Showing all newswire headlines

Last Saturday The Mozilla Foundation announced that it was 300% over its target of garnering $75,000 in donations so that it could place a full page ad in the New York Times. Kelly McNeill's osRadio broadcast shows that this strategy has the potential to exceed most paid software company's advertising budgets if extended to more projects and be allowed to go beyond the 10 day time limit that The Mozilla Foundation set.

Last time we talked about Unicode and its benefits. If you've decided you want to reap those benefits yourself, here's how to convert a Linux system from another encoding system to Unicode.

Microsoft says its IP indemnification provides better protection than that offered by rivals Red Hat and Novell - but not all lawyers agree. In a email, sent to Microsoft customers and partners on Wednesday, Steve Ballmer claimed that Windows was a better choice than Linux. His reasons included Microsoft's old favourites of total cost of ownership and security, but also included a relatively new weapon, IP indemnification.

Contending that it’s just too difficult to build applications that respond to events in the real world using current programming languages, iSpheres Corp. is offering an open-source, copyright-free SQL-like language for processing these kinds of requests.

Hardware Acceleration Delivers Wire Speed Performance to Award-Winning Security Software Provided to Systems Integrators and Network Equipment Vendors

NSW Commerce Minister John Della Bosca has ruled out umpiring government contracts in an effort to promote open source, saying individual agencies would choose their own software.

And this comes straight from the horse’s mouth! Software giant Microsoft has finally acknowledged Linux as its strongest competitor, much to the delight of Australia’s open source industry association (OSIA).

Computer Associates International on Monday plans to widen the field for open source alternatives to commercial databases with the general release of the Ingres r3 database on the Linux and Windows platforms.

Deciding to switch to Linux is one of the daunting questions every CIO must continually evaluate. Fortunately, the answer is getting simplier as Linux evolves into the enterprise-ready versions making their way onto the market today.

Last month Michal Zalewski posted to the Bugtraq security mailing list the results of a small experiment he carried out involving feeding randomly generated HTML pages into some of the Web's most widely used browsers. The results were somewhat alarming. All of the open source browsers Michal tested crashed when faced with this kind of input. Only one browser stood up well against this type of stress test. Which one? A round of applause please for, er, Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

The Office of Government Commerce has made recommendations that public procurement of software should consider open source solutions, citing, amongst other case studies, the experience of a Dublin-based hospital that made significant savings in transferring all its software to open source.

Microsoft chief executive officer, Steve Ballmer, has acknowledged Linux as the "only game in town" when it comes to competing with the proprietary software heavyweight's offerings, Australia's peak open source body claims.

Delivers High-Performance, Enterprise-Class Relational Database Management Solution to the Open Source Community

Lulu, founded by open source pioneer Bob Young, has opened a new software marketplace geared at allowing individual developers and projects to publish boxed sets, CD/DVD media kits, and printed docs and e-books themselves, and drive proceeds and donations back to the projects.

MontaVista has agreed to provide Linux "platforms" to NEC for its hardware reference designs for mobile phones, digital consumer devices, and car navigation systems. NEC, meanwhile, will join MontaVista's hardware vendor self-certification program, and will resell and support MontaVista Linux.

Security-software vendor F-Secure Corp. last week introduced two open-source products that let administrators route Windows security reporting through a single Linux-management interface.

After launching two of the world's first Linux smartphones, China's E28 is offering handset makers the opportunity to licence its software and hardware designs. "With our technology, manufacturers can bring their own Linux-based smartphones to market within only a couple of months," said chairman and chief executive officer Roger Kung at the LinuxWorld conference in Frankfurt. "We view Linux as a very powerful contender to the smartphone operating system software developed by Microsoft and Symbian."

How pervasive is the use of open-source software? InformationWeek Research measured adoption of open-source architecture via an online survey completed by 420 business-technology professionals familiar with their companies' desktop, network, server, or mainframe operating systems. Two-thirds of companies interviewed use open-source products; another 16% expect to use open source in 2005.

Airport security is an ever-growing concern these days, as fears about the potential for terrorist attacks loom worldwide. One airport adopting major security upgrades is the Santiago Airport in Chile, which recently opened 60 checkpoint kiosks utilizing biometric security software running on SUSE Enterprise Linux.

IBM has put Linux on the menu after signing a deal to develop Linux-based systems to help food and consumer goods distributors optimise supply chains and customer management.