Showing all newswire headlines

Analyzing firewall logs is key to understanding the threats your servers face. Knowing what the bad guys are looking for is the first step in assessing how vulnerable your servers are. Both open source and commercial firewalls make log information available to firewall administrator. But taking risk assessment a step further, what if there were a way to apply the principles that make open source software successful to firewall log analysis? A way to help yourself and others at the same time? The DShield project seeks to do just that.

In the ongoing brand war between the Linux and Microsoft marketing factions much of the true value of each of the platforms has become lost in pointless debate, argues James Ainslie.

The ROI of open-source software is a contentious issue. Several recent studies, conducted by Yankee Group, Jupiter Research, Forrester Research and others, have focused on the ROI of upgrading a Windows installation vs. switching to Linux and have concluded that it is less expensive to stick with Windows. But the reports miss a critical point: Switching from Windows to Linux is the worst-case ROI scenario. After all, the new platform requires training and perhaps hiring new personnel -- always expensive propositions -- vs. merely paying for licenses.

Proprietary, the one word that will send a shiver down any Free Software users spine, like Pandora's Box holding a whole wealth of curses inside just waiting to be unleashed. Any business can be proprietary, all they have to do is disallow you the luxury of having the source code, giving users no choice but to buy it through the simple fact that they have no choice but to buy it.

Iona Technologies announced that it is to sponsor an open source enterprise service bus (ESB) project called Celtix, hosted by the ObjectWeb Consortium, in a move likely to accelerate commoditization at the low end of the ESB market.

If you ask me, our competitor's products hedge their bets by designing their software with the odds that many businesses will fail in a couple of years. We build our applications for the businesses that grow and thrive.

Welcome to this year's 25th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Jordi Mallach reported that the GNOME team has completed all uploads needed to bring GNOME 2.10.1 into unstable. With the presence at this year's LinuxTag and the first sarge DVD after the release this will become a hectic week for European Debian people.

Kudos to Martin Ferretti, a stockbroker by day and web junkie by night, has rolled out a nice starter guide to the major and some minor Linux distributions. That not to mention that his site also broadly serves as a resource to many other tools available to web professionals.

GroundWork looks to make its systems-management tool easier to use and more competitive with big-ticket commercial IT-monitoring software.

Sun Microsystems is trying a new way to share its Java server software, launching a project called GlassFish that lets outsiders tinker with the project's source code but that stops well short of making it actual open-source software.

Novell's Mono open-source group will need to jump through Microsoft's IP hoops if it's to develop open versions of Avalon and Indigo.

A Chicago technology consulting firm that adopted the Mambo open source content management system for its own Web site infrastructure found it liked the software so much it began offering it to its clients.

While some in the Linux community are scratching their heads over the latest acquisition by Mandriva, one prominent member has a notion what the French distribution company is doing, and wholeheartedly approves. In fact, it could be the beginning of a whole new kind of of Mandriva distribution.

A new laboratory has opened in Manchester that will allow government departments and local authorities to trial open source software in confidence in an independent test environment. Cheshire County Council is the first public sector organisation to use the facility at the National Computing Centre's (NCC) headquarters to conduct a trial for a joint open source and proprietary desktop platform.

I've been working on a Linux Tips column for an upcoming issue of PC World--a much tougher assignment than my monthly Free Agent ramble, for two reasons: First, I've got only one magazine page to work with, so I'm a bit restricted in what I can tackle. Second, the reality is that the overwhelming majority of our magazine's readers run Windows, not Linux. Since we do our darnedest to make every page of PC World engaging to our readers, I'm out to craft a Linux column that might prove relevant to those who are still computing Bill Gates-style.

New Education Information System will be set up in 10,000 schools. Not a snub to Microsoft, official says.

Using a combination of Linux, solar- and pedal-powered batteries, and wireless network links, ActionAid and Inveneo have completed the first stage of a project to provide telecommunications and Internet services to an area of Uganda that doesn't have any formal infrastructure.

Performance Doubled and J2EE Support Added in Response to Rapid Industry and Community Adoption From Apache, JBoss, Sun Microsystems, Inc., TIBCO

How does Linux compare on a large scale to a well-proven commercial UNIX product?

Welcome to our first issue of Fedora Weekly News.