Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The Linux Foundation has published its third annual report about Linux kernel authorship. The statistics included in the paper illustrate growth trends in the kernel development process and provide insight into how the labor is distributed among individual contributors and corporate sponsors. The kernel has seen modest growth in its base of contributors over the past year, though the rate of development has seen a marginal decline.

Based on the run rates of the current quarter, Red Hat will likely reach $1 billion in annual revenue in 2011. Only a handful of companies, probably less than 20 software firms, have ever hit this milestone. Red Hat will be the first open source-focused company to break the billion dollar barrier. Certainly Richard Stallman did not envision this when he created the paradigm of Free Software. Such an event may be more in tune with what Eric Raymond, Tim O’Reilly, and others had in mind when they reframed Free Software as Open Source.

Linux developers continue to push out new kernels at rapid pace, though over the course of the last year the pace of new code commits has slowed, according to a new report from the Linux Foundation. The report also notes that the top contributors to Linux kernel development have shifted over the last year to include more contributions from mobile vendors. The new report from the Linux Foundation is the third annual 'Who Writes Linux' report, summarizing kernel contributions and activities over the past year.

These bye-laws define the internal organization of The Document Foundation. They cover the Community processes for contributions made to the projects of The Document Foundation. These bye-laws do not apply to the actual structure and governance of The Document Foundation as a legal entity, which are addressed in The Document Foundation's legal statutes.

It's now two months since Linux Game Publishing went offline due to a failure of their only web server and full service has still not been restored. Last week their service was partially restored with the LGP DRM system going back online along with some of their other web-sites, but the main Linux Game Publishing web-site is still down with no update since the 23rd of November.

Oracle is claiming ownership of yet another open-source project. This time, it's the Hudson project, the popular software build and monitoring service originally developed by Sun Microsystems. The giant has told users they are welcome to move the service to non-Oracle-owned servers, but if they do so, they can't call it "Hudson" anymore. Users have already moved code to new servers in an effort to deliver improved service.

The Linux World is rarely dull, but last week was an emotional roller coaster for users of openSUSE and Ubuntu. First Novell was sold to Microsoft and Attachmate with no mention of the fate of openSUSE. Then Ubuntu founder Shuttleworth told reporters that Ubuntu may switch from the six-month release cycle to daily updates. Both items garnered lots of speculation, elation, and worry until both parent companies finally addressed them.

The progress made by the LibreOffice folks so far is impressive, at least when it comes to attracting contributors. The third beta was released on November 18th, and seems to have impressive momentum. The release notes list 118 contributors who’ve helped with the development just between beta 2 and beta 3. How’s it looking so far? Don’t expect miracles, but it’s shaping up nicely.

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that may have a significant effect on the threshold under which patents can be invalidated in the US. In Microsoft Corp v i4i Limited Partnership, the court will look at the standard of proof by which patents can be declared invalid. In most civil cases in the US, the standard is "preponderance of the evidence", but in patent invalidity cases the Court of Appeal for the Federal Circuit has stated that the test should be "clear and convincing" evidence - which is a much higher threshold to achieve. If the Supreme Court decides this standard should be revised it could be of significant benefit to defendants claiming that patents being asserted against them are invalid.

Recently, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu shocked the Ubuntu Linux world when he announced that the next release of the popular Linux, Ubuntu 11.04, would use Unity instead of GNOME as its default desktop interface. Why move from pure GNOME to Unity? As Shuttleworth explained to the Ubuntu developers, "Lots of people are already committed to Unity -- the community, desktop users, developers, and platform and hardware vendors." In particular, he noted, "Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) favor Unity. They're happy to ship it."

To those that missed it in our Phoronix Forums where it was discovered, NVIDIA two days ago uploaded a new binary Linux (x86/x86_64) driver to their FTP server. This NVIDIA graphics driver is marked as the 260.19.26 beta, but they have yet to officially announce this new release or even provide a change-log.

For the past eighteen months, KDE has been my primary desktop. I use it about two-thirds of the time, with the rest of my desktop usage divided between GNOME, Xfce, and occasionally other desktops like LXDE. You could call me a generally happy user -- but, as with any desktop not designed for me personally, KDE has one or two quirks or deficiencies that make my computing less than ideal. To be sure, KDE has made many improvements since the last time I complained about its shortcomings, in 2008.

The graphics capabilities of modern computers are truly amazing. Whether you're viewing an animated Mandelbrot fractal, watching a DVD, designing a highly-detailed 3D image in a CAD program, or just playing a contemporary game, impressive graphics are the rule. Until recently the creation of stunning displays depended on deep familiarity with programs and coding environments that seemed to require a Master's degree in digital image processing and an arcane knowledge of video hardware. In fact, the old ways of creating complex graphics really were almost that demanding. But the old ways are always steadily morphing into the new ways, and the new ways are bringing greater capabilities to the normal user, even in specialized fields such as computer graphics and digital signal processing.

FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each February in Brussels. We are now inviting proposals for talks on KDE, KDE software and general desktop topics to take place in the Cross Desktop devroom. This is a unique opportunity to show the novel ideas of KDE to a wide audience of developers.

Learn to manage file ownership and permissions on your Linux® filesystems. Learn about access modes such as suid, sgid, and the sticky bit and how to use them to enhance security. You can use the material in this article to study for the LPI 101 exam for Linux system administrator certification, or just to learn about file ownership, permissions, and security.

Lightweight Portable Security is a LiveCD distro designed by the US Department of Defense to function as a secure end node, in other words, a safe environment from which to access the web or a remote desktop host. The focus is on security, and for this reason, it boots from a CD and executes from RAM, providing a web browser, a file manager and a few other small tools.

If you've ever paid attention to the market share statistics for desktop operating systems you probably know that Linux is most frequently pegged at about one percent. That's a dramatic underrepresentation, of course, due largely to the fact that Linux is free. Whereas Microsoft, for example, keeps careful count of each and every copy of Windows it distributes, in the case of Linux there's typically no vendor keeping count. Rather, users simply download, share, and enjoy the open source operating system to their heart's content without any official monitoring.

Never memorize what you can look up. This is one of the essential rules of system administration, and it applies very well to creating crontab entries. If you're not an expert on cron, don't worry -- just use the Corntab site or iPhone app. Generally speaking, cron syntax is not hard to remember. You have five fields to specify the minute, hour, day of the month, month of the year, and/or day of the week that you want to run a job automatically. It seems straightforward, but plenty of users and admins get it wrong -- not because it's really difficult, but just because it's not something they do often enough to memorize the correct syntax for oddball times.

The SuperComputing Conference is THE international conference and expo for all things HPC (High Performance Computing). The astute attendee of this year’s conference could see that storage is a big part of this year’s show. Two major storage trends from this year’s conference: really fast storage and really dense storage.

It will not have escaped your notice that the patent system has been the subject of several posts on this blog, or that the general tenor is pretty simple: it's broken, and nowhere more evidently so than for software. Anyone can see that, but what is much harder is seeing how to fix it given the huge vested interests at work here.