Showing all newswire headlines

Gov. Ted Kulongoski joined Beaverton Mayor Rob Drake to welcome entrepreneurs to the new Open Technology Business Center with hopes they can take advantage of Linux software that is taking over an increasing share of the multibillion-dollar market once dominated by rival Microsoft Corp. to the north in suburban Seattle.

Microsoft says it is clamping down on people running pirated versions of its Windows operating system by restricting their access to security features.

If you're an inveterate reader of blogs, then you're probably ready for the latest phenomenon roiling the Internet: social networking software (SNS). SNS enables the development of so-called "Friend of a Friend" networks (FOAF, for short) such as Ryze.com, Linkedin.com, and AlwaysOn.com that have come to the fore the past couple of years. MySpace.com, designed for the high school and college-age crowd, also has grown rapidly. These online personal or business networking sites are exploding in use, often adding tens of thousands of new users every month. Like the enormously popular dating site Friendster.com, all these sites are based on the "six degrees of separation" principle. That's the notion that any two random people on the planet are connected by an average of six acquaintances -- a claim that has been around for some time and supported most recently by a 2003 study reported in the journal Science.

Many IT managers are finding alternatives to proprietary software that doesn't mean having to leave behind their cherished Windows operating systems. Many free and easy-to-use open source applications, including the newly updated Mozilla Firefox Web browser and the steadily improving OpenOffice.org productivity suite, enable company executives to experiment with open source software while allowing users to stay with Microsoft Windows.

osCommerce is a powerful and open source e-commerce storefront system, that's not without a few shortcomings. We pointed out a few of them in our review here a little while back. We also pointed out that one of its great strengths was its extensibility, which is manifested in many user-contributed modules as well as spin-offs. Two such spin-offs of osCommerce are Zen Cart and CRE Loaded - both of which are based on osCommerce and both of which enhance it in a number of ways.

A cross-industry supply chain development initiative, based entirely on open source software, was launched yesterday. Three years in the making, the Lumus Project is essentially a network of buyers and suppliers aimed at developing a shared assessment and development standard across the market.

Like most enterprise shops, we have multiple versions of a Red Hat running on development and production systems. This includes versions of Red Hat 9.0 along with Enterprise 2.1 and 3.0. Each of our in-house applications goes through a Q&A process to verify stability with a particular release. Sometimes we have up to 3 different releases of a particular version in production.

A push mechanism is the delivery of unsolicited information to a mobile device. Learn how to set up a PPG on your own, configure the settings to your own taste, develop push content, and test it with a mobile handset simulator over a TCP/IP network on a LAN.

Aiming to be the "biggest friend of open source," the company says its open-sourcing of Solaris 10 code will help companies and governments across the globe. "But we don't want to move so fast and just dump everything out there," a Sun executive says.

The Southern California Linux Expo welcomes Al Brisard of PingTel to their panel discussion of on the future of VoIP and Open Source. Brisard will bring 17 years of experience in voice and data communications to the discussion. He will join panel members Louie Mamakos, (Chief Technology Officer - Vonage), Jeff Bonforte (President - SIPphone), and Darryl Strauss (President - Digital Ordnance).

Sun Microsystems on Tuesday launched its OpenSolaris program, which provides access to the Solaris operating system via an open source format, and also announced the release of 1,670 patents to the open source community.

According to the Radicati Group Inc., a messaging and collaboration research firm, 45 percent of corporations are already deploying enterprise instant messaging for faster intraoffice communications. If you're looking for an open source alternative to IM products from IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft, consider Jabber's Extensible Communications Platform (XCP). Setting up a Jabber IM server isn't as cumbersome as it used to be a few years ago. Here's how to do it.

Gentoo Linux has a reputation among Linux enthusiast as being one of the most hardcore distributions available today, and for good reason. While it is fast, stable, and mature, it doesn't have a reputation of being a very accessible distro... meaning not anyone can sit down and install Gentoo and have any expectation of simple success. Vida is Spanish for “life” so will it live up to its name? Will it breath new life into the Linux desktop? We are about to find out...

The Free Software Foundation Europe says the company is blocking Linux, Samba and other major open-source projects from taking part in a protocol licensing scheme mandated by the European Commission's antitrust ruling.

Welcome to this year's 4th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Marc Haber announced experimental packages of Exim4 linked against db4.2 for later inclusion in to sarge/sid. OSNews has a guideline on using the new debian-installer to install Debian by Luis Lima.

Business users get customisation help in the next version of the open source firm's customer relationship management software.

Yumex significantly simplifies software management on Fedora Core 3 machines.

Largest Single Grant in Patent History Spurs Software Innovation

The second episode of The Linux Box Show is now available. In this episode Sean discusses software patents, Xfce 4.2, fonts, Torvalds criticizing security approaches, and OOo templates. Stream/Download Audio

IBM granting access to 500 software patents to the open-source community was a good start. Now Big Blue must assemble a consortium of other IP powerhouses with an interest in defending the open-source development model.