Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

A group of key OpenOffice.org (OOo) contributors and community members recently decided to fork the project and establish The Document Foundation (TDF) in order to drive forward community-driven development of the open source office suite. Oracle has responded to the move by asking several members of TDF to step down from their positions as representatives on the OOo community council.

Microsoft Corp. Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, an executive once considered an heir to co- founder Bill Gates, will step down, becoming the third senior executive to announce his resignation in less than five months. Ozzie, who joined the company in 2005, won’t be replaced because the company has enough other leaders in place, Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer said today in an e-mail on Microsoft’s website. Ozzie, 54, will be “on board” for a while before departing, Ballmer said.

Apple cult leader Steve Jobs has hit back at Eric Schmidt over the Google boss' repeated claims that Google is "open" and Apple is "closed." During a surprise appearance on Apple's quarterly earnings call on Monday afternoon — "I couldn't help dropping by for our first $20bn quarter" — Jobs called Schmidt's characterization "disingenuous," a "smokescreen" meant to hide the real issues surrounding the companies' dueling mobile platforms. When you compare Apple's iOS to Google's Android, Jobs said, the question is not: Who's open and who's closed? The question is: Who's "fragmented" and who's "integrated"?

Filesystem block size rarely enters the sparkling dialog at your noontime geekfest where movie one-liners and song lyrics replace actual conversation but today is different. The ticking of thumbs halts in mid-text when someone at the table opens up an intellectual volley with, “Have you ever seen the error that there isn’t enough space on the filesystem for the selected operation in Virtual Center?” The puzzled faces stare back as if someone had just announced that iPads are on sale for half price. But, before you, or they, have a chance to react to this obviously simple problem of insufficient disk space, the problem isn’t insufficient disk space.

The big social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn all use open source software to power their services. Eric Geier rounds up a batch of open source social networking projects that you can deploy in your own organization.

SkySQL Ab , the alternative source for software, services and support for the MySQL database, today formally launched operations with the release of SkySQL™ Enterprise. The company, which is founded by former MySQL AB executives, personnel, and investors, is committed to furthering the future development of MySQL database technologies, while delivering cost-effective database solutions and exceptional customer service.

As was reported recently, the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port now has limited support for handling ZFS file-systems and its stock kernel has been upgraded against that of FreeBSD 8.1. Due to the upgraded kernel we ran a quick set of benchmarks to see how the performance of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD to that of Debian Linux.

When Nokia acquired Trolltech, there was a question mark over Nokia's long term strategy for the Qt framework. Qt for many, is the toolkit behind the KDE desktop and it's associated applications, so what would a phone company do with it. Over the past years, the strategy has steadily crystallised, and at this years Qt Dev Day, Rich Green, the new CTO at Nokia and first Nokia CTO to speak at the annual Qt developer conference, confirmed that Qt is core to all of Nokia's plans for mobile applications; "We're betting the whole company and smartphones on Qt" Green told the audience at the opening keynote.

I've written before about my deep skepticism regarding the true motives of Canonical, Ltd.'s advocacy and demand of for-profit corporate copyright assignment without promises to adhere to copyleft. I've often asked Canonical employees, including Jono Bacon, Amanda Brock, Jane Silber, Mark Shuttleworth himself, and — in the comments of this very blog post — Matt Asay to explain (a) why exactly they demand copyright assignment on their projects, rather than merely having contributors agree to the GNU GPL formally (like projects such as Linux do), and (b) why, having received a contributor's copyright assignment, Canonical, Ltd. refuses to promise to keep the software copylefted and never proprietarize it (FSF, for example, has always done the latter in assignments). When I ask these questions of Canonical, Ltd. employees, they invariably artfully change the subject.

Oracle will never grant a license to Project Harmony, the open source Java implementation. According to a source familiar with the situation, Oracle has told a closed meeting of Java's leaders from major companies and organizations that it will never grant Harmony a license, claiming this would damage the future of Java. The meeting took place in Bonn, Germany, between October 5 and 6 and was hosted by T-Mobile.

nny September weekend in Cambridge, England, ten KDE and Telepathy developers met in the Collabora office to plan the future of Instant Messaging in KDE software. Once everyone had arrived, our host George Goldberg gave us an overview of the current state of the codebase, which parts are usable, which parts still need writing, and which parts were written years ago and need revision. This turned into a project management session to determine the order for getting things done, and a discussion about a release schedule that will make the project visible without tying it prematurely into compatibility guarantees that slow down development.

LXer Feature: 17-Oct-2010

In the Roundup this week we have news of IBM deciding to back Oracle's OpenJDK instead of Harmony, Phoronix releases the 2010 Linux graphics survey results, 5 mistakes Linux newcomers make and lastly John E. Dunn gets the crazy idea to ditch Windows for Ubuntu. Enjoy!

While OpenShot and PiTiVi are the two currently most talked about open-source non-linear video editing systems for Linux, that's not all there is out there. There's also Kdenlive, Kino, an open-source Lightworks is coming soon, and then perhaps the most advanced open-source video editor of them all: Cinelerra.

After some days with the latest Ubuntu Linux desktop release, I was planning to devote a few graphs to extolling its many virtues. This is not a hard exercise because Ubuntu 10.10 is exemplary, about as good as it gets at doing the main things desktop operating systems were originally invented to do. It’s refined, uncluttered, comes with plenty of apps for most people and, most of all, it’s stable and fast. It runs happily in 1GB of RAM, something no version of Windows has done since the obsolete XP. There’s even a netbook edition with larger icons.

QEMU, the processor emulator that can be used alone for running unmodified guest operating systems and can optionally take advantage of KVM (the Kernel-based Virtual Machine) for greater virtualization performance with Intel and AMD hardware, has finally reached version 0.13 after suffering from a few delays. As was reported by us back in January of this year, QEMU 0.13 would focus on bringing new features and with this release they have achieved introducing several new features.

Wine 1.2.1 arrived last week as a bug-fix release for Wine 1.2 that was introduced back in July, but for those living with the bi-weekly development snapshots to leverage new features already in Wine 1.3 like ARM support for winelib, Wine 1.3.5 is out with more feature activity.

At the start of September we reported on Unigine's OilRush game, which will have a native Linux client and really be the first title to make its debut that's powered by this advanced OpenGL (and DirectX) engine (after Primal Carnage abandoned Unigine) that up until now has just really been seen by gamers and consumers with some amazing tech demos. The OilRush game is still expected to be released this quarter, but some new screenshots for now are available.

If you spend much time with any open source project, you're probably going to be spending time in IRC. If you want to make sure you don't miss a minute of your project's conversations, you'll want to check out Smuxi.

Regardless which platform you are using, there’s bound to be a calculator included in the stock OS. For simple calculation, these calculators work fine, but if you want to do more complex calculation, like solving an algebraic expression, it won’t make the mark. Qalculate is a powerful calculator for Linux that can solve complex mathematical expressions, units conversion, graph plotting and many more sophisticated functions.

Alcatel-Lucent has switched from VxWorks to Linux for a new "intelligent" 10-gigabit Ethernet enterprise switch. The OmniSwitch 10K Modular LAN Chassis supports 5Tbps (terabit per second) performance over 256 10G Ethernet ports, and offers intelligent management features, such as flow-based quality of service with variable flow control, as well as virtual output queuing, says the company.