Showing headlines posted by KernelShepard

To what extent does Android respect the freedom of its users? For a computer user that values freedom, that is the most important question to ask about any software system.

We're past the era when every Free Software project is targeted at us hackers specifically. Failing to notice this will cause us to ignore the deeper problem software freedom faces.

For the past week, the Moonlight team has been busy porting Moonlight to Android devices and today, showed it off at Mix 11.

Florian Mueller has been killing it these past few months with his analysis of various tech patent suits on his FOSSpatents blog, and today he's unearthed a pretty major bombshell: at least 43 Android source files that appear to have been directly copied from Java.

Since we’re at it – we not only took the new Mono garbage col­lec­tor through it’s paces regard­ing lin­ear scal­ing but we also made some inter­est­ing mea­sure­ments when it comes to query per­for­mance on the two .NET plat­form alternatives.

Sparkleshare – the open-source cloud storage (think Dropbox) alternative – has hit its first beta milestone.

Some aspects of this are unclear, so I believe this is mostly the time to ask the right questions, and time will provide the answers, probably sooner rather than later.

Today Oracle sued Google over Java patents and copyrights that they claim Google's Android OS infringes. The lawsuit claims that Google knowingly infringed on those patents, and that the continued distribution of Google's Android is harming Oracle's Java Business.

RMS's utopian advice runs counter to commercial logic and fails to advance the cause of software freedom.

I'm very excited to announce I have just landed support for downloading and importing your Amazon MP3 purchases into Banshee. It is a simple extension that understands the download queue file that Amazon delivers after a purchase is made. Linux Desktop integration is provided so that your web and file browsers associate Banshee with the download queue file.

After lots of intense work and collaboration, the Netbook profile for MeeGo 1.0 has been released today. As such, I am particularly pleased to announce in conjunction that Banshee is the default and integrated media player for MeeGo.

Excited to see the work happening on the Linux consumer space in the MeeGo Universe. There is now a MeeGo 1.0 download available for everyone to try out. At Novell we have been contributing code, design and artwork for this new consumer-focused Linux system and today both Michael Meeks and Aaron Bockover blog about the work that they have been doing on MeeGo.

Yesterday I had a look at the response of the Joomla! community to the news that Microsoft had signed the Joomla! Contributor Agreement and was contributing code to the content management project. You probably won’t be surprised to find that some people don’t like the idea. The speed and vehemence of their rejection of Microsoft’s involvement in the project is entirely predictable, but none the less depressing for that.

The Mono team is proud to bring you a preview of C# 5.0 a few years before our friends in Building 41 do. A snapshot of the code is available in the demo-repl.zip file. This contains the csharp.exe C# REPL shell and the Mono.CSharp.dll compiler-as-a-service assembly.

In the past weeks (actually, months) I've been doing some changes in the MonoDevelop GUI to make it more functional and better looking. Here is the result.

I wanted to give my readers a little bit of an insight of the various things that we are doing at Novell in my team. This is just focused on the work that we do at Novell, and not on the work of the larger Mono community which is helping us fill in the blanks in many areas of Mono.

The sysadmin community, once the backbone of Linux adoption, keeps asking "but what about me?". Indeed. What about them? What are we doing about these heroes? The heroes that ssh in the middle of the night to a remote server to fix a database; The heroes that remove a chubby log file clogging the web server arteries; The very same heroes that restore a backup after we drag and dropped the /bin directory into the trashcan?

Last weekend, during the tenth edition of FOSDEM, we had the joy of organizing the first ever Mono developer room. While there had been talks about Mono before (including Miguel's great presentation at FOSDEM 2007), it was still a rather underrepresented topic. For that reason, Stephane and I requested a developer room and gladly we got it.

About nine months ago we released MonoDevelop 2.0 and Mono 2.4. Today we are releasing the much anticipated upgrades to both. Mono 2.6 and MonoDevelop 2.2. The Mono team and contributors worked on this release like we have never worked before. Thanks to everyone that reported bugs, filed feature requests, contributed code and helped newcomers with Mono.

In the item we ran yesterday about GNOME and the GNU Project, one aspect got snowed under a little bit. It turns out a claim made in the iTWire article about the role a blog post by Miguel De Icaza was false, and even though the claim wasn't ours, I did repeat it, and therefore, should correct it too. I also need to offer apologies for not framing the opening of the article clear enough - had I framed it better, a lot of pointless discussion and name-calling could've been avoided.