explained, "When we started selling three months ago over the Internet, the response was very encouraging and we set up a channel in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh. We will now be building our channel in Delhi and Bangalore as well."