LWN Weekly Edition
Front pageSecurity
Kernel development
Distributions
Development
Linux in the news
Announcements
Letters to the editor
->One big page
This page
Previous weekFollowing week
| |||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||
Linux in the newsRecommended Reading Free Software as a Social Movement (Z Magazine)Z Magazine interviews Richard Stallman. "A problem arises when people who might be sympathetic to our ethical position, but focus on other issues, fall into the habit of helping to pressure others into using non-free software. It falls to me to tell them they are doing so, that they with their own actions are giving certain large companies more power. When you send someone a '.doc' file, a 'Word' file, or an audio or video file in RealPlayer or Quicktime format, you are actually pressuring someone to give up their freedom. Perhaps because I constantly have to bring this up, people believe I don't have a sense of proportion."
HOSP promotes open source in the Netherlands (NewsForge)NewsForge covers the Holland Open Software Platform (HOSP). "Officially founded last summer, HOSP has the goal of bringing together all existing initiatives around open source software, open content, and open standards in the Netherlands."
Companies Quanta Building MIT's $100 Laptops (eWeek)eWeek reports that Quanta Computer Inc. has been selected to manufacture the hardware for MIT's One Laptop per Child initiative, which aims to produce $100 laptops. "OLPC's goal is to sell the laptops to governments worldwide who will in turn distribute the machines to schoolchildren in impoverished regions to use in their classes and take home. The computers are expected to come in a brightly colored, rugged chassis in order to protect them from damage and discourage theft, and will run Linux with a 500MHz processor and 1GB of onboard memory, based on a design proposed by OLPC earlier this year."
University Rectors in Italy Promoting Proprietary Software (Linux Journal)Marco Fioretti has written a followup on his Linux in Italian Schools series with the report from an Italian university group promoting the use of Microsoft products, available at steep discounts. "The simultaneous publication of this press release and my article on the benefits of using free software in the same university/school system isn't the only interesting part of the story. First of all, the language in the CRUI announcement is similar to that used on the page of Microsoft's Italian site that advertises the discount; even if you don't speak Italian, the correspondence is evident."
Linux at Work Open source everywhere for Canadian brokerage (NewsForge)NewsForge looks at the successful deployment of Linux and open-source software at a Canadian brokerage firm. "One product that Fortlage calls "absolutely amazing" is PDFlib, a dual-licensed tool that processes PDF data on the fly. GHY's clients keep records using bar-coded forms that cost a dollar each and had to be ordered in multiples of 1,000. "The forms have static and dynamic bar codes, and the customers send them to their shippers to be filled out," Fortlage says. "The problem was that it was not cost-effective, and the costs had to be borne by GHY. We thought, what if we build the forms on the Web, use a cookie to save some information to the desktop about what was last filled out, and make a very simple Web-enabled document?" The result, says Fortlage, is that GHY was able to eliminate 90% of the annual $25,000 cost of the paperwork."
Legal Microsoft's Yates' to MA: How About 2 Standards? - Transcript (Groklaw)Groklaw covers the latest remarks from Microsoft's Alan Yates regarding the Massachusetts Open Document Format standardization issue. "First, what Microsoft is asking for is that Massachusetts adopt two standards, to "open up" to that. Yates says that Microsoft has never spoken against ODF, that what Microsoft is proposing is more choice and greater competition than the current Commonwealth policy provides. They want to be included too. It's just a question of two types of business models, Microsoft's, which he describes as a model based on "the magic of software," and IBM's, based on "the magic of services." On that basis, he says public policy shouldn't favor one business model over another, that public policy shouldn't choose software."
A Massachusetts ODF-MS XML Timeline/Resource Page (Groklaw)Groklaw has started a resource page for those following Open Document Format adoption in the state of Massachusetts. "Here's a draft of what will be a new permanent page on Groklaw, a timeline of all important events in the story of Massachusetts' adoption of Open Formats, Open Standards and it's a compilation of resources. It's in four sections: 1) resources; 2) by topic; 3) events chronologically; and 4) miscellaneous resources. There is some overlap, so that everyone can find what they are looking for, no matter how they approach it. If you can't find it anywhere else, look in the chronological list."
Interviews People Behind KDE: Debian Qt/KDE Packagers (KDE.News)KDE.News introduces this People Behind KDE interview with the Debian Qt KDE team. "A special treat on tonight's People Behind KDE as we bring you the Debian Qt KDE Packagers. A whole seven interviews in one! How are those packages made and kept up to date? What would the packagers like in KDE 4? What customisations do Debian's finest make to their own desktops? And do they prefer RMS or Linus? Find out on the Debian Qt/KDE People Behind KDE interview, the answers may not be what you think."
Resources High Dynamic Range images under Linux (linux.com)Linux.com has an introduction to high-end image formats and how they are supported with free software. "OpenEXR was developed by Industrial Light and Magic and released under a modified BSD license in 2003. It supports 16-bit floating point, 32-bit floating point, and 32-bit integer pixels. It covers more than the entire visible color spectrum, and more than 10 orders of magnitude in brightness."
KDE and OpenSync develop KitchenSync to replace KPilot (NewsForge)NewsForge covers the KitchenSync. "Developers of the K Desktop Environment (KDE) have teamed with those at the OpenSync project to produce a graphical interface called KitchenSync to replace the KPilot PDA sync tool beginning with the release of KDE 4. KDE developers made the decision to drop the current synchronization code, including KPilot, an older application also called KitchenSync, KSync, Kandy, and libksync, earlier this year in Spain at the aKadamy conference, just days after a SUSE-sponsored coding session in Nuremberg, Germany, where the KitchenSync interface was developed."
At the Sounding Edge: Music Notation Software for Linux, Part 3 (Linux Journal)Dave Phillips makes musical notation with MusiXTeX. "MusiXTeX is a set of macros and fonts that provide extensions for music publication with the TeX typesetting software. TeX is a powerful text processing system for UNIX/Linux, originally designed for high-quality typesetting of scientific and engineering articles and books. It puts special emphasis on representing the symbols and graphics found in algebraic equations and other mathematics formulae. This special graphics capability made TeX a natural choice for a high-quality typesetting system for music."
Reviews Linux Magazine: Busy Kat (KDE.News)KDE.News mentions a new Linux Magazine article (PDF format) on Kat. "For all the users wanting to better know how the Kat desktop search program works, Roberto Cappuccio explains the inner workings of Kat, the difficulties encountered during development and the future of this long awaited (and still under heavy development) piece of software in the article Busy Kat on Linux Magazine."
CLI Magic: Introducing rss2email (Linux.com)Linux.com has an introduction of rss2email. "Why would you want to receive feed updates in your inbox rather than checking them in a feed reader? Isn't the whole point of feed subscriptions to browse them at your leisure? For the most part, I don't want to receive an email every time one of the feeds I subscribe to is updated -- I have more than 200 subscriptions, so that would fill up my inbox pretty quickly. However, there are a few select feeds I do want to monitor more closely, so I use rss2email to shoot me an email when those are updated."
Miscellaneous Cooperative Funding for OpenEMR (LinuxMedNews)Consultant and OpenEMR developer Rod Roark suggests a new method for the funding of open-source projects: "Accordingly, my company Sunset Systems has organized a collaborative method for improving OpenEMR. We have put together a "wish list" at here. What you can do is pick an item on the list (or propose a new one) that is important to you, and tell us how much cash you might be willing to contribute toward its development, along with any special requirements you may have. When it appears that sufficient funding is available to complete your item to everyone's satisfaction, we'll contact you and the other contributors to confirm agreement and then make it happen."
Bringing MySQL compatibility to PostgreSQL (NewsForge)NewsForge looks at efforts to advance PostgreSQL adoption by providing MySQL compatibility. "Kings-Lynne, a PostgreSQL developer who also works on the phpPgAdmin project, is working on a MySQL compatibility project for PostgreSQL that may allow people to utilize PostgreSQL with software that normally requires a MySQL database. According to Kings-Lynne, the MySQL compat project is comprised of about 100 MySQL functions, two MySQL aggregates, and "maybe a cast in PostgreSQL.""
Page editor: Forrest Cook |
|
||||||||||||