Free Republic

By Maggie Shiels Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley Giving up some rights means you still have protection under the law Advocates of open source software have hailed a court ruling protecting its use even though it is given away free.The US federal appeals court move overturned a lower court decision involving free software used in model trains that a hobbyist put online. The court has now said conditions of an agreement called the Artistic Licence were enforceable under copyright law. "For non-lawgeeks, this won't seem important but this is huge," said Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig. "In non-technical...

Symbian's decision to make its source code freely available tips the scales in favor of open-source software in smartphones and could make it harder for Microsoft, and even other open-source platforms like Google's Android and Linux, to compete.On Tuesday, companies including Nokia, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, LG Electronics, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, AT&T, Texas Instruments, STMicroelectronics and Vodafone announced that they will work together to make the Symbian OS open source. They will offer it under a royalty-free license to members of a new nonprofit group called the Symbian Foundation. Symbian is used in about 60 percent of the world's smartphones, which...

Two recent events should give for-profit companies new reasons to re-evaluate the ways in which they use open source software as well as the extent to which they use it. These events are: (1) the release of a new version of the widely used license that covers such software, i.e., the General Public License version 3, and (2) a round of lawsuits filed by the Software Freedom Law Center against for-profit companies using the software for commercial gain. Four companies to date, the largest of which is Verizon Communications Inc., have been sued for violation of the GPL. Although the...

Back in May 2006, a few programmers working on an open-source security project made a whopper of a mistake. Last week, the full impact of that mistake was just beginning to dawn on security professionals around the world. In technical terms, a programming error reduced the amount of entropy used to create the cryptographic keys in a piece of code called the OpenSSL library, which is used by programs like the Apache Web server, the SSH remote access program, the IPsec Virtual Private Network (VPN), secure e-mail programs, some software used for anonymously accessing the Internet, and so on. The...

Ten minutes to open storage blissFind out how to eradicate 99.7% of spam Having been worked over by the rise of Linux servers, Sun Microsystems wants to capitalize on what it sees as the next major "open systems" movement. The company believes that storage systems - or more specifically storage software - will transition to favor lower-cost, less proprietary plays. Sun this week took what feels like a rather minor step in the open storage direction with the release of two "how-to-guides" meant to help with the creation of a storage server and a NAS (network attached storage) appliance. The...

I'm looking for an alternative to Outlook, for a computer that runs Vista. I was disappointed that the OpenOffice "main" suite doesn't include a calendar. Has anyone used Chandler? What are your opinions, for a computer running Vista? What alternatives do I have? I'm looking for calendar and contact manager, not e-mail (because I'm using Windows Mail for that purpose). Thanks.

Press release excerpt - Microsoft Makes Strategic Changes in Technology and Business Practices to Expand Interoperability New interoperability principles and actions will increase openness of key products. REDMOND, Wash. — Feb. 21, 2008 — Microsoft Corp. today announced a set of broad-reaching changes to its technology and business practices to increase the openness of its products and drive greater interoperability, opportunity and choice for developers, partners, customers and competitors. Specifically, Microsoft is implementing four new interoperability principles and corresponding actions across its high-volume business products: (1) ensuring open connections; (2) promoting data portability; (3) enhancing support for industry standards; and...

More good news for the open source community just in: an analysis of its enterprise customers by OpenLogic found that for 2007 as a whole, the use of open source among enterprise customers is up 26% year-on-year. Enterprises on average used a whopping 94 different open source packages last year, compared to 75 in 2006… OpenLogic -- which provides enterprises with a certified library of open source software that encompasses hundreds of open source packages via OpenLogic Exchange (OLEX) – also found that Apache is still the most common license in packages used in enterprises today. Its breakdown of licenses...

Every (Open-Source) Software Project needs a Business Model Most software developers have little interest in entrepreneurship, but an open-source software project will survive and thrive only by delivering value into a market (users) with business partners (contributors) and against competitors (other open and closed source software). If you want to run a successful open-source project, it helps if you consider the key questions that apply when defining a commercial business model. I'll expand on Chesbrough's and Rosenbloom's list of 6 themes to demonstrate why. 1. Value proposition - a description of the customer problem, the product that addresses the problem,...

WordPress secures $29 million in funding By Lisa Hoover on January 24, 2008 (2:02:00 PM) Printer friendly page Print Comment on this article Comments Automattic, the parent company of popular open source blogging platform WordPress, announced this week it received $29 million in funding from four investors who will take a minority stake in the company. Though this isn't the first round of financing for the not quite three-year-old company, it has drawn a lot of notice because one of the investors is the New York Times. It's an unusual pairing of two industries -- blogging and conventional media --...

Photoshop CS2 on Linux: Just the Beginning The Wine team has recently announced that Adobe Photoshop CS2 works under Wine, a program to enable Windows programs to run on Linux. (Softpedia news article) Although Photoshop CS2 on Wine may not be perfect yet, it may well be soon, potentially opening Linux up to many people who rely on Photoshop. CS2 is one version back from the current version, but it has not been long since CS3 was released, so it is likely that most users are still on CS2. While it is great that Photoshop CS2 works, this is just...

According to a press release issued earlier this month by Finjan, a security research firm, compromised Web servers are infecting thousands of visitors daily with malware that turns their Windows machines into unwitting bots to do the bidding of an as yet unidentified criminal organization. Security firms ScanSafe and SecureWorks have since added their own takes on the situation, though with varying estimates on the number of sites affected. All reports thus far say the compromised servers are running Linux and Apache. According to an article on ServerTune.com, the exploit involves a rootkit installed on the compromised server that replaces...

What you can - and cannot do - with your software is often determined by the code owner's license. From not using open source APIs with closed-source digital rights management (DRM) to being barred from fiddling with Windows source code, we've seen it all. Or have we? Joining the open source and commercial melee is a document that pretty much rules out using a new JavaScript tool by anyone working in - or associated with - the pharmaceutical, farming and food, and some manufacturing industries. Oh, and certain universities are out, too. ExtTLD, for developing components on the open source...

It’s one small step for Dell, and another great leap for Asterisk — the open source VoIP phone system. Dell plans to promote Fonality (a major Asterisk proponent) to small business customers seeking IP telephony systems. It’s a landmark development, folks, that benefits Dell in multiple markets (open source, VoIP, unified communications, and managed services). Here’s why. While most people are zigging, Michael Dell continues to zag. In mid-2007, Dell announced the surprising decision to pre-install Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux on selected desktops and laptops. Red Hat and Novell were the obvious choices for that deal (and Dell maintains partnerships with...

How can an open source software company with $70 million or so in revenue and no profits to speak of be worth $1 billion? That's the question Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has been trying to answer since he bought MySQL last week. The question is not how can Sun make any money from MySQL – this is after all a commercial company that already has an established business selling enterprise support subscriptions – but rather, how can Sun make enough money to justify that incredible price? To get a feel for what a reasonable answer to this question would look...

KDE 4.0 Released FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE KDE Project Ships Fourth Major Version of cutting edge Free Software Desktop With the fourth major version, the KDE Community marks the beginning of the KDE 4 era. January 11, 2008 (The INTERNET). The KDE Community is thrilled to announce the immediate availability of KDE 4.0. This significant release marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the beginning of the KDE 4 era. The KDE 4.0 desktop The KDE 4 Libraries have seen major improvements in almost all areas. The Phonon multimedia framework provides...

The Five Open Source Business Models Posted by Andy Dornan, Jan 2, 2008 02:03 AM »  Print»  Write To Editor »  Slashdot Open source has become standard in Silicon Valley, with nearly every software startup planning to release at least some code. So far, they've found five main business models:1. Sell support services. This is the traditional Linux model, prototyped by Red Hat. It's still a part of most open-source business plans, but on its own it's rarely enough for startups trying to grow. The problem (for the startups) is that anyone can redistribute the code and sell support or...

Misconceptions about open source software have made many U.S. Defense Department sectors reluctant to employ this technology. Although a 2003 department policy allows its use, many still believe that open source software poses an increased security risk to networks and that it is not supported as well as commercial products. An example of such software is the U.S. Joint Forces Command's (JFCOM's) J-9 Joint Futures Laboratory redact tool. JFCOM developed a free open source software redaction tool to remove changes from standard office documents. "Secure Save" uses OpenOffice.org software to redact non-viewable text, images, metadata and other undesired elements of...

Over the years I have been an active participant in the ongoing fight for open and interoperable Web standards. I have always opposed those who would force proprietary technologies where open alternatives, often superior, exist. From 1994, I worked at CERN and W3C to help make sure there were good specifications for the Web. In 1999, I joined Opera to make sure there was at least one browser that implemented those specifications right. We have worked hard to do that. Unfortunately Microsoft's Internet Explorer, the biggest browser of all, did not. Today we have taken a stand. Opera has filed...

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) recently released a software toolkit designed to help universities detect instances of potentially illegal file-sharing on school networks. The toolkit is based on the increasingly popular Ubuntu Linux distribution and includes the Apache web server as well as custom traffic monitoring software created by the MPAA. Although the toolkit was previously available from a web site set up by the MPAA, the software was removed last night after the organization's ISP received a DMCA takedown notice from Ubuntu technical board member Matthew Garret. Many of the components in the Ubuntu Linux distribution, including...

The SCO Group, working to emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, hopes to sell its Unix assets to York Capital Management for up to $36 million, the company said this week in regulatory and bankruptcy court filings. Through the deal, York would provide SCO with $10 million in cash; up to $10 million in credit to fund its Linux-related legal fight and to get 20 percent of revenue from that action; $10 million for a 20 percent stake in the company; and $6 million to license the Hipcheck products from SCO's Me mobile device software effort and to share revenue...

Patent Infringement Lawsuit Filed Against Red Hat & Novell - Just Like Ballmer Predicted Thursday, October 11 2007 @ 09:41 PM EDT IP Innovation LLC has just filed a patent infringement claim against Red Hat and Novell. It was filed October 9, case no. 2:2007cv00447, IP Innovation, LLC et al v. Red Hat Inc. et al, in Texas. Where else? The patent troll magnet state. The first ever patent infringement litigation involving Linux. Here's the patent, for those who can look at it without risk. If in doubt, don't. Here's the complaint [PDF]. And now let's play, where's Microsoft? You...

The head of the Open Invention Network (OIN) has dismissed Microsoft's claims that Linux violates over 200 of its patents. OIN chief executive Jerry Rosenthal said that Microsoft's assertions are simply an attempt to undermine the open source movement. Rosenthal added that it is time for Microsoft to reveal the patents that are supposedly being infringed, or to drop the claims. "The FUD is clear. If you have a patent that you are proud of, then disclose it," he said. "If your patent is a good patent then you are not worried about revealing it before going to court because...

When it comes to launching online attacks, criminals are getting more organised and branching out from the Windows operating system, says eBay's security chief. eBay recently did an in-depth analysis of its threat situation, and while the company is not releasing the results of this analysis, it did uncover a huge number of hacked, botnet computers, said Dave Cullinane, eBay's chief information and security officer, speaking at a Microsoft-sponsored security symposium at Santa Clara University. Cullinane, who one year ago downplayed the role of organised crime in phishing ("It's not the Sopranos," he said), believes that online attackers are indeed...

open.NET? Microsoft To Make .NET Libraries Available Under "Open Source" One minute ago Microsoft made one of its first "open source" moves under the new Microsoft Reference License: the team in Redmond announced they'll make some .NET libraries available.  I say "open source" because to me, open source means you can easily access a .tar or .zip of the code.  Microsoft's effort is a bit more cumbersome. What does that mean for you?  Is .NET open source now?  I wouldn't call it that quite yet.  This is the first step on a much longer journey.  The license indicates that developers...

iFAX, a commercial company that is built on open source fax server software HylaFAX, was recently included in Inc. Magazine's 2007 list of the top 500 fastest growing companies in the United States. iFAX founder Darren Nickerson says one of the keys to iFAX's success has been its commitment to the open source community behind HylaFAX. "Our success is tied to the openness of the software." iFAX provides value-added services, support, and hardware to the HylaFAX open source facsimile server software. HylaFAX uses a client-server architecture that allows users to send documents through fax modems from any computer on the...

Way back in January, I announced a program to write Linux drivers for companies for free. When I did that, I never expected the response to be as large as it was. It turns out that there were two large groups of people who responded to the announcement, companies wanting drivers, and developers wanting to help out. I never imagined that so many different people would offer to help out. There is a real need for a place where developers can find a "real" project to work on in the Linux kernel. The Kernel Janitors project is a great place...

Novell's Linux business has soared 243 percent since last November when the company signed its controversial deal with Microsoft. "The affect on sales year over year, for Novell's first three quarters of our fiscal year, which ends Oct. 31 -- our Linux business was up 243 percent year over year," said Justin Steinman, director of marketing at Novell, who, along with executives from both companies, spoke at a program hosted by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council. And, that growth doesn't seem to be short-lived. "We're continuing to see above market growth year [over] year and that clearly has resulted in...

The first U.S. GPL-related lawsuit appears to be headed for a quick out-of-court settlement. Monsoon Multimedia admitted today that it had violated the GPLv2 (GNU General Public License version 2), and said it will release its modified BusyBox code in full compliance with the license. Spread the word:digg this story Monsoon Multimedia has stated that it is currently in settlement negotiations with the BusyBox project to resolve the matter without going to court. The company also said in a statement that it intends to fully comply with all open-source software license requirements. The company plans to make its modified BusyBox...

This is very good news. We've long needed real competition in the e-mail market, given how much time people spend in e-mail. Now the organization that gave us competition in the browser market has decided to get serious about e-mail. This is a Very Good Thing. Mozilla (on Monday) announced a new initiative to stimulate innovation in Internet mail and communications. Mozilla plans to develop Internet communications software based on the Thunderbird product, code and brand. The new initiative also aims to nurture a robust developer ecosystem in order to drive improvements through open source and community innovation, in the...

Recently, Free Pascal (FPC) version 2.2.0 was released. This open source Pascal compiler has - since its initial release in 1993 - grown to be one of the most sophisticated open source compilers available today. Daily, more programmers discover FPC and develop their applications in Object Pascal. Specifically, the development of Lazarus has contributed to this phenomenon: Lazarus is a graphical open source IDE for FPC, with an extensive tool kit to design graphical (GUI) applications. What is FPC's strength? For many programmers, the renewed interest in Pascal is surprising. Many think of Pascal as an old language, no longer...

The popular open-source browser Firefox hit another milestone on Friday when it passed the 400 million download mark. The browser, distributed by Mozilla, appears to be enjoying exponential growth in terms of downloads. From its launch in 2004, it took one year to reach 100 million downloads. A year later, it hit 200 million downloads. Advertisement In a message posted on its Web site, Spread Firefox, Firefox's community marketeers, thanked users for helping to achieve the latest download figures. "With your amazing efforts, Firefox has reached 400 million downloads and demonstrated that not even the world's most powerful companies can...

AMD briefed Linux.com this morning on a pending announcement regarding the open sourcing of drivers for ATI graphics cards. It's official -- AMD will make code and specifications for ATI graphics cards available on the Internet on September 10. We spoke with Phil Hester, senior vice president and CTO at AMD, and Chris Schlaeger, director of AMD's Operating System Research Center, along with Jon Carvill, AMD's manager of public relations. They confirmed the rumors reported earlier on Slashdot, that everything necessary for community-driven and -maintained 2-D and 3-D drivers for ATI Radeon X1000 and HD 2000 graphics will be made...

Redmond works with Novell to port 'Flash killer' Robert Jaques, vnunet.com 05 Sep 2007 ADVERTISEMENT Microsoft is to make its recently unveiled Silverlight 'Flash killer' plug-in available on Linux. The commercial release of Silverlight 1.0 is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering richer user experiences on the web. Microsoft confirmed that it will work with Novell to deliver Silverlight support for Linux, called Moonlight, based on the project started on mono-project.com. The Redmond giant unveiled Silverlight at the 2007 National Association of Broadcasters conference in April and released the beta version to the public in May. Silverlight claims to significantly...

Sun seeks to apply the lessons of Linux and turn open source Solaris into an operating system to rival Linux and to be as commonly used as Java. Sun Microsystems has ambitious plans for the commercial and open-source versions of its Solaris operating system, hoping to achieve for Solaris the kind of ubiquity already enjoyed by Java. To come close to reaching that goal, Sun needs to reach out more to developers and endeavour to overcome some long-held prejudices against the OS. Sun's Java programming language, which debuted in 1995, is present in most of today's PCs, mobile devices and...

GPLv3 will help FreeBSD take some users away from Linux, according to the founder and vice president of The FreeBSD Foundation. Writing in the FreeBSD Foundation's August newsletter, Justin T. Gibbs said "GPLv3 is a critical concern for many current commercial users of open source software. "Against the backdrop of GPLv3, the stark difference between the BSD licensing philosophy and that of the Free Software Foundation are only too clear," he said. One difference Gibbs saw was future-proofing the licences. "A GPL proponent might argue that a licence for free software must be upgraded periodically since we cannot anticipate what...

The Word “LINUX” is inappropriate in XBOX Live September 3rd, 2007 · 67 Comments I love Linux and the XBOX 360, so yesterday I tried to include the word “LINUX” in the motto section on XBOX Live. I was stunned when I got a message saying “Your motto contains inappropriate language. Please try again”. Come on Microsoft is that really inappropriate? Maybe only to you guys.Here is the screenshot: Try it out and check it for yourselves !

Student, prof build budget supercomputer August 30 , 2007 When Tim Brom 07’ set out to build a budget supercomputer with Calvin computer science professor Joel Adams, he didn’t know the product of his efforts might end up in his checked baggage headed for England. Brom, now a graduate student at the University of Kentucky continuing his studies in computer science, worked with Adams to build Microwulf, a machine that is among the smallest and least expensive supercomputers on the planet. “It’s small enough to check on an airplane or fit next to a desk,” said Brom. This may prove...

HP launches RedHat Linux desktop PC 30th August 2007Dan WarneLinux, Open source, PC Hardware HP Compaq DX2250: cheap, cheerful and Linux-basedHewlett-Packard, the world’s largest PC manufacturer, has announced it will start selling Linux-based PCs from $AU600 in Australia. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Desktop will come pre-loaded on the HP dx2250 desktop computer -- an AMD-based model.The PC itself comes with a range of AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual-core, Athlon 64 and Sempron processors.“With the cost of proprietary systems continuing to rise, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Desktop minimises acquisition and ongoing deployment costs, leaving more money and resources for...

How hypervisors can defeat GPLv3's "anti-tivoization" Aug. 27, 2007 This guest whitepaper explains how hypervisors can isolate proprietary software from GPLv2 and GPLv3-licensed software. Authored by a Trango product manager, it uses Trango's hypervisor as an example, showing how the technology could help safeguard copyright-encumbered multimedia content in a video playback device with a user-modifiable Linux OS component. Spread the word:digg this story The paper was written by Bruno Zoppis, a former Sun Microsystems software engineer who now manages products for Trango. Alongside Trango's "Virtual Processors" technology, Zoppis appears to consider products from VMWare, IBM, and Sun Microsystems as falling...

It was a long time in coming. But Microsoft has finally acknowledged that its anti-Linux site had gone past the point of usefulness.On August 23, Microsoft pulled plug on the “Get the Facts” site, replacing it with a new Windows Server “Compare” site.The goal of the site is to offer more in-depth information and customer-to-customer opinions about many of the issues IT administrators face,” a company spokeswoman said. “It turns out people wanted 3rd party validation in addition to people’s experiences making OS purchasing decisions so in addition to customer case studies, research reports that compare platforms the site will...

Rave: Two months with Ubuntu Linux and loving it by RickGeek posted on August 22, 2007 2:45 pm In late June of this year, I made a type of executive decision. I have been a software developer by trade throughout my entire professional career. I began programming commercially in 1987 and have followed the progression from MS-DOS 3.31 through 6.22, then Windows 3.x, 95 and up. I’ve moved from the library of custom-developed tools in C and assembly during my MS-DOS days to the GUI + libraries present in Windows OSes. Still, even today, I continue to code for Windows...

Haiku Turns 6! Submitted by Michael Lotz on Sat, 2007-08-18 17:00. Tags: birthday We are excited to announce that having reached the 18th of August, 2007, the Haiku project is now six years old! Read on for some more details... When the decision to start Haiku these six years ago was made (then still called OpenBeOS), the motivation to reach the goal of creating a functioning BeOS clone was very high. Over time this motivation has seen many ups and downs, and there have been times where development was really stagnant, but there were always the other times in which...

Aug. 22, 2007 [Updated Aug. 23] -- Analysis -- According to DesktopLinux.com's just completed survey, the number of Desktop Linux users has more than doubled in the past year, and Ubuntu remains their Linux distribution of choice. Spread the word:digg this story Since DesktopLinux.com's recently completed survey is a self-selected group, we can't claim scientific proof that the number of desktop Linux users has more than doubled in the past year. Still, this year's survey produced 38,500 votes versus 14,535 votes over the same number of days in a similar survey one year ago. Part of the increase undoubtedly was...

It is nice to see the open source projects' progress in Microsoft world, especially it is been extremely fast growth after the Codeplex launched, and also GotDotNet suggests their hosted projects to move on to Codeplex. As you might remember, I have submitted a post about Codeplex a few weeks ago; Microsoft Open Source Projects. This time, it is proud to list most popular and active top 25 projects that has been hosted in Codeplex. AJAX Control Toolkit - a collection of samples and components which make it easier than ever to build and consume rich client-side controls and extenders...

Stellarium features a 3-dimensional sky in much the same way as if you were looking up at the sky in real time. So if you’d like to discover what’s beyond our planet, go on tours around the Solar System and the Milky Way, travel in time back to when other galaxies formed, or become a witness to the formation of other stars billions of years ago, now it’s your chance to experience it. All you have to do is to decide on a destination, set the coordinates and go. With this “virtual planetarium”, one may calculate the positions of the...

You've reached this page because the site you were trying to visit now blocks the FireFox browser. The Mozilla Foundation and its Commercial arm, the Mozilla Corporation, has allowed and endorsed Ad Block Plus, a plug-in that blocks advertisement on web sites and also prevents site owners from blocking people using it. Software that blocks all advertisement is an infringement of the rights of web site owners and developers. Numerous web sites exist in order to provide quality content in exchange for displaying ads. Accessing the content while blocking the ads, therefore would be no less than stealing. Millions of hard...

What's your opinion? Comment on "Fedora vs. Vista" in the Forum Every few months, a pundit asks, "Is Linux ready for the desktop?" The implication, of course, is that it hasn't been -- at least, not until very recently. Yet those who actually use a GNU/Linux desktop know that the operating system has been ready for some years. Considering that much of the early design of desktops like KDE and GNOME were based on what was happening in Windows, that readiness is hardly surprising. In fact, development of the GNU/Linux desktop has reached the point today where it not...

The VMware house of cardsBloomberg believe VMware’s IPO today may the largest technology offering since Google. But doubts have been cast over the company’s supposedly proprietary ESX product, which may be derived from Linux. Updated: Added link to archived copies of Torvalds’ quote regarding hooks to binary modules. Clarified that ESX has two kernels that run directly on the hardware (some readers [...]'; Bloomberg believe VMware’s IPO today may the largest technology offering since Google. But doubts have been cast over the company’s supposedly proprietary ESX product, which may be derived from Linux.Updated: Added link to archived copies of Torvalds’...

Community Hosted Servers Compromised This last week, 5 of the 8 servers that are loco hosted but Canonical sponsored, had to be shut down due to reports that they were actively attacking other machines. These servers were found to [WWW] have a variety of problems including, but not limited to, missing security patches, FTP (not sftp, without SSL) was being used to access the machines, and no upgrades past breezy due to problems with the network cards and later kernels. Loco teams will be given a choice to: a. migrate to the Canonical data center, or b. stay on the...