Showing all newswire headlines

eWEEK Labs often hears IT managers express a desire to loosen Microsoft Corp.'s grip on the office productivity market by deploying alternative office suites. The continuing maturation of open-source office applications, along with the fact that these applications have no licensing fees, makes such a move increasingly attractive—but not for all companies.

Linux backers foresee desktop gains - optimistic Linux will reach mainstream status, typically defined as 10 per cent market share or better, within the next five years. To get there, analysts say, developers and businesspeople behind Linux will need to make some changes. The user interfaces used by most Linux distributions are a good place to start, independent analyst Amy Wohl said. Some relatively simple cosmetic changes to make Linux look prettier and more similar to dominant Windows conventions would make a big difference, she said.

Amid rosy forecast of the industry and the government’s initiative to boost its market, domestic Linux firms are showing concern over possible dominance of the burgeoning market by multinational companies.

Mozilla's newsgroups are still hosted on Netscape's servers. While the Mozilla Foundation has the hardware for running its own news server, it has no spare resources to actually set it up, create the new groups, work out a transition plan and so on. If any experienced news admins out there want to help out, the job application is bug 215294.

This mostly bug fix release improves PHP 5's stability and irons out some of the remaining issues before PHP 5 can be deemed release quality. Note that it is still not recommended for mission-critical use but people are encouraged to start playing with it and report any problems.

The purpose of this little tutorial is to introduce a better solution to upgrading KDE, one that will allow a user to get his/her hands on a release the night it hits the mirrors, without having to hose the base OS install. "A miracle?" you say. Well...perhaps just the saving grace we have been looking for. The solution is to Konstruct a new desktop rather than using RPM or DEB to upgrade the system packages.

Sun’s ballyhooed new 3D desktop interface, Looking Glass, should be shipping to customers early next year, Sun says. But applications will need an update to make full use of its features.

We are getting to a point with our software where the desktop is going to play a key and integral part to new users and businesses. This means not only refining the technology that we already have, but working together to meet the goals and ambitions of desktop integration with the freedesktop.org project.

Pico Peta Simputer is introducing the Amida Simputer, a made-in-India PDA aimed at retail and corporate customers. The company hopes that its product will change the perception customers have of the Simputer. The prototype for the Simputer—positioned as an affordable and feature-rich PDA—was first developed by Indian scientists at the IISC Bangalore in 1998, with the aim of bridging the digital divide in India by enabling mass adoption of the product.

"Forgent is committed to developing all of its assets and technologies to maximize shareholder value," said Richard Snyder, chairman and CEO of the company. Don't those words just chill you to the bone? Maximizing shareholder value. As if that excuses everything. Maximizing shareholder value, no matter who gets hurt. That's the proprietary way. The problem is, software is too vital to the public interest for it to be held hostage by every greedy patent-holding pig on the planet. The same goes for his shareholder piglets, too. True to the piggy template, Forgent announced it has sued everybody and his cousin for"infringing" its patent on JPEGs, a standard format that everyone used in good faith for ages. The patent is almost two decades old, and now they want their money. Gotcha. The Proprietary IP Business Model.

The Linux Box is in the final stages of planning for a Linux Home Desktop Kit and is requesting participation from other members of the FOSS community.

Gnome 3.0 is a long way off still and I have already written a wishlist for Gnome, however this time around I thought I write some specific feature requests for the next major Gnome release (coming in more than a year from now). These are applications that I would like to see included by default on Gnome 3.0 for a more full and integrated experience.

A recent survey of advanced technology companies indicates that Open Source software is becoming an explicit component in enterprise Information Technology (IT) strategy and architecture. Some nine out of ten respondents include Open Source in their planning, according to CATAAlliance, which depicts itself as “Canada's leading, most influential and entrepreneurial technology alliance.”

Tokyo-based open source integrator Ten Art-ni has joined The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL). Ten Art-ni will participate in Data Center Linux and Carrier Grade Linux working groups to advance Linux in Japan.

This interview with Denx founder and CEO Wolfgang Denk discusses the popular and free Denx embedded Linux distributions, Denx's business model, software patents, and other matters related to embedded Linux markets and technology.

While GNU/Linux has gained popularity as an operating system, many criticize it for lacking "killer applications" capable of competing with their Windows and Mac OS X proprietary counterparts. Some killer applications, however, haven't received the recognition they deserve. Here's a short overview of some professional-quality Free Software applications that run under Linux.

A Dutch seller of a wireless networking product could get itself out of legal hot water, if it publishes some information on how to install its software, the programmer's attorney said Friday.

The information technology ministry has launched a pilot project [in Islamabad] worth Rs37 million to train 4,000 government servants in open source software. [Editor: I think the amount translates to about $650,000 USD, based on Yahoo's conversion tool.]

DLT Solutions, Inc. was named as the government technology solutions partner for Red Hat as the Linux company pushes into the public sector. The Raleigh-based company has said that government sales is a key focus in 2004.

You may not have heard of MySQL, but I can almost guarantee you've used its database at some point. If you've ever filled out a form on the Web or purchased something online, there's a good chance the data you provided is stored in a MySQL open-source database. This simple-to-use database is behind many of the transactions that take place on the Internet, because unlike Microsoft's database products, it's free and it runs on both Linux and Microsoft operating systems.