Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

It had to happen eventually. Open source software is all about letting anyone have access to the source code, and Apple is all about restricting any software access on its platforms. So when questions began to be raised about whether VideoLAN's popular VLC Media Player, which is licensed under the GPLv2, could legally be sold on the Apple's App Store, you knew something had to give. Well, it just did. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has just told the VLC developer community that the GPLv2 does, indeed, conflict with Apple's App Store Terms.

This past weekend, while the US was ramping up for yet-another contentious election, politics of another sort were happening in the land of open source software. Specifically, 33 members of the Germanophone project within the larger OpenOffice.org community gave Oracle and the OpenOffice.org team leaders notice that they would be walking away from the project and working for the new LibreOffice project, now being managed by The Document Foundation. The reasons for the walkout are clearly stated: the developers are unhappy with the OpenOffice.org stance that any current OpenOffice.org project or team leader who is also working on LibreOffice should withdraw from their position in the OpenOffice community.

ActiveState, the dynamic language experts offering solutions for Perl, Python, and Tcl, has launched its Python Package Manager Index (PyPM Index) to give developers a more complete picture of Python build information and package availability across multiple platforms. PyPM Index shows developers instantly if Python packages they need are available for all the platforms they must deploy on, providing critical information to speed up the design phase of development. With PyPM Index, developers now have direct access via the web to search PyPM repositories (collections of ActivePython packages).

Stormy Peters is stepping down as GNOME's executive director and heading to Mozilla to work on developer engagement. In a post on her personal blog today, Peters announced the decision to leave the GNOME Foundation to join Mozilla and work on "pushing freedom on the Web as much as we've pushed for it on the desktop." Peters was hired by GNOME in July of 2008.

A group of Italian developers has just released a free and open-source framework for creating e-books for the iPad. The Baker E-book Framework allows designers and developers to turn fixed-width HTML5 pages into an e-book format and publish the finished product. After that, all you need to do is follow the App Store submission guidelines, and you’re on your way to e-book greatness. To design for the Baker Framework, simply build HTML5 pages with a fixed width of 768 pixels. You can test your HTML versions on an iPad using the Safari browser and iterate accordingly.

The Fedora Project announced the Fedora 14 final release, adding Amazon EC2 support. Fedora also features faster boot-times and JPEG downloads, the MeeGo for Netbooks UI stack, improved debugging, and a new "Spice" virtualization desktop framework, says the project. Released in beta form at the end of September, Fedora 14 ("Laughlin") is now available in final form. This community-driven open source distro is a techie-focused upstream contributor to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The community has also upgraded its Fedoraproject.org site with the Fedora 14 release.

This week the Linux Foundation has unveiled the Self-Assessment Checklist (SAC) as part of the Open Compliance Program (OCP) announced earlier this year. If your organization is involved in working with open source software, you'll want to take a closer look. The Linux Foundation's checklist is a set of best practices to ensure that your organization, or its suppliers, are complying with licensing requirements. The checklist covers several areas, such as compliance management, training, business processes, and more.

I love using Linux. I enjoy the control over the computing experience it affords me and how I can choose exactly how my desktop is to be run. I'm not some guy writing Linux articles on a Windows box or a Mac. I "live Linux" exclusively, every-single-day. And I have done this for years. That said, I’ve put myself into the position of those who are new to desktop Linux or simply overwhelmed by something within the platform. With this article, I hope to address new ideas alongside some challenges that I believe, if dealt with realistically, would make using Linux more accessible for everyone.

Ten days after releasing Linux 2.6.36, Linus Torvalds has issued the first release candidate of Linux kernel version 2.6.37. This concludes the kernel's merge window – the first phase in the development of a new kernel version during which the kernel hackers integrate the majority of changes into the source code management system of the main development branch.

OpenOffice.org 3.3 Release Candidate 3 was released on November 1 with many updates and new features that have been in development for the last six months or more. This comes when as many as 33 OpenOffice.org developers are handing in their resignations. While the loss of the German team is unlikely to affect this release, one has to wonder what the future holds for OpenOffice.org.

At the recent openSUSE Conference, Frank Karlitschek introduced a new KDE initiative intended to bring developers and users closer together, Bretzn. He admitted that they came up with the name Bretzn (a kind of German pretzel) only the day before the Saturday keynote, illustrating the speed and ease that are appropriate to the initiative.

The Paul Allen against the World case is moving forward. In fact, faster than the parties probably expected. There was a stipulation to extend time to complete initial disclosures from November 1 to two weeks past whenever the claims were clearer, either through an amended complaint or two weeks after infringement contentions are due. But the judge denied it. And he goes on to remind the parties that the date for filing the joint status report is November 8.

The LDAP command line can be a bit frightening at first, but once you get to know it it's not all that bad. In order to successfully manage your LDAP data from the command line you need to be familiar with three commands: ldapadd, ldapmodify, and ldapsearch. They may be, at first, a challenge to understand, but once you get the basics they are as simple as any other Linux command.

OpenBSD 4.7 came out this past summer, but OpenBSD 4.8 is now available for those interested in this BSD operating system that focuses on providing portability, standardization, correctness, proactive security, and integrated cryptography. With OpenBSD 4.8 there is now ACPI-based suspend-and-resume support for most systems utilizing Intel or ATI graphics, but the suspend-and-resume support when utilizing NVIDIA graphics is still problematic. There's also other hardware support improvements, new tools, daemon improvements, and various other improvements to this free software operating system.

If you open nautilus and browse to the root filesystem, you’ll see something that looks like the image to the left. This is the default layout of the filesystem in Ubuntu 10.10, and is a peek into the ancient (by computer science standards) history and genealogy of Linux. The directories listed above are holdouts from one of the oldest standards, the Filesystem Hierarchal Standard, FHS. FHS is the system that defines what belongs where.

Video fanatics were thrilled when an iOS version of VLC made its way to the App Store recently. Finally, users could watch all manner of videos in a number of codecs from their iPhones or iPads, just like they do with the (ever-popular) VLC desktop clients. That may not last forever, though: a wrench has now been thrown into the mix by one of the many VLC code contributors, leading to a complex dispute over VLC's GNU Public License (GPL) and whether an app released through the App Store—or any mobile OS store, for that matter—violates that license.

Last week was the Ubuntu 11.04 Developer Summit in Orlando, Florida of the United States where a variety of topics were discussed. Aside from the very surprising announcement that Ubuntu 11.04 will use the Unity Desktop rather than GNOME's interface, most of the coverage on Phoronix was focused around the X.Org / graphics side of things, such as the xorg-server and Mesa to be used by Ubuntu 11.04 and the other discussions. Of course, other things were discussed too at this Ubuntu Developer Summit, and here's some of the other major happenings from the event.

I like Fedora, Red Hat's community Linux distribution, a lot. But, let me warn you right now, that it's not a Linux for beginners. That's not to say that the newest version of Fedora, Fedora 14 Laughlin, is hard to use. It's not. But, if you need a lot of handholding as you explore Linux, I think you'll be better off with Ubuntu.

Fresh off of an $8.5 million round of funding that was announced earlier today, Acquia co-founder Dries Buytaert is feeling pretty good about the open source business model. The company that he co-founded in 2007 sells software and products that leverage Drupal, the open source project he started in 2000. Drupal has grown from Buytaert’s experiment with new technologies into a worldwide group project that includes thousands of programmers. The White House, Harvard and MTV all use Drupal to run their sites. Acquia is just one of many companies profiting from the volunteer project.

Samsung and Google are planning to announce a "Nexus Two" heir to the Galaxy S smartphone on Nov. 8 based on Android 2.3, says industry reports. Another report says the Nexus Two will go on sale exclusively in the U.K. for the holiday season.