Showing all newswire headlines

For the past year and a half, I've been a co-sponsor of the KDE Quanta+ project helping Eric, Andras and the entire Quanta+ team deliver one of the best web development applications in the world -- Free or otherwise. It has been my pleasure and an honor to be part of bringing Quanta+ to you.

A Darwinian-like post in response of the "Open Source and Post Capitalistic Society" article, that may show how to reach this conclusion while being fairly capitalist.

In a recent LinuxWorld Magazine article, entitled "The Power of Mozilla Firefox and OpenOffice on Windows," I observed some of the causes and practical implications of market share gains being made [by Firefox and OpenOffice.org]. Equally alluring are the strategic implications, which may conjure images of a few heroic Englishmen in pursuit of the Holy Grail--way back in the 1970s.

Last issue, I mentioned that a number of readers were leery of moving to Linux servers because they feared they might lose NetWare's traditional highly granular file and folder permissions matrix. As I also mentioned, Novell assures me that Novell Storage Services would be ported to the SuSE Linux server platform in the upcoming release of Open Enterprise Server. So that's one major hurdle overcome. But there is one other (at least; I'm sure you'll tell me about more as time goes on).

With the growing use of open-source software, businesses may find themselves using someone else's intellectual property without knowing it.

Softmaker has fully released its Microsoft Windows-compatible office suite that runs on the Linux operating system. The German software maker's SoftMaker Office 2004 includes Textmaker for word processing, and Planmaker, a spreadsheet program.

MontaVista Software Inc's plans to boost the real-time capabilities of Linux via a new open source project have been dismissed by both Linux creator Linus Torvalds and fellow embedded operating specialist Wind River Systems Inc.

Open source activists need to get Linux into schools if Windows' pre-eminance on the desktop is ever to be seriously challenged, a panel discussion at LinuxWorld conference in London last week concluded.

A French company that claims to be the world's largest manufacturer of portable DVD players has added a unique capability to its medallion-shaped portable MP3 players. New "Z2" models of Shinco's "Medaillon" (French spelling) line can be used as USB storage devices that boot PCs into embedded Linux.

More than half of all developers are using Eclipse, with the bulk of those users developing Java applications—and the biggest reason why Eclipse is being adopted is because it’s an open-source platform, according to a recent study conducted by BZ Research.

Management guru Clayton Christensen has a paradoxical answer for Microsoft to the challenge posed by open source: Invest in Linux applications for handheld devices.

Wind River Systems Inc's turnaround under chairman and CEO, Ken Klein, looks set to continue thanks to improving market conditions, a new management structure, and its recent conversion to the Linux operating system.

While it’s not universally admired, few would disagree that the phenomenon of community development around the open-source software model has taken hold in many organizations. While first seen by proprietary software companies as perhaps everything from fad to fascism to a force to be reckoned with, many have realized that it’s better to ride Goliath’s massive strength than to nip at its heels.

Mandrakesoft has teamed up with the French ministry of foreign affairs on a program to provide a network of sixty public Internet access points throughout Africa, according to a statement from the French Linux maker.

Almost unnoticed, our favorite Desktop Environment has turned eight. This posting by a young and daring student called Matthias Ettrich started it all. Since then, KDE has come a long way. It did not only evolve technically, but also has one of the greatest communities, where people are not only terribly productive but friends. Thanks to all contributors and happy birthday KDE!

AT&T has set up a lab to evaluate how Linux desktops would work as an everyday technology environment for the company. The telecom giant is doing this as a way to explore potential cost-cutting methods, the company said last week. AT&T is also investigating Macintosh OS X as a potential desktop operating system replacement. AT&T says it will make a decision based on its evaluations at the end of next year.

According to the quarterly report [pdf link] we received today from Wipro, India's largest IT services and business process outsourcing contractor, revenue was up 47% -- and profits were up 67% -- over last year. Better yet, Wipro claims it has added 34 new clients in the last quarter, and "10 are Fortune 1000/Global 1000 customers."

Traditional patch management solutions are better at installing software than they are at patching and upgrading, according to a recent Yankee Group report that recommends comprehensive rather than piecemeal approaches to fixing vulnerabilities in applications.

This article shows how to access a non-booting Linux system with a Knoppix CD, get read-write permissions on configuration files, create and manage partitions and filesystems, and copy files to various storage media and over the network. You can use Knoppix for hardware and system configuration detection and for creating and managing partitions and filesystems. You can do it all from Knoppix's excellent graphical utilities, or from the command line.

People just don't willingly contribute enough money for long term support of Free, Open Source Software, or any free community projects for that matter. The numbers don't lie. Most free software projects put a PayPal link on their websites so their supporters can make donations (non coercive payments). But somehow, their bank balances retain double goose egg balances, or close to it, in absolute perpetuity. These freeloading dead-beats must be pushed into paying. A commercial, "paid for" (coercive payment) model, is the only way that we can ever really sustain GNU/Linux projects and distributions. Wake up and smell the coffee!