Recommended Reading
Glyn Moody
muses on GPLv3 adoption in a Linux Journal article. He looks at the history of licensing and concludes that GPLv3 adoption is inevitable. "
The interesting point here is that it was not legal issues that prompted the adoption of the GPL, but simply a desire to make it easier for MySQL to be included in distributions by simplifying the legal wrapping. MySQL is not alone in making the move to the GNU GPL for this reason."
Comments (none posted)
Paul Sladen covers [click below] the Finnish Summer of Code.
"
Google's Summer of Code may have taken the limelight, but in the
north-east corner of Europe there has been another smaller (near) namesake
taking place. Since 2006, Finland has had its very own Summer of
Code—"Kesäkoodi", "summer code" in Finnish—organised and
backed with the help of Finnish companies wanting to contribute to the
community at a local level."
Full Story (comments: 1)
Trade Shows and Conferences
HP's Randy Hergett
speaks
at the Gelato Itanium Conference & Expo in Singapore.
"
"[Linux] is ready for most applications," he said, noting that there
are telecommunications companies running mission-critical databases on
Linux, and overall adoption levels are ramping up."
Comments (4 posted)
KDE.News
looks forward to the KDE 4.0 release media event, happening January 17 to 19 in Mountain View, California. "
There will be plenty of time and opportunity for interaction between all attendees; but there will also be many interesting presentations, involving both technical and non-technical topics. We have invited over 200 members of the media, I.T. business, distributions and other Free Software groups, completed of course with many members from the North-American KDE community. Further, several international KDE hackers will attend to give talks or help organise the event."
Comments (none posted)
Companies
Bloomberg
covers the latest financial results from Red Hat, Inc.
"
Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 5 software, released in March, sold faster than expected last quarter, increasing cash flow. The Raleigh, North Carolina-based company also persuaded existing customers to use Red Hat software on more of their computers.
``Cash flow from operations was very solid compared to last quarter, and the revenue beat expectations,'' said Denny Fish, an analyst at JMP Securities in San Francisco. He has a ``market perform'' rating on the stock.
Cash flow from operations rose 43 percent to $63.7 million last quarter from a year earlier. In the previous quarter, it declined 4 percent."
Comments (3 posted)
John Fontana
writes
about Red Hat. "
"The big challenge for Red Hat is moving from an
[operating system] distributor to becoming a distributor of an application
platform, a virtualization platform, an SOA platform. Moving into those
spaces is not an easy transition," says Denny Fish, senior analyst for
infrastructure software and services for financial services firm JMP
Securities. "They are selling to different people within an
organization. The [operating system] is often an indirect sale, but with
the middleware platform, for instance, you are selling to application
developers and systems architects.""
Comments (none posted)
Linux Adoption
The Ubuntu Fridge team
reports that Kubuntu in
taking over the Canary Islands. "
The Canary Islands have two
derivatives of Kubuntu, one which is being installed in all their schools
and one used by the largest university. The Jornadas de Software Libre
conference at The University of La Laguna, took place in Tenerife, Canary
Islands, Spain, from the 18th-21st September 2007. It was organised by the
university's Software Libre Office (OSL)." (Found on
KDE.News)
Comments (none posted)
Legal
Free Software Foundation Europe president Georg Greve
discusses the fallout from the recent EC antitrust ruling against
Microsoft.
"
If one were to believe Microsoft, antitrust law is for sore losers who are too lazy to innovate, and the decision of the European Court of Justice against Microsoft was to the detriment of consumers around the world. One might even believe that any company with large enough market share would now have to fear the wrath of the European Commission and its anti-innovation bloodhounds.
At first the notion seemed ludicrous, but then more and more blogs repeated it and serious media started picking it up. Even representatives of the US government spoke out on behalf of Microsoft, to the annoyance of Neelie Kroes, the European Union's antitrust commissioner."
Comments (1 posted)
Interviews
BR-Linux.org presents a
community interview with Novell, here's a summary of the responses:
"
One of the questions, sent by the reader semente, wasn't answered at all, other answers look evasive, some of them repeat known company policy without adding much more meat to it (the deal was about interoperability, you know), but most of them may reveal more than a glimpse of unfiltered opinion: Novell believes there should be one open standard and that standard is ODF, We do not believe that Linux infringes on any Microsoft patents, We welcome GPLv3, and so forth."
(Thanks to Augusto Campos).
Comments (6 posted)
Sean Daly
talks
with Thomas Vinje about the EU Microsoft Decision and OOXML.
"
When the EU Court of First Instance announced its verdict on
September 17, upholding the EU Commission's findings that Microsoft abused
its market dominance, the media flocked to the lawyers representing the
various parties for reactions to the ruling, Brad Smith for Microsoft,
Carlo Piana for FSFE and Samba, and Thomas Vinje, who represented ECIS, the
European Committee for Interoperable Systems."
Comments (none posted)
Resources
The
October 2007
edition of Linux Gazette is out. Articles in this issue include An
Ongoing Discussion of Open Source Licensing Issues, Linux Console
Scrollback, Securing Apache Web Server with mod_security, Introducing
Python Pickling, and more.
Comments (none posted)
In this Linux Journal article, Dave Phillips completes his
look at using Linux
for loop-based composition. He looks at Ardour, Reaper, and Audacity
to create and edit music from sampled sources. "
Drummers are pattern-playing creatures, but to keep things
interesting they vary those patterns from time to time. We can liven up our
example by replacing every fourth loop with a variation of the groove or a
fill taken from the same source loop collection. Simply load the new set of
audio files as new tracks, edit as desired, then mix and match until you
find the right combination of patterns (i.e. what pleases your ears)."
Comments (none posted)
IBM developerWorks
looks
at squeezing the maximum usage out of your network resources.
"
Though bandwidth available to a particular protocol is limited by
Shannon's law and other factors, such as network usage patterns, most of
the time it is shoddy programming or naive coding that causes suboptimal
utilization of network resources. Performance enhancement is also an art
as much as it is a science. To get the best end-to-end throughput, you have
to employ various tools to measure performance, identify bottlenecks, and
eliminate them or minimize their impact. You can quickly get a huge
performance boost by simple and straightforward scientific methods."
Comments (17 posted)
Reviews
ArsTechnica
looks
at the instant messaging client Empathy, which has been proposed for
inclusion in GNOME 2.22. "
Empathy is rapidly becoming an important
part of the GNOME software ecosystem and is already packaged in several
mainstream distributions, including the upcoming Ubuntu 7.10
release. Empathy integration features for Nautilus, Totem, Epiphany, and
Jokosher and others are currently being developed. The Empathy toolkit is
also being used by Intel as part of its new Linux-based mobile
platform. Telepathy could eventually provide pervasive messaging and
presence functionality throughout the entire desktop environment."
(Found on
GnomeDesktop)
Comments (3 posted)
Tom Adelstein
looks
at the Mono project. "
Back in February, Ralph Green asked me to
speak at the North Texas Linux Users' Group. I discussed Linux
administration and then took questions. Some one in the audience asked me
about Mono. I gave a cavalier answer having a bias against it. Then someone
else in the audience said that I needed to get my facts straight."
Comments (42 posted)
Miscellaneous
In this article from O'Reilly's Women in Technology series Selena
Deckelmann
shares
some suggestions for how to get more women involved in open source.
"
We can learn from research about increasing diversity. I'm sure
smart people have summarized, put together lists of bullet points, and made
handbooks to show how to do it. Certainly, organizations dedicated to
fixing inequalities will be touchstones for change. But we need more than
leadership to change our culture. We each can take steps now to make women
feel like there is a place for them in our communities."
Comments (205 posted)
Page editor: Forrest Cook
Next page: Announcements>>