Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Email, love it or loathe it, there's no getting away from it. On an average day I process hundreds of emails, but haven't yet found an open source mail user agent (MUA) that I really like. Ten years ago this wasn't surprising, but today? Why aren't open source mailers keeping up with the rest of the Linux desktop, and being blown away by Gmail?

As reported a few months ago, KDE software has plenty of use among scientists, who may use Plasma workspaces for their daily jobs or develop applications on top of the KDE Platform. We interviewed Thomas Friedrichsmeier, the lead developer of RKWard, a KDE Integrated Development Environment for the statistical programming language R. Thomas discussed his experiences, KDE, and the role of KDE software in science.

A Google executive has stated that Android 2.2 is not optimized for tablet computers, and that in particular, Android Market will not run properly on tablets. Meanwhile, the Android 2.2 based Samsung Galaxy Tab tablet will be offered by Verizon Wireless, AT&T, and Sprint, say reports.

The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit recently ruled that End-User License Agreements (EULAs) are absolutely binding, thereby making resale, redistribution, modifications and any other terms forbidden within the agreement illegal.

Clementine is a port of Amarok 1.4 to QT 4, giving users an application that fits in well with KDE 4 while still resembling the previous version of the library-based music player. As I've commented in the past, acceptance of KDE 4 wasn't helped by the fact that the developers took it upon themselves to redesign some of the most popular apps such as Konqueror and Amarok.

A recent column in The H Open posed a question: 'The "best open source software for business" list contains almost exclusively well-known contributors. Is there no more new open source?' It's an important issue, because it picks up on a persistent line of criticism that goes all the way back to the famous 1998 Halloween Document, an internal Microsoft strategy report that offered perhaps the first deep glimpse into the company's thinking about open source..

Everyone loves a turnkey solution and everyone wants a turnkey solution. Who wants to use multiple vendors for what a customer perceives as a single service? Thanks to the coolness of Linux, the power of Amazon’s EC2 services and the entrepreneurial spirit of Alon Swartz and Liraz Siri, TurnKey Linux delivers turnkey solutions to bare metal, virtual infrastructure and to Amazon’s EC2 environment in the form of virtual appliances. And, TurnKey Linux is, like its Ubuntu parent and Debian grandparent, free.

Earlier this month we started once again our annual Linux Graphics Survey in which we poll our readers about their choices and opinions concerning graphics cards, display drivers, and other graphics / X.Org related features of the Linux desktop. While this survey is still going on through the end of September -- so you still have time to participate -- here are the results from the first 6,300 people to submit their responses. We are publishing the results so far since there is the X Developers' Summit this week in Toulouse and some of these findings may prove to be useful during those discussions.

Fink is a collection of open source programs built for OS X. These programs are largely available on Linux and on Windows via Cygwin. Another similar system for OS X is Mac Ports, which uses a ports system similar to FreeBSD's port system. Fink uses DEB packages and is more similar to Debian's package management style, although the Fink front-end to build the .deb packages is unique and quite robust. As a result, Fink makes it easy to get development tools on the Mac. With it, you can install server programs like MySQL and Apache, or development tools like Subversion and Git. Fink makes the installation of, and continued upgrading, of these tools extremely simple.

LXer Feature: 12-Sept-2010

In the LXWR this week we have some new happenings with Diaspora, debunking the 1% Myth and a rather subdued response to the announcement of the Open Solaris fork known as OpenIndiana. Also, a Gartner report predicts Android will the top mobile OS by 2014 and could Oracle fracture open source community? Enjoy!

A week ago we reported on the open-source GPU drivers causing headaches for KDE users when attempting to use the KWin compositing manager under certain conditions. Version 4.5 of the KDE Software Compilation has a few improvements to KWin and while the compositing manager does check for optional OpenGL extensions, the open-source Mesa drivers don't always do things right and it's resulted in some bugs and other issues inflicting KDE users.

A group of classical music lovers have successfully appealed for funds to release copyright-free versions of symphonies by four famous composers. The money will pay for an orchestra to record the music on an “all rights basis”. The project, Musopen, aims to deal with a problem caused by the way copyright laws work. Although the actual symphonies written by composers in, for example, the 19th century are long out of copyright, there is separate protection for every individual performance by an orchestra. That means that in most cases, the only recordings currently in the public domain are very old performances generally recorded with poor quality equipment and plagued with hiss and crackle.

Many have criticized syslog-ng, a replacement for the syslog logging daemon with many additional features, for not being open enough. Syslog-ng has a closed-source commercial version and keeps the entire code base under a single copyright by requiring copyright transfer for contributions, which has been a sore spot in the eyes of many people. This may be part of the cause for syslog-ng failing to become the default system-logging daemon of modern Linux distributions. Now the project seeks to relieve these concerns and attract a wider contributor base with a new licensing model.

Acer founder Stan Shih, in a talks with reporters on September 8, commented that Apple's strong popularity is mainly due to its products such as iPad and iPhone, and these products are like mutant viruses, which are difficult to find a cure for in the short-term, but he believes that PC vendors will eventually find a way to isolate Apple and become immune. Shih noted that Google's Android operating system is already attracting a lot PC brands to develop related products and this is one of the factors that proves that PC brands will eventually be able to isolate Apple.

First some definitions. In this post let’s define an “open standard” as one that is: 1) freely available, 2) developed in an open process and 3) freely implementable, e.g., is royalty free. I freely acknowledge that there are interests out there that attempt to soften these criteria, but that only demonstrates the competitive power presented by truly open standards. We see similar “dumbing down” pressures on other popular marks of distinction, such as the constant pressure by “big agriculture” to allow more permissive use of pesticides in organic/biologique food. It is almost a law of nature that any item of relative scarcity and value will be counterfeited. Dumbing down definitions is just one way to counterfeit an open standard.

Nearly 6 years ago when we first started thinking about doing project hosting on code.google.com we noticed something particular about the other open source project hosting sites. They either accepted all Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved licenses, like Sourceforge, or they only accepted one, like the Free Software Foundation's Savannah project, which only accepted GPL'd projects.

Parrot S.A. is shipping a hackable $300 "quadrocopter" flying drone that runs Linux on a 468MHz ARM9 processor and may be remotely controlled by an iPhone. The AR Drone uses Wi-Fi to receive navigation instructions and transmit video from one of its dual cameras, and it ships with an SDK for developing multiplayer augmented reality games.

Google's Android mobile operating system was designed for smartphones, but it is increasingly being adopted by consumer electronics companies to power a range of new devices, including tablets and e-book readers. As we discovered when we looked at some of the upcoming Android tablet products a few months ago, the platform isn't natively suited for the tablet form factor and will need some refinement in order to deliver a top-notch user experience on devices that aren't smartphones.

On Thurday, September 2 two leading Linux distributions released milestone developmental versions on the road to their next releases. OpenSUSE released Milestone 1 of 11.4 and Ubuntu released a beta of their upcoming 10.10, codenamed Maverick Meerkat, for developers and community testers.

Yesterday on the mailing list for GCC is was brought up if Apple's Objective-C 2.0 patches for the GNU Compiler Collection could be merged back into the upstream GCC code-base as maintained by the Free Software Foundation. Even though Apple's modified GCC sources still reflect the FSF as the copyright holder and are licensed under the GNU GPLv2+, it doesn't look like Apple wants their compiler work going back upstream any longer.