To use your own IRC client, join channel #boycottnovell in FreeNode.
Come and join us while the site takes a break around the 4th of July. The IRC channel stays active.
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To use your own IRC client, join channel #boycottnovell in FreeNode.
Come and join us while the site takes a break around the 4th of July. The IRC channel stays active.
]]>“…Microsoft wished to promote SCO and its pending lawsuit against IBM and the Linux operating system. But Microsoft did not want to be seen as attacking IBM or Linux.”
–Larry Goldfarb, Baystar, key investor in SCO
Summary: Microsoft extorts $120 Million out of rival Intuit, using the patent troll it is grooming
ACCORDING TO Glyn Moody, the world’s biggest patent troll — an anti-competitive man [1, 2] who originates in Microsoft — makes his move to make some more money through patent racketeering. Others at Microsoft are still behind him [1, 2], so his firm (essentially a shell) should not be treated an an entity separate from Microsoft. Moody calls it “the Super-Troll” (we called it Übertroll).
As with all patent trolls, the danger is that the more companies accept these proffered licensing deals, the stronger the trolls become. I imagine we’ll see many more such stories leaking out as Intellectual Ventures gains in confidence and ambition.
The big problem is not only that Myhrvold’s an ex-Microsoftie, but that Microsoft is also an investor in the company; this means that we are not going to see Microsoft on the receiving end of Intellectual Venture’s “offers”. But there is a very real danger that at some point the larger supporters of open source will be.
[...]
Expect, then, Mr Myhrvold to emerge as public enemy number one for the free software community; it’s just a matter of time now that the super-troll has awoken from its deep slumbers and started to feed on those that foolishly fail to defend themselves.
Moody links to this article which is titled “Intuit Taxed $120 Million by Intellectual Ventures.” It says: “Its latest deal is a licensing agreement with financial software company Intuit Inc. that will bring in $120 million, according to people who have been told about the transaction.” It is worth reminding that it is not possible to cross-license with a patent troll because it hasn’t actual products which may constitute an infringement.
TechDirt complains that the press does not scrutinise such people for the huge damage they cause to the industry.
Aaron Martin-Colby points us to Good Magazine’s softball interview with Erich Spangenberg, considered by many to be one of the more successful “patent trolls” or “non-practicing entities” out there.
In other news of interest, Novell has just earned yet another software patent.
Network content in dictionary-based (de)compression , patent No. 7,554,467, invented by Kasman E. Thomas of Wilton, Conn., assigned to Novell, Inc. of Provo.
Yes, Novell is part of the problem. Its exclusive deal with Microsoft is hinged on software patents and it legitimises them. █
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Summary: A lot of news about Mono with special emphasis on key developments
A GREAT DEAL has happened [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] since Richard Stallman spoke his mind about Mono. Coverage in the press was initially scarce because Stallman’s statement had been made public just before the end of the week, but here is ZDNet UK catching up.
GNU project founder Richard Stallman has called on developers to pull back from Mono, arguing that increasing use of the open-source toolset could prompt legal action by Microsoft.
Stallman does not even say much (or anything) about the fact that Mono makes Windows stronger [1, 2, 3]. Novell makes it happen. It is almost Novell’s obligation to do so because as the SCO-faithful Maureen O'Gara put it a couple of days ago, “Of course, without Microsoft propping up its Linux business, Novell would be in the tank.” To say more on the path to Windows, watch how Novell loses to its so-called ‘partner’. From the news:
Sydney Water has decided to migrate its email platform from Novell’s GroupWise to Microsoft Outlook/Exchange and is looking for a contractor to help implement the change.
Is Novell trying to befriend the company which takes away its Netware and GroupWise customers? If so, why? And why does it help Microsoft by promoting and spreading .NET? GreyGeek writes the following in LinuxToday:
De Icaza has been trying for EIGHT YEARS to get a distro to become totally dependent on MONO, and since Novell bought De Icaza, both have increased their propaganda efforts, with the assistance of Microsoft TEs, trolls, astroturfers and fanbois.
IF MONO is what its advocates are saying it is (the best thing since sliced bread and safe to use), it would already be in widespread adoption by now. The fact that you can count dependent programs on the fingers of one hand says VOLUMES about how the Linux community as a whole totally distrusts MONO. They are right to hold that distrust.
Java is open source and is MUCH less susceptible to patent attacks. It has CONSIDERABLY MORE tools and applications built with it and for it than MONO does.
Qt4 is GPL’d and has an excellent API and development tools, bar none. It also has excellent apps built by it and tools available for it.
MONO serves no purpose, except to raise the risk of patent attack or of being left in isolation WHEN Microsoft adds extensions to .NET that patents will prevent being added to MONO. This is backwards from Microsoft’s usual attack mode.
The remainder of this comment is well worth reading.
Perhaps the most interesting finding today is this poll. Based on 557 votes in total, 62% don’t trust Microsoft on Mono (at the time of writing). Compare that to 73% who said "No" to Mono (for whatever reason). Might it be safe to infer from this that the majority of people are with Stallman on this subject?
Looking at distributions more specifically, Stallman referred to Debian as an example. One of the Debian officials wrote an open letter to Stallman. It concludes as follows:
So, Debian didn’t change “the default installation” (whatever that’s supposed to be) but the dependency of a package which is used by a minority of our users who explicitly wishes to install everything GNOME related (which is to the best of my knowledge in accordance with upstream developers who added tomboy to the default GNOME installation, too).
This is already covered by Heise
Debian - Mono is not in our default installation
[...]
In response to the open letter written by free software guru Richard Stallman about the Mono problem, Alexander Schmehl, Debian developer and spokesperson for the GNU/Linux distribution has pointed out that Debian has no plans to include the controversial programming environment in the default GNOME installation. Stallman, who opened his letter with “Debian’s decision to include Mono in the default installation, for the sake of Tomboy”, had suggested that Debian were including the Mono libraries for anyone using Debian with GNOME.
There are other noteworthy remarks and there are skeptics of Mono inside Debian. How is this for an argument?
I recently came across this very interesting article, written in 1999, which details the tactics used by Microsoft to fight IBM. They obviously saw OS/2 as a threat. Back then, Windows 95 was the trading token. They could have caused IBM a great deal of harm shall they refused to license it to them, but it seems the idea of subjugating IBM was more appealing. This is how Garry Norris (IBM) put it:
“Microsoft repeatedly said we would suffer in terms of prices, terms, conditions and support programs, as long as we were offering competing products.“
“[Microsoft] insisted that IBM sell 300,000 copies of Windows 95 in the first five months or face a 20 percent price increase“
Nice deal, eh? Make your dependancy on Windows 95 stronger, or else we’ll use your existing dependancy on Windows 95 against you. No surprise IBM abandoned the PC market. Are Red Hat and Sun/Oracle set on the same direction?
Why don’t people learn from history? It is an immense loss to ignore all these lessons. Consider what Bill Gates, for example, had to say on this subject.
Canonical repeatedly insists that it will not change its Mono policy, not even after recommendations from the FSF and SFLC. There is a lot of coverage about it, such as:
This comes at a price. From yesterday, for example, there is this:
Our company also takes the potential threat of patents seriously. As such we stand by the position of the SFLC, FSF and RMS in that Mono is just too dangerous.
We are therefore going to look at switching from Ubuntu to Fedora.
The threat is too great to ignore. I wish the UTB would reconsider this as more harm will come to Ubuntu rather than good.
For context, there is more in this address.
Sam Varghese cites the assessment of the SFLC and aligns this with Canonical’s relative apathy.
The Ubuntu technical board has announced that it sees no reason to consider a dependency on Mono as an issue when suggesting applications to be included in the default set included in the GNU/Linux distribution.
[...]
The Software Freedom Law Centre, which provides “legal representation and other law-related services to protect and advance Free, Libre and Open Source Software” has a diametrically different view.
Following the statement made by Free Software Foundation chief Richard M. Stallman against Debian’s inclusion of Mono as a default, SFLC technology director, Bradley Kuhn , has written an essay, backing Stallman’s view about it being better to avoid a language like C#.
And to conclude, popular blogger devnet writes about Ubuntu’s decision: “I think this is pretty bold…they’re inviting someone to throw the first stone so to speak.
“I’m with Stallman on this one….better safe than sorry.” █
“I saw that internally inside Microsoft many times when I was told to stay away from supporting Mono in public. They reserve the right to sue”
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Summary: Microsoft demonstrates that non-Free software is simply incapable of handling mission-critical tasks like GNU/Linux does (in Wall Street for example)
BACKED by roughly 20 references, we have already written quite extensively about the recurring issues at the LSE (the stock market, not the school). It is considered to be Microsoft’s poster child that they brag about in commercials all over their Web site. By some people’s assessment, this is considered the case study for Microsoft, never mind the excessive redundancy (cost) and poor track record.
Well, guess what?
The LSE is calling it quits and dumping the platform.
What an unbelievable PR disaster. IDG has the details:
London Stock Exchange reportedly to dump £40m platform
[...]
Dropping TradElect would be a dramatic about-face for the exchange, which had heavily promoted its ability to rival newer, dedicated electronic exchanges, and plumbed millions of pounds into doing so. It runs on HP ProLiant Servers and Microsoft .Net and SQL Server 2000 systems, and within a Cisco network architecture.
How will Microsoft respond to this PR gaffe, which was probably an expected blunder? Analogous systems running GNU/Linux are true success stories.
In a similar vein, now that the UK abandons this system, who can ever rely on proprietary formats like OOXML, for example? That too will be at risk if Glyn Moody gets his way. He is rallying for support at the moment.
Next week, I’m taking part in a debate with a Microsoft representative about the passage of the OOXML file format through the ISO process last year. Since said Microsoftie can draw on the not inconsiderable resources of his organisation to provide him with a little back-up, I thought I’d try to even the odds by putting out a call for help to the unmatched resource that is the Linux Journal community. Here’s the background to the meeting, and the kind of info I hope people might be able to provide.
Not surprisingly, the meeting is neither for my nor Microsoft’s benefit, but for that of Richard Steel, who is CIO of the London Borough of Newham. Those with good memories may recall that back in 2003 it looked like Newham was going to switch to open source, in what could have been a real breakthrough for free software in the UK, but that it then changed its mind and signed a long-term - and secret - deal with Microsoft. Winning Newham was so important to Microsoft that it helped set up a competitive trial…
The Newham situation is one that we wrote about in:
Indeed, it is rather ugly. Newham’s people are hopefully paying attention to the significant news from LSE. It is also in London. █
]]>If Microsoft wants me and others like me, to take IE 8 seriously, I expect them to treat our intelligence with some respect. Anything less, and after a while, we’ll have been taught to discount their bold claims.
• Excellent example for the threat to the openness of the internet
Were you ever worried that the internet could be controlled by single vendor technology? That there is certain information that you can only see and get when using one specific browser? That interoperability is at risk?
You are certainly not paranoid if you have such worries. Microsoft Australia now gives an example for what is possible and done by offering the chance to get $10,000 by finding information on some website - WHICH CAN ONLY BE VIEWED USING INTERNET EXPLORER 8 !!
• Browser Wars: Get the facts! Sort of…
But… consider the situation in Europe where Windows 7 will be supplied sans browser.
Related posts:
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Summary: Beyond the hype there is a rather colossal failure that the press actually reports on
HERE IS just a quick pointer to this new article from IDG. It shows that Windows XP (and GNU/Linux) is still keeping Vista out of people’s PCs.
A year ago today, Microsoft pulled the plug on Windows XP, no longer selling new copies in most venues. The June 30 kill date for XP followed a six-month outcry from users about Windows Vista, with demands that Microsoft keep XP available alongside Vista for the many users who were frustrated by ease-of-use, compatibility, and retraining issues.
The same should be expected from Vista 7, which is just like Windows Vista under its hood. And speaking of Vista 7 pricing, here is an interesting new accusation of price-fixing.
Who in their right mind will purchase Windows 7 at these prices?
The answer is of course is that Windows will not be sold at that price. Instead Microsoft will use its OEM monopoly control to fix prices so that it is priced to undercut competitors in any area they make an inroad by offering low OEM prices with conditions attached such as hardware spec. price etc. and offering rebates so that OEMs effectively are paid by Microsoft to keep competitors off preloaded systems. They are doing exactly this on netbooks and nettops right now, and there is a long suspicion that the reluctance of the likes of Dell and HP to advertise or aggressively sell Linux PCs and laptops that are preloaded with Linux in the past is due to such market manipulation.
See what we published about the scam of Vista 7 only a day ago. It is related to this. █
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In early 2008, School District No. 33 trustees voted to replace virtually all 1,200-or-so computers Chilliwack elementary school students were using for a cost about $600,000.
The major challenge, beyond replacing the equipment, has been making sure the students and staff know how to use the new gear–more specifically the new computers’ operating system.
If you fall into the camp that believes that Linux/Free Software is at war with proprietary software for the future, there’s good news…or fairly good news if you are a cynic. Look at what’s being done.
June 22 through June 27th…2009.
The HeliOS Project built transported and placed 16 Linux Computers in and around Austin.
This time on a very special Linux Outlaws, Dan and Fab are actually in one room together and besides being silly and having a lot of fun talk about shitty beer, Moblin, German Internet censorship, Opera Unite, Valve possibly releasing native Linux games, Nvidia prefering Windows CE to Android and much, much more.
Arkeia Software, a worldwide provider of backup and disaster recovery software and Mandriva (EURONEXT: MLMAN) the leading European Linux publisher, today announced the optimized integration of Arkeia Network Backup with Mandriva Enterprise Server and a deepened partnership to bring enterprise backup to Linux environments.
The Florida Linux Show 2009 Orlando will be held at the lavish Radisson Resort Orlando-Celebration in Kissimmee/Orlando Florida on October 24th 2009, from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm. Rooms are a mere $82.00 a night which gives guest the run of the hotel. Genral attendance to the show is $20.
Columbus, Ohio: The Ohio Linux community continues its forward march and is gaining momentum every year. Each year brings a new group of speakers and generates more excitement—2009 will be no exception! The seventh annual Ohio LinuxFest will be on September 25-26, 2009 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center, in downtown Columbus, Ohio.
I am on my way back from FISL 10 in Porto Alegre, Brazil and what a great conference it was. The president of Brazil stopped in on Friday and addressed the crowd saying how important free software was and that “Free software prevailed [in Brazil] and we don’t need to buy anymore only what Microsoft wants to sell”. Hopefully Brazil will become even more of an example of how governments can and should adopt open source software.
Guess what? You don’t
The command line is a powerful tool. With a few keystrokes (or by using scripts or shortcuts), you can perform tasks in one or two steps that can take multiple sets in a graphical user interface. For some tasks, the command line is just a faster and more efficient way of doing things. If you want more information, check this out.
The global technological stage received a boost yesterday in Lagos with the launch of Omatek handtop Personal Computer (PC).
Disclosing that it is the world’s smallest PC, the Group Managing Director of Omatek Computers Limited, Engr. Mrs. Florence Seriki, said it was in continuation of the company’s trail blazing efforts on the global technological stage.
On July 1, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu in partnership with Eucalyptus Systems, an open-source cloud infrastructure firm, will be launching Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud Services.
Earlier this month we reported on Linux support for a new, unreleased Intel IGP after several commits hit the Intel driver’s X.Org DDX driver (xf86-video-intel).
Coming out soon after this will be the start of X Server 1.7 development releases, with the latest schedule having it planned for an August release.
Miro is an open-source and cost-free application for watching Internet TV in high definition quality. It’s available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.
Transmission is a lightweight BitTorrent client built in GTK, with a clean and simple interface. Although most people prefer more popular clients like Vuze, Deluge or KTorrent, Transmission incorporates all the major features one needs for downloading torrents and can prove a very good alternative to those, especially if you don’t need all those whistles and bells.
Using torrents has become quite an everyday routine for most of us. Though eating up all your bandwidth in one bite, they surely can take the load off traffic-heavy servers. How? Each of us becomes a peer that “seeds” tiny bits of the download, leading to exponentially growing speed and availability. Most of the times, people associate the word “torrent” with piracy, which certainly doesn’t come as a surprise, but there are a lot of other legal uses of this great technology.
There are not many burning tools in the Linux world compared to the Windows world, but what is most important that all burning tools for Linux are free of charge, open-source and work very well. Here are 6 burning tools to make your app search less exhausting:
If you’ve been using Twitter through its website, I recommend that you use a desktop client instead to further enhance your tweeting experience. Since Twitter has become immensely popular, there are tons and tons of available desktop applications that support this great micro-blogging service. So I’m here to assist you on narrowing down the choices, and hope to somehow give you an idea on picking the one that suits you best.
JAG, a free software arcade-puzzle 2D game, has been released for Linux. The aim of JAG is to break all of the target pieces on each level before time runs out.
KDE Community Ships Release Candidate of KDE 4.3 Free Desktop, Containing Many New Features and Improvements
July 1st, 2009. The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of KDE 4.3 RC1, a release candidate of the 3rd iteration over the KDE 4 desktop, applications and development platform.
Let’s a play a game of “Spot the New Feature”! Here’s a screenshot, submitted by our own Helio, that shows a new feature in Plasma that will debut in KDE 4.4…
Core KDE developer Aaron Seigo posted a much-anticipated screencast of the upcoming 4.3 release.
This snapshot is approaching the final release (due in a month) and comes after more than 2300 bugs (including duplicates) were closed.
Krusader is a twin-panel file manager for KDE which has been around for around seven years and was always a good alternative to Konqueror since KDE3 days. Its interface resembles the one of the popular file manager Midnight Commander for the console. Codenamed ‘Mars Pathfinder’, 2.0 is the first KDE4 stable release, bringing lots of new features and coming with the entire interface ported to Qt4 libraries.
This release offers an updated kernel v2.6.29 for 64-bit systems, OpenOffice 3.0, Firefox 3.0.6 and IBM Cell SDK v3.1.0.1, as well as the next generation of ps3vram for fast, temporary file storage or swap using PS3 video RAM. With this release, ps3vram is up to 50% faster than in YDL 6.1 and is automatically enabled as swap.
Sabayon 4.2 will catch you: just the best of the Out-Of-The-Box, GNOME, multimedia applications and nothing more than what you need for your daily tasks, but what about your free time? We’ve got it. XBMC (formerly known as Xbox Media Center) 9.04 is what you’ve ever wanted to build up a fantastic HTPC or Internet Multimedia Box, so what’s better than having it ready to use? Show off the new Sabayon Linux to your friends, they have no more excuses to not try it!
We reviewed the June 2009 release v.4.2 of Puppy Linux, which comes in a 110 MB file download from their website, or from accepted mirrors. The iso file is then burnt to CD and runs as a Live CD. After installing the Live CD into RAM, I experienced my HP Laptop (2GB RAM) run faster than I’ve ever seen with any other OS or Linux Distro.
NeddySeagoon and I have been trying to figure out the official 10th anniverary date of Gentoo, and here are the dates I’ve figured out so far…
Just released are two ‘mini’ editions of PCLinuxOS. You will know them by their names MiniMe and Zen Gnome Mini.
There has been an explosion of activity going on over here at PCLinuxOS. The quarterly ISO updates for PCLinuxOS 2009.2 and PCLinuxOS Gnome 2009.2 are now available featuring a fully updated iso with the latest applications from the PCLinuxOS repositories.
It’s not exactly the Sundance Film Festival, but Red Hat’s new Red Hat Stories film series is setting the standard for technology marketing through film.
The Red Hat Premier Cloud Provider Program has been established to address the increased interest in cloud computing from Red Hat customers, both in building virtualized internal infrastructure systems and extending their applications into the clouds.
As the dominant supplier of commercial Linux operating systems, a key player in middleware, and a wannabe with a pretty good shot at being a force in server virtualization, Red Hat would seem to be a shoo-in as a player in cloud computing. But for the moment, Amazon’s EC2 sets the pace in commercial cloud computing, and that means being Amazon’s friend is particularly important to companies like Red Hat that want to make money from clouds.
Evans: Red Hat is firmly positioned to take on CIOs’ core concerns with security and interoperability. With JBoss, RHEL, and our virtualization offerings, Red Hat already provides the trusted low-level infrastructure, or “substrate” as I’ve called it, upon which many CIOs depend. Given that we believe most cloud-computing involvement, at least initially, will be in private clouds, it’s important that CIOs feel they can trust their cloud infrastructure. Red Hat delivers that trust.
Red Hat has launched a cloud partner and certification program, and Amazon is the first to join. The VAR Guy is hardly surprised. This is a sign of things to come from Red Hat — and another indication of Amazon Web Services’ growing influence over next-generation solutions providers. What’s in store for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss open source partners? Here’s the scoop, from The VAR Guy.
In the case of Red Hat’s hosted desktop virtualization solution, this is achieved through the use of Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux), sVirt and the KVM hypervisor. This combination of open source technologies provides a level of isolation equivalent to that which exists in physical deployments, and in doing so dramatically increases the security of virtual desktops and the hypervisors on which they reside.
The native Linux virtualisation hypervisor Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) has reached milestone 87 and now integrates the qemu emulator into a single package.
Scores of changes have occurred since the 86 release last month, and with the merge of qemu upstream brings better tuning and visibility of the live migration process, the setting of qcow2 (qemu disk image format) cluster size is now allowed, qcow2 optimisations, and networking improvements.
I started using Fedora back in the Fedora 8 days. I’ve always tried to run SELinux in enforcing mode and back in the Fedora 8-9 days that seemed to mean I’d have some SELinux issue every few days. It wasn’t a big deal, but it was annoying and very tempting to turn it off completely.
It seems like these would also make an ideal way to embed a Linux OS on a small form factor board for that carputer or NAS appliance you’ve been thinking about building. Super Talent is currently shipping units but didn’t disclose pricing.
With as many set-top boxes as there suddenly appear to be in the home video market, as long as any one of them has a strong central feature, it could be the one that becomes a household name. Look at TiVo, Slingbox, and AppleTV: Each of these built a TV-based ecosystem around a single unique feature: TiVo’s was the DVR, Slingbox was the place-shifting concept, and AppleTV was iTunes.
Now, IPTV startup Myka has designed its own media center STB, focusing on BitTorrent as its winning central feature. And while it doesn’t carry all the functions one would expect in a home theater PC (HTPC), it offers enough power and functionality to be considered a little more than your run-of-the-mill set top box. Like the title says, if you’re a little bit lazy…you could even consider Myka a pre-built HTPC. Betanews got an exclusive look at this new device.
Blackmagic Design Inc. has released support for software developers who want to use DeckLink, Intensity and Multibridge products on the Linux platform. Support includes the software driver and an SDK for developers, and can be downloaded now from the Blackmagic Design web site, free of charge.
THE PALM PRE smartphone seems to be selling very well, according to Charter Equity Research.
By ringing up a few of its mates in the channel, the analyst outfit has worked out that sales into the channel in June were more than 300,000 units.
When I joined MySQL back in June of 2005, one of the first “MySQL Truths” I learned and repeated often when discussing MySQL with others was “release early, release often.” If you’ve been using MySQL for any length of time, you know what that statement means – it meant that MySQL was: (1) dedicated to getting new features and enhancements into the hands of its community so the software’s quality could be validated; (2) eager to take early feedback on those features so the input could rapidly be incorporated back into the product allowing everyone to benefit; (3) committed to very frequent releases of the software so helpful new features and/or external contributions that were ready for action could quickly be put into play and not sit idle on the shelf. And if you’ve been around Open Source for a while now, you know this is the spirit in which most providers of Open Source software operate.
Open source for our company is also really huge. We release all the source code that we have to the general public and the communities we work in. We make a concerted effort to do that.
All of what we use is open source. We’re a completely Ruby-on-Rails engineering team. The bigger idea of sharing and collaborating, we push that hard. It’s a distinct quality: are you willing to money into investing money and people’s salaries into something that might not make you money right away?
Because of the fast evolution of Continuous Integration (CI), the first generation of enablement tools proliferated at lightning speed. Open source CI tools became widely used due to the ease in which an engineer could install it and start tackling the initial CI challenges that he faced. Once proven effective, these apps (particularly Cruise Control) spread like wildfire among other build engineers, and in most cases, development shops began ‘sewing’ several instances together.
Beckstrom said he has faith the Internet, which has shown resiliency as an open source of information. “The importance of the Internet as a free-flowing source of information is being underscored right now by the events in Iran,” said Beckstrom in a statement after being named to the psotion. “It shows the power of human expression through a free and open Net.”
Hello all. The 2009 Blender F1 Challenge has concluded and the results are in…
ZORDAN defends his Title as the Blender F1 Champion!
Colosa’s open source business process management (BPM) software, ProcessMaker, that enables enterprises and public organizations to automate paper-based workflow processes, has been selected by Daytop-NJ to automate its core workflow processes and ensure compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
The world is not enough. Following the recent opening of its U.S. office, the open source ECM vendor Nuxeo (news, site) keeps expanding its global reach with a new partnership announced today.
KnowledgeTree, a leading provider of commercial open source document management software, today announced the company has opened its North American headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina. The company, which is funded by Hasso Plattner Ventures, has already gained significant worldwide traction and is now focusing on building its US operations.
Tim Spink, a former executive at rPath and Red Hat, will lead North American operations for document manage software firm KnowledgeTree at its new regional headquarters in Raleigh.
Spink is one of two Raleigh-based employees for the South African-based company. KnowledgeTree, which is backed by Hasso Plattner Ventures in Germany, also is in the processing of hiring a sales force.
After thorough testing of the leading Open Source index engines, Mailspect Inc. has selected Sphinx as the search and retrieval engine for MPP, the Message Processing Platform. Sphinx is an Open Source project founded and maintained by Andrew Aksyonoff of Voronezh, Russia.
It’s a big day for us at Acquia. We finally took the beta-wraps off of Acquia Search, and made it available commercially as part of the Acquia Network. Thanks to the 250+ beta testers who helped make our hosted search service fit for use in production environments, including Brightcove, JackBe Developer Community, P-O-P Design, Wide Divots and others.
Germany’s federal Agency for Information Technology (BIT) is increasing its open source support to public administrations, according to representative attending the Linuxtag conference in Berlin last week.
BIT’s now employs a team of consultants and technicians specialised in open source, that will offer assistance to public administrations. The renewal of the competence centre is one of the measures taken by the federal government to prop up the country’s economy.
During the conference BIT’s colleagues from the federal Office for IT security (BSI), part of the ministry of the Interior, presented the most recent version of Kolab, an open source collaboration suite for Unix platforms.
Is there a possibility of rigging electoral outcomes in a general election to the Lok Sabha? This question has arisen not only because of the unexpected number of seats won or lost by some parties in the recent contest. It is accentuated by the recent spate of articles published in reputed computer engineering journals and in the popular international press, which raise doubts about the integrity of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs).
But moving forward, new certification “paths” recently announced by CCHIT will be a boost for modular software packages, especially those from smaller software vendors and open source developers, as well as their potential customers, including doctor practices that don’t need fancier software tools, as well as health care organizations that have a hybrid mix of health IT systems featuring legacy and best-of-breed applications.
Hello!
This mail was sent to you, since you are one of copyright holders of software which used in ASUSTeK Computer WMVN25E2+ WiMAX Subscriber Station.
At current (2009-06-30) time ASUSTeK sells the above device through their Russian exclusive partner “Scartel” Ltd. (trade name “Yota”) with next GPL violations:
1) They didn’t give any access for customers to source codes of GPLed software, see (possibly not full) list below, on the ground of their “intellectual property” defense.
2) They sold their product without mentioning Gnu Public License (and without copy of GPL certainly), nor in printed version of “Quick Start Guide”, nor in electronic version of “User Manual”, nor in any other form.
I am sure you saw the news post item about certain GPL violation.
Let me present here some more details about the case.
The Open Database License (ODbL) is an open license for data and databases which includes explicit attribution and share-alike requirements.
Chaos systems AB presents a new and open source database connection, which connect to a large number of databases. It uses the open source FDO from Open Source GEO, which has been adapted to Topocad. Many customers have expressed a demanded of a freestanding database.
Black Duck reckons there are about 9,500 GPLv3 licensed applications now.
Last week I wrote about David Cameron’s fine words about cancelling ID cards and generally opening up data. It was full of sound and fury, but I reserve judgement on just how much it really signified.
But here’s a hopeful sign that things really might change if the Tories win power at the next general election. It’s a new report from the Centre for Policy Studies
How do we sustain Open Source in a distributed world? We are facing this challenge with several of our chemical software creations/packages. People move, institutions change. Open Source does not, of itself, grow and flourish – it needs nurturing. Many packages require a lot of work before they are in a state to be usefully enhanced by the community - “throw it over the wall and it will flourish” does not work.
Many OS projects have clear governance and (at least implicitly) funded management. Examples are Apache, Eclipse, etc. Many others have the “BDFL” - Benevolent Dictator For Life with characters such as RBS, Linus, Guido Python, Larry Perl, etc. These command worldwide respect and they have income models which are similar to literary giants. These models don’t (yet?) work for chemistry.
UNESCO has released its first openly licensed publication. Open Educational Resources: Conversations in Cyberspace brings together the background papers and reports from the first three years of activities in the UNESCO OER Community. Access the online edition – or buy the book!
For those of us tracking open access and its wider import, it’s pretty clear that scientific publishing has changed for ever. But for some within the industry, there remains the desperate hope that all this new-fangled open, collaborative stuff will just blow over.
Open Source compiler provides automated advice on software code optimization
As part of the MilePost (Machine Learning for Embedded Programs Optimisation) project funded by Information Society Technologies (IST) of the European Union, the IBM research lab in Haifa, Israel, has released an open source compiler which automatically learns how to translate source code into machine code suitable for the respective hardware used. The compiler uses suggestions made by an ICI (Interactive Compilation Interface) plug-in.
Called Milepost GCC, the compiler is the result of a collaboration between IBM and partners in the European Union-funded Milepost consortium. The project is an extension of the GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) effort.
Less than one week after the release of the second beta, Sun Microsystems has announced the release of version 3.0 of its open source VirtualBox desktop virtualisation application for x86 hardware. VirtualBox 3.0 is a major update that, in addition to a number of bug fixes and performance improvements, introduces several major new features.
Under development since 1998, Wireshark has been lauded as “one of the most important open source apps of all time” for making network and application troubleshooting more accessible to computer users and administrators. Since many businesses and educational institutions rely on Wireshark to optimize and secure their networks, there is even a certification course aimed at IT staffers.
In advance of the scheduled release of its Firefox 3.5 browser, Mozilla on Friday also released two new versions of its Fennec mobile browser.
Google’s Linux-based mobile operating system — Android — has become a popular choice for phonemakers worldwide. Now, if Firefox developers are getting what they think they are, we may finally see the combination of Google’s power OS with Mozilla’s groundbreaking browser
Last week’s release of the Android Native Development Kit could spur interest in an Android version of Fennec, the Firefox-based mobile browser.
Mozilla released a new edition of its popular open-source Web browser, Firefox. The latest edition of the open-source browser, Firefox 3.5, claims to be the fastest version to date.
Firefox 3.5 was released just a couple of hours ago and it comes with great new features and a new version of Gecko, the rendering engine.
Two and a half years after the release of PHP 5.2.0 and following a slight delay, the PHP development team have announced the release version 5.3.0 of PHP. Version 5.3.0 of the web programming language includes several fundamental new extensions, as well as a number of other new features and is the one of the biggest revisions in PHP’s history. Many of the functions originally planned for PHP 6 have ended up in the 5.3 development pipeline.
The PHP development team is proud to announce the immediate release of PHP 5.3.0. This release is a major improvement in the 5.X series, which includes a large number of new features and bug fixes.
Some of the key new features include: namespaces, late static binding, closures, optional garbage collection for cyclic references, new extensions (like ext/phar, ext/intl and ext/fileinfo), over 140 bug fixes and much more.
The Sputnik test suite requires python in order to run - and is already available as a free download. Whether or not Sputnik will become a new standard by which browser vendors will measure themselves is a question yet to be answered.
Yet another data point to suggest the predicted “death of journalism” that we keep hearing from the old school newspaper guys is a bit overblown, online news publisher Talking Points Memo has just announced that it’s hiring seven new editorial staff.
Q: What does that mean for the record companies?
A: I believe the recording companies have great skills to offer artists, and there may need to be some reshuffling in the way those skills are passed around and the ways in which revenue is returned.
Q: You want to webcast the proceedings. Why?
A: We see ourselves as representing the public interest. And what a fantastic opportunity, to tune in on a case being litigated by all this high-powered talent.
The UK government has put an anti-filesharing law on its legislative programme commencing this autumn. The law is based on the Digital Britain report, which includes proposals to make the regulator, Ofcom, oversee protocol and website blocking. Will it contravene the Telecoms Package and how should it be seen in light of the French Conseil Constitutionel decision?
The European Commission has quietly released the Final Report on the Content Online Platform. Does it serve the interests of serious policy-making for online film and music?
Full of grammatical errors and lacking in substantial understanding of the issues, the Final Report on the Content Online Platform poses a challenge to anyone seeking a serious policy proposition.
It seems an unfair fight. On the one hand, you have some of the biggest, most powerful multinationals, intent on defending their turf and extending their power and profits. On the other, you have a tiny number of ragtag idealists who believe that knowledge belongs to everyone, and that no one should have disproportionately long monopolies on its supply.
And yet: in the last few years a remarkable series of victories have been one by the latter against the former, to the extent that representatives of the big media industries have warned that they are losing the “battle”.
Against that background of uneven forces - but not quite in the way the media companies mean it - sharing information about past successes so as to drive future ones is crucially important. And yet it is rarely done, probably because the practitioners are too busy fighting the battles to write about it.
Alexandro Colorado, international open source evangelist 12 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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Summary: Another classic case of illegitimate use of money without public tender
THE GOVERNMENT of Switzerland was recently sued for doing this type of thing, which is a violation of the law. See for example:
The Portuguese government appears to be engaging in similar practices. The European Commission-backed Open Source Observatory has some new coverage on that, which is summarises as follows:
Portugal’s National Association for the promotion of Free Software (Ansol) accuses the government Office of Construction and Property (INCI) of having broken procurement rules after it admitted on Monday that it had signed a 268,000 euro contract with Microsoft for the government’s website on Public Expenses, Base, without a public tender.
The full story told by ANSOL is a little long-winded, but here is this longer version:
You may find it quite newsworthy as it is scandalous: people admit what are probably crimes with their best angel faces put on.
Last year the government mandated that public expenses should be online for everybody to see, starting at the end of July 2008, the responsible entity is called INCI (some overview of the law and process can be found here and here).
This led the site called Base, which only listed, sequentially, the expenses (c.f. official Government site).
It quickly led to some people finding absurd software related expenses (the public expenses with software soap opera), but as it was revealing to be quite useful, it was also revealing a fatal flaw of the site: search was, in fact, worse than failure.
The list was composed of 60 items each pages, which you could only navigate in the following way: go to the first page, press next until the end OR go to the last page and press previous until the beginning. It was completely impractical do find anything as more and more public entities registered their expenses, you either had a way to search or the purpose of the site was now to hide expenses while pretending to show them.
The site had a search box, but it didn’t search through the expenses, only through “articles” in that website. Searching for “office” would actually result in adverts to Microsoft Office Server (MS SharePoint). Scandalous!
Many had complained to the official institution and I read at least one blogger who claimed to not even receive an official answer to his inquiries on the matter (I have an extensive list of blog entries and news articles I found about the subject at the time, but right now I can’t find which of then had this article). The government officials from INCI denied to ever receiving any contact prior to January 2009. [news paper article in the main daily newspaper Publico]
ANSOL, a Portuguese association for the promotion of Free Software, saw the need to have search because it would be an useful tool to search for software related expenses which would be helpful to denounce the (mostly) illegal expenses with software in the public administration, so after some development attempts of friends and associates we finally found out how to extract the data from the official site, by web-spidering the unmanageable list.
And with a few man-hours of work and the money necessary to register a domain for two years (both mine, in the name of ANSOL), we created the web-site Transparência na AP (Transparency in the Public Administration) and announced it on January 13th, 2009.
It works “just like google” and it provides many features the official site doesn’t until today.
It generated quite a scandal, Publico put it on the first page, referencing a full page 4 article on the matter, and a positive mention about my person in the last page as an example of citizenship.
People were finding hundreds of dubious expenses. I don’t know if any of them got to courts, but INCI claimed it was just a couple of errors made by the people who submitted the values.
The truth was that there were way too many “mistakes”, and some public entities felt quite insulted because they claimed to have submitted them correctly, and were demanding for correction of the registered values for many months (one of them was the City Hall of Sines).
Anyway, our website was such a success that the day the article showed up at Publico (16th of January), the website broke down due to the sheer number of hits, in a few hours about 200 thousand visits (not page hits, visits!). We had to, in emergency and with the evident technical problems of changing DNS entries, move to a more powerful server.
In the newspaper article (by the way, full copy is available here), INCI claimed it would have search in the next 10 business days. It took over a month!
Later on we had a meeting with INCI where we explained that the site still had many problems, for instance navigating until page 115 and then clicking next would provide a fatal error and navigation was disabled until you start from the beginning again (they quickly corrected it, but it broke our spidering in the meanwhile).
Right now, their website is broken. We fetch LESS expenses than those currently in our database, and we lack the manpower to investigate what’s wrong in over 1000 pages of listing.
And now we reached almost the status quo. I’ll list more facts, some are quite public, some came from our meeting, and some from the recent news:
- the authors of the website are Microsoft and Brandia Central
- in the meeting, INCI confirmed Microsoft is the site author and Brandia only designed how it should look
- in the meeting, INCI claimed it had to use Microsoft (and would continue) due to contractual obligations
- in recent news, it was revealed that:
- Microsoft begun work on the site BEFORE it was ordered
- it was granted to Microsoft without procurement even though the value would demand it
- it cost about 269 thousand euros
- adding search cost over 20 thousand euros more
- in the follow up to the previous news it was revealed that INCI claims:
- it respected the law
- claims there was no procurement for lack of time
- Microsoft was chosen due to Microsoft’s know-how, experience and credibility, also because it was the owner of the software that was going to be used, which is widely tested
- there was no extra payment for the search (in the meeting I had with INCI they confirmed they were charged for it, but no values were revealed).
Some words on the technology behind the official site:
- what is it? it’s Microsoft Sharepoint!
- not scalable
- not suitable
- not interoperable
- widely known for another Microsoft technological failure
- competition? No competition, no procurement, INCI admits in the same articles total vendor dependence and lock-in on Microsoft
- no governance! Microsoft owns, Microsoft made, Microsoft is the only option to INCI
For a little bit of background, the links below may also be of use. █
Related posts:
Summary: Microsoft is giving awards to marketing people who help its fight against GNU/Linux (and Free software in general)
FOR the uninitiated, learn how Microsoft trains its evangelists to crash competitors' events by attending them and stealing the thunder. This is not a side-effect but an actual intention which Microsoft employees are trained to adhere to.
Having just taken a second look at the Open Malaysia blog, the MSCOSCONF entry which we wrote about at the beginning of the month appears to be ‘decorated’ with new comments. Nasrul, who was the winner of the maligned ‘LAMP2WIMP’ contest (push GNU/Linux software towards Windows) is attacking the Malaysian FOSS proponents. His rude attacks are in Malay, but the answers are mostly in English, which helps the international crowd understand what is happening.
Being a winner of the Microsoft contest, he may deem it necessary to defend Microsoft. He is not a FOSS guy, but mainly a marketeer. See some of the comments, e.g.:
naah, I dont envy that advertisement. It was of no use for me. It was your facial expression and tone change after the people in the secretariat room (we) stated the advertisement was too large for the screenshot for the launch was what I see as something need to be fixed.
[...]
Free
its not free as in free price
its free as in FreedomOpen
its not just about opening up your source code
its also about the culture of Openness[...]
Nasrul,
It is interesting that you are criticising our actions as FOSS proponents, when your comments itself certainly gives a bad impression to all the other LAMP2WIMP winners. Are all the winners of Microsoft’s money so hell bent in attacking FOSS people? I hope not. I really hope that you are the only anomaly. So lets try to fix that.
Can you state exactly what I criticized which has gotten you so riled up? As far as I can see, the above blog post on “the cognitive dissonance within MDeC” is a fair representation of the current state of events. I elaborated in the post to provide constructive corrections for MDeC and the communities to take in the future, so as to be more consistent with the FOSS message.
After your first comment, I tried to get in touch with you via Facebook, your favourite Social Networking platform, so as to take this issue offline. However you did not respond privately but instead preferred to engage in the name calling and petty personal attacks online. If thats the image you want to project for yourself, by all means, keep going. We’ll just sit back and enjoy the show.
So Nasrul, can you please tune down your vitriol? You are hurting your standing in the community more than you realise.
If you intend to contribute to the community, please realise that you need to thicken your skin with regards to taking constructive criticisms. You, like what I went through, will get alot of it. You should know by now that geeks like us are more direct and blunt with our messages.
We arent smooth tongued salesmen ala experienced marketeers, who have are thick in skin for self promotion even at the most inappropriate occasions, yet thin in skin when it comes to self criticisms.
Read my article again. I “spat” out my thoughts, but it was to heal the wounds [0 : follow the link; your favourite word, "licking," is involved too].
I will be happy to report to Microsoft that their Marketing monies in sponsoring their brilliant LAMP2WIMP competition has worked beyond their wildest dreams; Their investment has created some really fanatical anti-FOSS marketeers from within. So unless you want to remain a testament to their strategy, do us all a favour and educate yourself in what really FOSS means, and not be a tool for others.
Remember: Free as in Freedom.
The following response ought to explain who the “winner” of this Microsoft competition really is:
I am surprised, as an expert in Facebook marketing (after all, you wrote a whole book on it) that you could leave your Inbox so poorly maintained. Perhaps you could add that as the 12th Mistakes you can do in Facebook Marketing: [ http://www.rahsiapemasaranfacebook.com/buku/ - Bonus Tambahan ] : Prune your Inbox to Catch that Important Sale!
So besides that, I guess you missed the tweet I sent you at 2:25pm, Fri 27th June 2009 as well, reminding you that I sent a FB message?
http://twitter.com/yoonkit/statuses/2356075761
“@nasrulrpfb tone down the vitriol, dude. You are making yourself look lame #osdcmy you may take it offline if u like, if FB’d u 3 days ago.”
And yet you continued to comment on this public forum at 9pm later that day. As a PAKAR in viral marketing, I would expect you to handle your online communication logistics better.
So for those who keep pleading us to keep this private (Kage and Rafe), I let the evidence show that I gave him ample opportunity to do so. Nasrul, you obviously thought that you had to have your say, and I am not denying you that right. How you want to proceed is entirely up to you.
You asked, what is my purpose to be involved in the FOSS community? I dunno. I could tell you my history with regards to FOSS, but I believe you are not interested in it. After all your response was dripping with sarcasm, so I wont waste both our times.
[...]
Just how many people is Microsoft hiring to attack GNU/Linux under the disguise of "open source"? It’s getting shallow enough to see through. █
“There’s no company called Linux, there’s barely a Linux road map. Yet Linux sort of springs organically from the earth. And it had, you know, the characteristics of communism that people love so very, very much about it. That is, it’s free.”
–Steve Ballmer
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Summary: Microsoft carries on smearing ODF in public while pretending to support it
Microsoft is still changing ODF’s history and daemonising ODF using Wikipedia. We wrote about that in:
Rob Weir has already complained about this. It is part of Microsoft’s ongoing attack on ODF [1, 2] — an attack which it is defending by buying journalists lunch (now confirmed to us by the journalist) so that is can carry on breaking ODF interoperability [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] without public scrutiny.
Weir has just published another rant about Wikipedia, so obviously he keeps track of the continued manipulation by Microsoft — one that we too are seeing because all edits are visible.
I have a mental model of how Wikipedia works and behaves. This may not reflect reality, but it is how I, as an end-user, expect Wikipedia to behave. I think these are reasonable expectations regarding things like standards of proof and balance and that if the real Wikipedia differs substantially from these expectations, then we have a problem.
[...]
Does anyone know whether the above statements have any basis in the aspirations or actual practice of Wikipedia editors and admins? Sadly, my recent reading of some articles suggests that these reasonable expectations are routinely flouted and bear little resemblance to reality.
It’s obvious what Microsoft must be thinking.
“All those haters…”
But to characterise opposition as “anti-Microsoft” is like describing the police as “anti-criminals” and thus “irrational haters”. Microsoft’s behaviour speaks for itself. █
“Their documents display a clear intent to monopolize, to prevent any competition from springing up. And they have used a variety of restrictive practices to prevent that kind of competition.”
–Judge Robert Bork, former US Supreme Court nominee (on Microsoft)
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Summary: New signs lead back to Microsoft (not just Novell)
IN recent posts [1, 2, 3, 4] about Richard Stallman's statement on Mono, we saw that resistance to it mostly comes from Mono developers, Novell, Microsoft and other such stake holders. We have already seen the FSF and the SFLC putting their weight behind Stallman’s statement and now there is this from the FSFE (Adriaan de Groot from the board of directors of KDE e.V.):
There have been two posts about C# and mono on PlanetKDE this week (e.g. Richard and Andreas). The comments on Andreas’ entry are quite cogent, as are those replying to Richard, but it deserves a wider audience. As far as asking RMS at Gran Canaria this weekend, it’s worth a shot if you abstract the question away from specifically-C# and specifically-mono.
[...]
This isn’t to say there’s not other submarines in the water. We don’t know. Maybe we should. The known submarine should be treated with caution. And the side of caution is to treat C# as a non-Free platform to be avoided.
Mono is a win to Windows [1, 2, 3] and it is also helping Novell, which owns Mono and has exclusivity over it (including perceived ‘protection’ from Microsoft patent assaults that target Mono). This is explicit in the Novell/Microsoft agreement. As Stefano Forenza puts it, there is “pressure Novell and Microsoft.”
Pressure Novell and Microsoft (as some of you work in both the companies) to change the agreement to look like this:
Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, Google and its affiliates hereby grant to you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this License) patent license for patents necessarily infringed by implementation of this specification. If you institute patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the implementation of the specification constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses for the specification granted to you under this License shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.
Is that easy. Everybody wins. Even Microsoft.
Just look what they are doing. At Novell, there is now promotion of a new conference called Monospace. Details of the registrar are “protected”, so it is hard to know who initiated the Web site, but Miguel shows that it’s probably Scott Bellware, whose blog says: “I am a recipient of Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional award.” As for the conference he seemingly sets up for Mono, its description is: “Monospace is the conference that teaches .NET software developers and organizations how to use the Mono framework to leverage investments in .NET skills on a broader array of platforms where business opportunity awaits.”
Microsoft staff may openly say "Fuck you, Richard Stallman", but there are rebuttals to this disgraceful behaviour. Stallman was being polite and rational.
Does anyone still doubt Microsoft’s involvement in Mono? Some people in the Mono team itself are directly on Microsoft’s payroll (not just via Novell). Had Mono been beneficial to GNU/Linux, would Microsoft really help it? Mono is a bridge leading to Microsoft, not from Microsoft. There is even evidence. █
“I would love to see all open source innovation happen on top of Windows.”
–Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO
Addendum: the gentleman who insulted Stallman has expressed regret about it and the statements should not be attributed to Microsoft.
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Summary: Axing embellished as “folding”, more on “perception management”
Mary Jo Foley links to this report about Microsoft’s Channel 8 and Channel 10 getting folded into Channel 9, which Miguel de Icaza seemingly admires. As Foley puts it, they do not publicly acknowledge that budgetary constraints are the cause.
“As Foley puts it, they do not publicly acknowledge that budgetary constraints are the cause.”It is very interesting to see how a reduction from 3 channels to just 1 is described as neutral news, at least in the Mirosoft-sponsored Web sites. No matter how much lipstick is put on this pig, the reduction is very telling and it is part of a trend. Microsoft also axed some of its magazines recently.
The embellishment seen above is very much like PR, and it is only to be expected because it’s part of a pattern (Microsoft's pseudo-reporters break the news when the news is bad). Microsoft may not be unique in that regard. An article from yesterday shows what the monopoly abuser Intel tells its people on behaviour in social networking.
Intel’s guideline headings are: “Be transparent”, “Be judicious”, “Write what you know”, “Perception is reality”, “It’s a conversation”, “Are you adding value?”, “Your responsibility”, “Create some excitement”, “Be a leader”, “Did you screw up?” and “If it gives you pause, pause”.
“Perception is reality”?
Really?
That sounds just like an adjunct to “perception management” [1, 2], which is a gruesome practice that should be banned. Regular readers may have noticed a lot of trolls here recently, including familiar ones that are considered “Microsoft shills” and are therefore banned in other Web sites. As we never censor any comments, the trolls take advantage of it. They relentlessly try to disrupt this Web site. █
“I’m a huge fan of guerrilla marketing.”
–Joe Wilcox, Microsoft Fan
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Summary: Janet Napolitano from Microsoft speaks on behalf of the DHS about the effect of Windows zombies
A couple of weeks ago we warned about the possibility that the US security czar will be a Microsoft employee. This is alarming because the new DHS secretary is a Microsoft employee (correction: that would be Phil Reitinger entering the DHS, coming from Microsoft) who has just changed jobs [1, 2]. This was enabled under pressure from the BSA, a Microsoft front. Essentially, they installed more of Microsoft DNA inside the government.
Well, this Microsoft employee the secretary is now speaking on behalf of the DHS where she warns about “cyber threat”, probably Windows botnets.
The issue of cyber security is of “great concern” to the US, the nation’s homeland security secretary has said.
Janet Napolitano told the BBC that protecting against virtual attacks was something the US was “moving forward on with great alacrity”.
“Virtual attacks” must refer to DDOS. So, she must be aware of the simple observation that hundreds of millions of Windows PCs out there are zombies. Will she recommend migrating to the more seucre UNIX/Linux? That would be a betrayal of her Reitinger’s colleagues at Microsoft. And either way, this would not block botnets in other countries. They can still hammer on any target at the behest of the botmaster.
Last week we wrote about Windows zombies costing the economy hundreds of billions per year, accroding to estimates of the cost of SPAM alone. This is the product of Windows botnets. Glyn Moody uses some of the available figures to write about “the huge cost of Microsoft software” (to its surroundings, collectively).
Yesterday I wrote about a report from ACT that brought up the issue of TCO for free software.
As I pointed out there, it’s old news that free software has costs; but what is more interesting is the fact that fans of the proprietary world always fail to point out the huge hidden costs of using poorly-written closed-source software. Here’s a great demonstration of my point:
The `Conficker worm’ caused chaos when it hit Manchester town hall in February. Now we can reveal the bug cost the council more than £43,000 in `lost’ bus lane fines.
The computer problems meant 1,609 tickets could not be issued within the 28-day legal limit - rendering them useless.
In total, the Conficker worm cost taxpayers in Manchester nearly £1.5m, the M.E.N has learned.
A £1.2m bill in the IT department, including £600,000 getting ‘consultancy support’ to fix the problems, which including drafting in experts from Microsoft;
£178,000 in extra staffing costs across the town hall – including £169,000 going to clear up a backlog of benefits claims and council tax bills;
Compensation payments due to delays in processing benefit claims.
A few things to note here.
Watch how this article gets flooded by “perception management” [1, 2] in the comments. █
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To use your own IRC client, join channel #boycottnovell in FreeNode.
]]>AS we pointed out over the weekend [1, 2], the SFLC and FSF are in alignment with Richard Stallman's views on Mono and so are many others. But Bradley Kuhn has just made it more official with a long essay at the SFLC’s Web site. It’s a recommended read.
In an essay last Friday entitled Why free software shouldn’t depend on Mono or C#, RMS argued a key point that I agree with: the software freedom community should minimize its use of programming language infrastructure that comes primarily from anti-software-freedom companies, notwithstanding FaiF (Free as in Freedom) implementations. I’ve been thinking about an extension of that argument: that language infrastructure created in a community process is likely more resilient against attacks from proprietary software companies.
Here is another new perspective:
I think it is interesting that he thinks that it is the “‘best technology’ Linux camp” that is the camp that offers the greatest threat to Microsoft. I can understand why some may think that this is true since this camp is creating flashy and very useful products and features that increase the appeal of Linux. However, mono is not the only tool that the “‘best technology’ Linux camp” has at its disposal. Many view the use of the Qt toolkit as a better alternative, and one that does not have the risk associated with mono. Furthermore, I do not agree with the thought that “‘best technology’ Linux camp” is the one that Microsoft feels most threatened by. I think Microsoft is only threatened by the combination of both camps.
I view mono as a distraction for FOSS developers. Yes, there are some practical advantages in its use, but there are a lot of questions surrounding it. It has the potential of dividing the two mayor camps of Linux contributors. It will be interesting to see what comes out of this controversy.
Since Nokia’s Qt toolkit is mentioned above, here is what KDE developers say on the subject (mind the good comments) and here is what Jack Wallen thinks about Novell’s role.
If Microsoft is threatening patents against .NET, it would seem to me that the Novell/Microsoft relationship didn’t really work out all that well. And now Microsoft is back to their old tricks. And what should the Linux and open source community do about this? Should another deal with Microsoft be made? Is the seamless communication between Linux and Windows worth making a deal with a partner that is only going to turn around and stab you in the back again and again and again?
The Register on the lessons to be learned from TomTom:
Although Stallman frequently speaks about the dangers of software patents on open-source, trust for Microsoft has run particularly thin recently because of the company’s legal attack on TomTom over a FAT patent dispute.
Stallman urged the community to instead distribute and recommend non-C# applications whenever possible to avoid Redmond lawyers from being able to disable major OS functions on a whim.
Microsoft neither retracted nor backed its accusations against Linux. Horacio Gutierrez from Microsoft said about Linux that “there is an overwhelming number of patents being infringed.” He named not even a single one, but Mono is an easy target and also a very unique one.
GNU/Linux users do not want Mono. Well, maybe with the exception of SUSE and Canonical, whose desktop engineering manager comes from Microsoft. In response to the many discussions stemming from Stallman’s essay, Canonical has published yet another statement about Mono.
The Ubuntu Technical Board has been asked for a position statement on the use of C#, specifically the Mono implementation, by applications in Ubuntu.
These applications, as well as the Mono stack, were proposed for inclusion like any other application and underwent the same review process that all new applications and platforms undergo before being accepted into the archive.
With specific regard to the default installed application set, applications have been reviewed and compared against each other on merit and features. These often take place during the Ubuntu Developer Summits, most recently over the default media player.
For those who prefer Ubuntu (like myself), here is a handy new guide: “How to Completely Remove Mono on Ubuntu” █
What Microsoft has
What Microsoft wants
Remark: At this pace of abandonment, who will be left to lead?
LAST week we saw the departure of at least two Microsoft executives [1, 2] (among around half a dozen so far this month) and joining this exodus will be the vice president of Services. Maybe it’s a morale problem.
Maria Martinez, the corporate vice president in charge of the big Microsoft Services division, is leaving the company. Microsoft confirmed the move in response to our inquiry this morning, saying Martinez would be replaced by Kathleen Hogan, current corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Customer Service & Support
In other interesting news, the Seattle P-I shows that Microsoft employee benefits fell by a staggering 26% compared to last year.
Microsoft’s assets available for employee benefits fell by $1.4 billion in 2008, shrinking by more than a quarter from the year before.
The Redmond-based company’s funds available to pay out benefits dropped 26 percent to $4.01 billion in the year ended Dec. 31, according to a document filed Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In 2007, Microsoft’s available assets for benefits amounted $5.43 billion.
It’s not exactly surprising to those who have paid attention. Microsoft’s earnings are down 32%, to a great degree because of GNU/Linux. █
“DOS will be with us forever. We’ve learned how passionate people are about DOS.”
–Former Microsoft Vice President Brad Silverberg
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Summary: Microsoft hangs the Messenger
EARLY in the day we wrote about Microsoft discarding over 2,000 more employees and once in about a fortnight (on average) we see yet another Microsoft product being axed. The latest product which Microsoft axes has got a few hours left to live. That product is MSN Web Messenger.
The site will go offline June 30.
Microsoft made the announcement on its Windows Live blog.
This may represent another defeat to Google (this time it’s videochat) and it resembles Microsoft’s loss to Google’s book-scanning initiative and YouTube too.
The Microsoft-sponsored press is already showing this list of dead products which Microsoft has been accumulating.
Microsoft’s sidewalk memorial to Encarta, Money and other fossils
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For anyone who’s never been there, the company has this great old courtyard in Redmond where for many years it placed plaques in the sidewalk for nearly every piece of software it shipped.
It is very much out of date. With almost 20 dead products in the past 9 months (list needs updating), Microsoft will need many more plaques. █
“Microsoft is, I think, fundamentally an evil company.”
–Former Netscape Chairman James H. Clark
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Summary: Microsoft uses Michael Jackson’s tragic death to advertise itself
SEVERAL WEEKS ago, the media industry used a really traumatic experience of pirates in Somalia to make a comparison to people who share files. Several years ago, Microsoft fraudulently also used the identities of deceased people to rescue itself from criminal investigation. In both cases, front groups were used. And now, ladies and gentleman, the monopoly from Redmond uses the death of Michael Jackson to promote Bing, Microsoft, NBC and other such brands.
Sighted in New York City: A taxi sporting an ad for Bing and NBC that says, “We will miss you Michael.” That scrolled right next to the famous picture of Michael Jackson from the “Thriller” album cover.
Has Microsoft no dignity left? Must it also smell an opportunity to make a buck from this death of the King of Pop? Mirosoft also pays some publications to promote Bing, but that is a separate story about corruption of the media. █
“The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there’s no risk of accident for someone who’s dead.”
–Albert Einstein
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German city Munich got itself into the American newspapers a few years ago when the city council decided to start the project LiMux, aimed at gradually banishing Microsoft programs from the town hall computers & introduce Open Source software like Linux & Open Office onto all town hall workstations. This project was so succesful, other local authorities in Germany have now followed suit.
It wasn’t too long ago, I told you the story of my experiences with Acer. Seems that articles I wrote about 3 years ago concerning Trusted Computing and the hardware/software nightmares implemented to enforce it came home to roost.
We couldn’t get to the login prompt due to the Trusted Core sentry. These computers were in essence, doorstops.
Linux Fund is pleased to announce that the BSD Fund Visa is available for application by US residents today at bsdfund.org. A percentage of every purchase made with the BSD Fund Visa card goes to events, software development and other initiatives related to the “Berkeley Software Distribution” family of operating systems. The BSD Fund Visa is offered in partnership with U.S. Bank of Minnesota and is also available as a student card. BSD Fund has provided financial support to BSD-related events around the world and is key supporter of the Portable C Compiler Project.
1. You’re tired of being bossed around by your computer.
Would you tolerate your car refusing to start until you scanned in your pink slip every time to prove you bought it? Would you put up with parts of your house being walled off because only the architect was allowed access? Would you allow your doctor to withhold information in your medical file from you because it’s intellectual property? Then why do you put it with this from a computer you bought and paid for?
As to the “coming cyberwar,” I do have concerns that the future may bring a whole host of new problems from belligerent agencies sponsored by governments or illicit enterprises, though I am not overly freaked out by it as some are. History has demonstrated that as soon as we invent something, we usually find a way to inflict damage or injury with that invention. With that in mind, I do take comfort in running Linux. Nothing’s completely bullet-proof, of course, but added security is always a good thing, at least for peace of mind.
I have had a fair share of experiences with computing conferences and trade shows. Whether as an employee of a company that hired a stand at a popular event or as a neutral visitor ready to be swayed by the exhibitors’ eagerness to demonstrate their products, I have often found these fairs both educational and stimulating. Perhaps the only disappointment on these large shows was the fact that computers running a decent operating system were extremely rare, even non-existent. As a result, I longed for the day when I would attend a “real” computing exhibition, one where free software would be the dominant topic of conversations and where open-source operating systems would power every single computer on the floor.
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Great show, excellent ambiance, and authoritative presentations - that was LinuxTag 2009. Hope you can join us next year!
Contrast this with GNU/Linux and its GUIs and CLI and Freedom and Openness:
You may struggle a bit – and these days its just a little bit at worst – in the beginning, but the more you learn and the more familiar you become, the faster and more efficient you get. This is a world filled with doors instead of Windows, and they swing wide open whenever you approach.
Why do I use GNU/Linux? Are you kidding?
Getting back to the title of this article. Ask yourself. When was the last time you tried Linux? If it is more than a year then maybe it is time for round two. If you have never tried Linux, possibly influenced by the negativity of out of date information, now might be a good time to see just how outdated that information really is. When you do try the latest distribution let me know what you think. I am very interested in learning your thoughts.
Acer ships its Aspire One netbooks in both Windows and Linux versions. Meanwhile, Dell has a new line of netbooks out, which are available with either Windows or Ubuntu. Dell would like to have the same kind of success that Acer has had in the netbook arena, but that may take time, and Dell is suffering from a punishing business hardware buying environment.
Mac4Lin is best Mac like User Interface for Gnome and Xfce desktops like Ubuntu/Xubuntu, Fedora, Debian and others, that will take care of absolutely everything (from icons, themes to usplash – loading window at start) to look just like Mac. With this package comes: dock, the GTK theme, Emerald theme (3d window borders), new icons, new wallpapers, taskbar image, GDM themes, cursors, themes for Pidgin, Firefox, music players and system sounds and you will be amazed of flexibility and customization of Linux system.
By default, Ksplice shows up in your system menu-bar so you can keep an eye on what’s happening with your updates. While Ksplice itself is open-source software, and the service for individual users is free, you’ll need to pay a service fee if you’re a business using Ksplice to keep your servers up-to-date.
Since Ksplice doesn’t require any changes to the Linux kernel I strongly suspect you’ll soon be seeing its technology used with other Linux distributions. After all, as great as Linux is about letting you run for months on end without wasting time or money on a reboot, it will be even better when we can run Linux for years without rebooting.
Great praise to the awesome Philippe Guillaume and his brilliant crew. Pianoteq is simply amazing. Its sound quality is excellent, its user interface is attractive and invites interaction, the add-on instruments are wonderful, et cetera, et cetera. It’s not free and it isn’t open-source software, but its developers are certainly interested in the open-source community of music makers. In this community member’s opinion, Pianoteq for Linux gets four out of four big stars (or Emperor penguins, take your pick).
Need to whip up a quick screencast? You might want to use Krut for the job. This cross-platform screen recording tool has virtually no learning curve, and offers a few useful features that can help you to create high-quality screencasts with consummate ease. Krut is written in Java, so you have to install the Java Runtime Environment on your system before you can run the utility. Krut requires no installation, and you can launch the application by simply running the KRUT.jar file.
Linux is just one of the great things that everyone should know about. If you ever experienced one of your kids saying “Daddy, what should I do next, I’m bored”, then you’ll appreciate the great number of free and wonderful educational programs available on Linux. The apps shown here are KDE based but should work in most if not all Linux distros and desktop environments. My recommendation – You can install Edubuntu and get many of these apps, or if you’re just looking to add a kids ’section’ install Kubuntu or your favorite KDE desktop (Debian, Mandriva are excellent choices, see our reviews in the Linux tools section). Then jump over to your package manager and select these games to install.
Version control systems are indispensable if you’re working on a multi-person project, and they’re pretty damn useful even if you’re just working solo. Keeping a full history of the changes you’ve made gives you a basic backup and enables you to revert back to an earlier version if you screw something up.
But with so many options available, from the rather dated CVS onwards, which one is best? What about distributed versus centralised? Read on as we look at three of the big names - Bazaar, Subversion and Git - to give you an idea of which one might best suit you and your project, whether that’s large-scale software, small-scale coding, keeping track of config files or anything else that might spring to mind.
Welcome to the seventh Linux gaming compilation. Hopefully, you will like this one as much as the others. I have carefully selected today’s titles, and I believe you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the repertoire. The long-awaited Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory is finally here. Then, there’s the masterpiece UFO: Alien Invasion, a remake of the legendary UFO: Enemy Unknown. Fans of board games, including 3D board games, will also like today’s choices. Racing fans won’t be left in the dry, either. We will talk about Liero and Liero clones, two other FPS, a number of arcade games, and more. It should definitely be interesting.
Eschalon is a turn-based RPG (role-playing game), which tries to reproduce the feeling of classic RPG games. It’s closed-source, available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, and it comes with a demo too. The full version is available as a download for $19.95.
FreeTumble is a free 2D Puzzle game with hardware accelerated graphics from Seby and Suiland.
It is based on Collapse, and features 3 different game modes, nice visuals and music and bonus.
FreeTumble is available for Linux and Windows in English, French and German.
Ho, ho! Finally! The KDE 4.3 Plasma screencast arrives! It’s 10:36 in length and covers some of the nice improvements we’ve in Plasmaland for 4.3, including:
# The new Air theme
# Small panel sizes
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Many KDE 3 users depended on Krun, a simple yet effective application used to execute commands. Executed simply by pressing “Alt-F2″, it was much easier to start applications using it, rather than navigating through a launch menu or opening a terminal window. The only catch with Krun was that you had to know the exact name of the command you intended to launch. With the advent of KDE 4, that has all changed.
A while ago I wrote an article called 13 Terminal Emulators for Linux, where I briefly reviewed all those popular shell-like applications and a few flavours of xterm or rxvt. In this article I will talk about Yakuake, a powerful terminal application for Linux, and also the KDE counterpart of Tilda in GNOME.
Just a few months removed from its 1.2 update, the latest version of the GeeXBoX LiveCD has added multi threaded video decoding for MPEG-1/2/4 and h.264, which should finally let all users decode even 1080p video on dual- and quad-core systems running Linux.
Linux advocates like to brag about the number of choices people get with open source software. Windows offers very few choices, beyond dropping to your knees and begging “please, PLEASE let me keep XP! How much is a downgrade from Vista?” And Mac World even locks you into the hardware.
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If you have an old machine that you want to make functional, the leaders are Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux. I found Puppy just a little bit easier and have it running on one machine.
And if you have kids, Qimo is very good. It’s also Ubuntu based, but it installs with a kid-friendly interface: large icons and lots of educational games. It also works well with older low-resource machines, a smart move since the kids often get the hand-me-down computer.
The New PCLinuxOS Magazine, which comprises volunteers from the PCLinuxOS community is proud to announce the release of it’s July 2009 edition. This edition brought forth several decisions from the new crew to bring it forth to a monthly release and the selection of a new Chief Editor, Paul Arnote aka parnote.
I HIGHLY recommend that you get PCLinuxOS. Download it, burn it to disk, run the Live CD and then install it. You’ll be saying goodbye to all the Windows headaches of spyare and viruses. You’ll also be saying hello to a stable, secure operating system with thousands of software titles (like AudiKonverter) and a wonderful welcoming community of users.
Qimo needs a minimum of 256MB of memory to run from the CD, or 192MB to install. At least 6 GB of hard drive space is recommended, and a 400MHz or faster CPU. Because of its very minimal system requirements, it’s a fantastic OS to install on that old PC sitting in your closet and put in your childs room.
Kid-Friendly Linux Distributions
Believe it or not, there are several distributions of Linux intended for use by children as young as 3 years old. Child-oriented Linux distros tend to have a simplified interface with large, “chunky”, colorful icons and a specialized set of programs designed with kids in mind. Some of the better-known distributions aimed at children include:
* Sugar, the operating system designed for the One Laptop Per Child project. Sugar is a radical departure from traditional desktops, with a strong emphasis on teaching programming skills, but is very strongly geared towards classroom use. Although I’m pretty comfortable using Linux, I’m afraid Sugar might be too different for me to help my nephew and niece make use of it.
* Edubuntu is based on the popular Ubuntu distribution. Designed to be easy to install and very Windows-like in its operation, Edubuntu would be my first choice if I were using newer hardware. With its rich graphical interface, though, I worry that these years-old PCs, neither of which have graphic cards, will lag running Edubuntu. And given kids’ attention spans, I’m afraid that would be a major barrier to getting them to use it.
Saturday was the end-of-year festival at my kids’ school and I hosted a Sugar booth. I had asked if I could set up my XOs and netbooks on a table for kids to interact with Sugar. It was also a way for me to celebrate the Sugar on a Stick, Strawberry Release from Sugar Labs.
Say you don’t like something, then change it! We’ve seen lots of change in Red Hat and Fedora over the years, in terms of visual looks, feature sets, support and more, as the community has spoken and Red Hat has listened.
That is why I believe that Fedora is a great distribution with a great future, and is most certainly a hat with a history.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 148 for the week June 22 - 28, 2009. In this issue we cover: MOTU Council, New Ubuntu Members, First Paper Cut milestone reached, Tracking Ubuntu Community Issues, Kubuntu Tutorials Day, Introducing the Ubuntu NGO team, Extra options when filing bugs, Ubuntu Podcast Quickie #7, and much, much more!
Sound: The Altec Lansing speaker make all the right sounds: I am not sure that Altec Lansing should be claiming these speakers as theirs, but that is another story. They sound equally tinny on Vista. I fired up Rhythmbox and we listened to some Internet Radio for a bit.
Boot Speed: Fedora 11 is making a lot of noise about their new 20 second boot speed. I tested it, and on my desktop Dell 945, it is 30 seconds: Same as Mint 7 on Dad’s DV9000.
Battery: This dv9000 is only 9 months old now, but Linux reported that its battery was only able to charge up to 80% of its design capacity: Something Vista was reporting as 100%.
And so forth: What a difference 6 months makes in Linux land. Dad was thrilled with the computer, and said that, other than to play a RealArcade game called WordSlinger, he did not see ever having to go back to Vista. I tried briefly to get that going under WINE, but it was acting very weird: Another thing to research!
I spent June 26 at Dell’s headquarters in Austin, Texas, meeting key members of Dell’s Linux team. We spent an hour discussing the broad Linux market; Dell’s current Ubuntu strategy; and the PC giant’s early reaction to Moblin (Mobile Linux).
Ultimate Edition 2.2 was released on June 17. It’s the latest salvo from TheeMahn, creator of this popular distro of Linux. Ultimate Edition was originally released in late 2007 to be Ubuntu with a “better user experience and with improved usability.” In the releases since, they have broken from Ubuntu and actually have created their own repository .
Like Ubuntu, Ultimate Edition is Gnome based. TheeMahn also built Ubuntu Gamers Edition, and it shows in Ultimate Edition (UE). Ultimate Edition has software pre-installed and ready for use on a live DVD environment.
If God had intended Man to program, we’d be born with serial I/O ports.
I recently decided to check out the newest release of Ubuntu Ultimate Edition, and I have to ask the question, is this really the ultimate Ubuntu? To find out, keep reading.To start, I am going to appologize to the person who did the remaster, as I am sure they are no going to be happy with what I have to say about this “distro”.
It appears that Ubuntu is still the most popular Linux distribution. According to some stats, it’s more popular now than ever.
That was it for my first month ever with Ubuntu only. Did it work? Yes. Did it make a difference? a little. Operating systems are interchangeable nowadays, there are equivalent applications on any of them and the choice boils down to user preference (i.e. Usability with a capital U) and the limited availability of a few killer apps (which again are defined by the users and what they want to accomplish). And what count most for a user on the road is battery life, and after years of average 2-3 hours (with the occasional outlayer) there finally is some good news for the mainstream on that front.
Why do Microsoft and vendors like ASUS continue to push the line that Microsoft Windows is the ultimate operating system for the diminutive ultraportable netbook market? The Windows 7 plan for netbooks is fraught with limitation and burdens. It’s time to bring back the penguin.
Mobile carriers may start giving away netbooks for free, and Linux-based application stores could help them profit by doing it, the head of a Linux advocacy group told Chinese companies on Monday.
You may have noticed that practically ever netbook running Windows has the same specs: 1GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive, probably an Intel Atom processor, and a 9 or 10 inch display. That’s largely because Microsoft is offering low cost Windows XP licenses to PC makers selling netbooks that meet these specifications. It helps keep the costs down while providing netbook makers with an operating system that’s been proven to work well on low power computers.
Last month I wrote about netbooks powered by the MIPS processor, originally developed by SGI. I also pointed out that the price for the Belco Alpha 400 had dropped to $149 last December and January. That is now the regular price for the lowest of low end Linux netbooks at Geeks.com. Last week they had a special and the price dropped to $139.
In recent weeks, the OpenSolaris project has rolled out AMIs for Ruby on Rails 2 for application development, WordPress 2.7 for Web content management, and MediaWiki 1.14 for wikis. In April, Sun put a 64-bit version of OpenSolaris 2008.11 out for EC2, and it seems likely that a 64-bit version of the more recent 2009.06 release is due any day now. The most recent addition to the AMI jukebox for OpenSolaris running on Amazon’s EC2 is an OpenESB v3 stack, all licensed under Sun’s Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL).
No weird feelings, no dissonance, no FUD.
To summarise. Child psychology warns us about exclusivity and what happens when communication clues move out of the strictly rational.
Basically, when dealing with proprietary and FOSS software, start off with top level stuff and it starts off the exclusion conflict.
Start with properties and the potential customer has a chance of following the reasoning and we avoid the flowers
With about 245 stores, three warehouses, 20,000-plus employees, and a trucking fleet as part of a multi-billion-dollar grocery operation, Modesto, Calif.-based Save Mart has discovered that where it made a shift to open-source software for databases, operating systems and network management, it lowered costs by more than half.
“Open source is profoundly less expensive,” says Sims, citing the adoption of SuSe Linux, the Ingres open-source database, MySQL, and Hobbit open-source monitoring as changes that contributed to over 50% in IT savings in comparison to the proprietary software from Oracle, Microsoft Windows or HP OpenView that was replaced.
Open source “is free but we do pay for support and services,” Sim’s points out, noting that Save Mart has established vendor alliances with Novell, Red Hat and Ingres to support open-source software the grocery retailer uses.
Since 1999, SourceForge has the ‘go to place’ for all open source downloads, but in the last couple of years, Google Code has put up a bit of challenge. Remember also for a while there was this constant thread in media about how SourceForge had 100,000 project, though most had been abandoned. SourceForge.net now has 230,000 projects and if downloads are an indication, they seem to be doing just fine.
We’ve discussed in great detail how the current ACTA treaty has been mostly driven by corporate interests as a way to sneak in more draconian copyright laws through international treaty, rather than through legislative means. When consumer groups have requested a seat at the table, they’ve been rejected, even as industry lobbyists have had no problem being active participants in the process.
Except… that’s not true at all. As a recent Harvard study showed, the amount of money going into the “music ecosystem” has grown — tremendously. The only thing that’s dropping is the sale of plastic discs.
In the meantime, considering BPI and others were so incredibly wrong 10 years ago, and they’re only willing to admit it now, why is it that they think everyone should trust them now — and that those of us who were actually right 10 years ago should still be brushed off as wackos who just want stuff for free? Perhaps it’s time to start actually listening to those who have been pointing out new ways to embrace what consumers want to do with music in order to make more money.
The listed software company, Global Gaming Factory X AB (publ) (GGF) acquires The Pirate Bay website, http://www.thepiratebay.org, one of the 100 most visited websites in the world and the technology company Peerialism, that has developed next generation file-sharing technology. Following the completion of the acquisitions, GGF intends to launch new business models that allow compensation to the content providers and copyright owners. The responsibility for, and operation of the site will be taken over by GGF in connection with closing of the transaction, which is scheduled for August 2009.
Alexandro Colorado, international open source evangelist 11 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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In order for records to be approached or even broken, if you are a Firefox user (about 60-70% of our visitors are), don’t forget to grab a copy of the latest great release some time before the end of the day. Having just installed it, the software looks fantastic and it’s faster than before. Out of the box it also plays all those embedded Oggs we’ve spread in pages since last year. Plug-in developers will hopefully regain compatibility shortly.
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