Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Many electrons have been expended in the discussion of Oracle's recently-filed lawsuit against Google alleging patent and copyright infringements in the Android platform. Your editor is somewhat reluctant to contribute to the flood; at this point, the amount of real information which is available is minimal while the amount of speculation is high. This will be an important case, though; the world will be watching to see how it turns out. So here are a few thoughts to add to the pile.

The Linux Mint team has released the final version of Linux Mint 9 ("Isadora"), based on Ubuntu 10.04. Linux Mint 9 features a new software manager with 30,000 packages, a new backup tool, and menu and interface improvements, says the team.

In the second episode of the new Behind KDE series of interviews with KDE sysadmins, we meet KDE's "identity expert", Ben Cooksley - the guy behind the new identity.kde.org, which will be launched next week. Ben is one of the leaders involved in setting up key parts of the new git infrastructure. Normally he's quiet and avoids publicity - another reason to put him in the spotlight. This interview even contains one of the rare pictures that are available of Ben.

You may think that the last thing on earth that could happen to your company would be that your business might be sued because it used a particular software program. You’d be wrong. In the aftermath of the Bilski Supreme Court decision, the Supreme Court did nothing to stop software or business method patents. As a result, not only software development companies but all businesses are now in more danger from patent lawsuits than ever before.

Even before the first Oracle-driven JavaOne conference has seen the light of day, an alternative Java conference is being planned for those not thrilled with Oracle. Media company Software & Support Media (S&S) plans to offer a U.S.-based version of its JAX (Java Apache XML) conference, which the company has been conducting in Germany for several years. "A lot of the Java community has been a little upset about how the JavaOne conference is being [run] by Oracle," said a source familiar with S&S plans.

Like many of you, every year we look forward to the workshops, conferences and events related to open source software. In our view, these are among the best ways we can engage the community, by sharing our experiences and learning from yours. So we're sad to announce that we won't be able to present at JavaOne this year. We wish that we could, but Oracle's recent lawsuit against Google and open source has made it impossible for us to freely share our thoughts about the future of Java and open source generally. This is a painful realization for us, as we've participated in every JavaOne since 2004, and I personally have spoken at all but the first in 1996.

It's hard to believe that Debian has 17 years under its belt, but the project celebrated its 17th birthday on August 16. Though Debian may not be quite as well hyped as other distros, it's still one of the most important FOSS projects around.

GCC and GNU Emacs are the two facets of the GNU operating system that have probably done more than any other to take GNU and free software from idealistic concept to a utilitarian reality. Having previously looked at GNU Emacs and the Hurd, Richard Hillesley looks at the history and progress of GCC.

Mozilla has pushed out another alpha version of Firefox for mobile phones, Fennec, and it's inviting Android, and N900, users to have a shot with the little fox. Fennec is the working title for the mobile version of Firefox, incorporating the irritatingly-named "Awesome Bar" and synchronising in real time with its bigger brother. Previous alpha releases of Fennec have only been available for Nokia's N900 internet tablet, with one "pre-alpha" release being built for Android. But now Android users get a proper "alpha" and are invited to download to see what they think.

This patent troll shakedown racket has gotten a lot of press attention over the years; here is a piece I did a few months ago. Unfortunately, there is no end is in sight. Some had hoped that the Supreme Court would find a way to curb the matter in the recent Bilski case. The decision, though, ended up doing no such thing.

Yesterday Red Hat hosted a virtual press conference titled "The Evolution of Cloud Foundations." The press conference served to outline Red Hat's plans for the future of their cloud services and JBoss, but the big announcement was that the company would be open sourcing all of its cloud APIs.

Since at least 2008, the Btrfs Linux filesystem has been talked about as a next-generation technology one day potentially rivalling or supplanting the current dominant Linux filesystems. According to Chris Mason, founder of the Btrfs effort and now director of software development at Oracle, Btrfs is today generally stable and usable even though it's yet to be finalized.

The Indian ICT market was hit pretty hard by the global financial crisis. Although the country's tech economy avoided going into a recession, growth fell from around 30 percent in 2008 to just five percent last year. In 2010, a healthy rebound is expected.

When you get serious about creating panoramas on Linux, there's really only one answer: Hugin. Akkana Peck shows us how.

In the computer technology business, we tend to see patents as being bad for developers and business. What we don't realize that the problems we have with Microsoft's bogus patent claims against Linux and Oracle's patent-based attack against Google are nothing compared to the evils that IP patents bring to the pharmacy business. Take, for example, the assault that the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) is now mounting on Abbot Labs. PUBPAT is formally asking the United States Patent and Trademark Office to reexamine eight Abbot patents relating to the critical HIV/AIDS drug Ritonavir, aka Norvir.

would like everyone to watch tridge's talk on patents and how engineers can interact efficiently with patent lawyers, to get your knowledge across to them. More formats are linked from End Software Patents, if you prefer audio only. Focus, please, also on what he's learned about patents, how to invalidate them in various ways, especially the part about proving non-infringement and why that is easier than proving prior art, and then the part about finding a workaround and then publicizing it. He shows how to read a patent filing document. You guys have been effective already in the past in finding prior art, but he is raising the bar with more techniques.

Prior to the emergence of Btrfs as a viable next-generation Linux file-system, Sun's ZFS file-system was sought after for Linux due to its advanced feature-set and capabilities compared to EXT3 and other open-source file-systems at the time. While ZFS support has worked its way into OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and other operating systems, ZFS had not been ported to Linux as its source-code is distributed under the CDDL license, which is incompatible with the GNU GPL barring it from integration into the mainline Linux kernel. Next month, however, a working ZFS module for the Linux kernel without a dependence on FUSE will be publicly released.

Over on his blog Sebastian Kügler talks about the status of Akonadi, how the migration of Kontact to Akonadi is going, and in general where the direction of development is leading. As a status update, sebas notes "Initially, we had planned to release the new Kontact along with the restof the KDE Applications 4.5. This did not quite work out, so we pushed the release back a bit, and are planning to release it along with one of the 4.5.x updates. The current plan is to release the Akonadi port of Kontact still this year. In contrast to our usual releases, this step is a bit different. We want to avoid hassle for the end-user as much as possible, so we are extending the beta phase until we think the quality is sufficient for the high demands of users, which is especially important in Kontact, where you likely spend a lot of your time."

One of the most common programs on Linux systems for packaging files is the venerable tar. tar is short for tape archive, and originally, it would archive your files to a tape device. Now, you're more likely to use a file to make your archive. To use a tarfile, use the command-line option -f . To create a new tarfile, use the command-line option -c. To extract files from a tarfile, use the option -x. You also can compress the resulting tarfile via two methods. To use bzip2, use the -j option, or for gzip, use the -z option.

While the new kernel versions mainly correct minor bugs, X.org's next generation X Server offers a range of improvements. Various code segments released by AMD developers allow the X.org open source drivers for Radeon GPUs to utilise the 2D and 3D acceleration features available with Radeon series 5000 graphics cards.