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Open Source Software Shows Its Muscle (Law.com)

Law.com takes a look at the legal issues in using GPL'd software. "Open source software had its origins in the free software movement. By now, most open source users understand that free refers to freedom, not to price. The new lesson is that the freedom belongs to the software, not to users. You are not free to do whatever you want with the open source software and may find yourself in a legal fight if what you do restricts the freedom of the software. Many of the things that for-profit companies strive for end up limiting some software's freedom. Any activity that leverages software for business advantage is likely to restrict the software's freedom, and the growing use of open source software by for-profit companies has been a growing irritant for free software advocates." (Thanks to Uwe Klein)

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Companies

Intel CEO: Smaller gadgets will expand market (AP)

Intel CEO Paul Otellini comments on the increasing popularity of smaller CPUs. ""I've not seen energy like this from our customers in a long, long time," Otellini told The Associated Press on Wednesday. "Everyone views this as being sort of hyperexpansive to the existing market." A centerpiece of the strategy is the Atom processor, which packs the power of a PC-class processor from six years ago into the smallest space yet — 25 Atoms will fit on a square inch. It's intended for Mobile Internet Devices — iPhone-like tablets that provide a "full" Internet experience, better than that available on cell phones. Somewhat larger than the MID is what Intel calls the "netbook," a small, cheap laptop. Taiwan's AsusTek has had a breakout hit in this category with its eeePC, which starts at $300 and uses an Intel chip."

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Linux Adoption

Three German KDE Deployments (KDE.News)

KDE.News looks at three new KDE deployments in Germany. "The IT Service Center Berlin has announced the development of a desktop system for the public services in Germany's capital. This is yet another public body making the switch to the Free Desktop system. The announcement talks about the good integration of KDE with their current infrastructure, which is partly based on Microsoft's software."

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Linux at Work

Introducing Fedora Nightlife (Bryan's Blog)

Bryan Che's blog notes the launch of Fedora Nightlife. "Fedora Nightlife is a new project for creating a Fedora community grid. People will be able to donate idle capacity from their own computers to an open, general-purpose Fedora-run grid for processing socially beneficial work and scientific research that requires access to large amounts of computing power. Given the large number of Fedora users, I hope that we will eventually be able to build a community grid of over a million nodes at Fedora. This will be a great example of the power of the Fedora community, give people new and meaningful ways to contribute to Fedora, advance the development of large-scale grid software, and lead to real benefits for the world."

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Resources

Linux Gazette #151 is out

The June 2008 edition of Linux Gazette is out; with articles on Deividson on Databases: Triggers, gDesklets: Beauty with a Purpose, Monitoring Function Calls, Using Crontab, USB thumb drive RAID, and much more.

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Is OpenOffice.org getting faster?

Andrew Ziem has put together an analysis of OpenOffice.org performance trends. "Some complain OpenOffice.org is slow and bloated. With each release there may be dozens of performance improvements, but there are also new features, some of which may slow things down. This the natural balance in software development, but in the end, what is the net effect on performance from one version to the next? We need a good benchmark to produce good data, but what do we measure? Let's assume the most common operations are starting OpenOffice.org, opening a Writer document, scrolling from top to bottom using the down arrow, exporting the document, and closing both the document and OpenOffice.org."

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Quickies: Fedora Review, Edu, 3D PDF, Beautiful Akonadi (KDE.News)

KDE.News presents another Quickies article. "Red Hat Magazine has a review of KDE 4 on the new Fedora 9. *** Linux Journal takes a look at Marble which recently gained OpenStreetMap support. *** The Fanatic Attack blog features an article on exceptional Linux programs for kids covering a good number of our own KDE Education apps. *** Another project's loss means we gained one extra summer of code project implementing the 3D part of the PDF specification for Okular. *** The Register takes a look at 4.1 Beta 1. *** SoftVision Blog reviews KDE 4 distros..."

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Reviews

Ubuntu offers Remix, a lighter Linux for mobile users (ComputerWorld)

ComputerWorld looks at Ubuntu Linux Remix, a lightweight version of Ubuntu aimed at "netbook" computers. "A key difference with the Remix from the standard desktop Ubuntu Linux is the inclusion of a "launcher" that allows users to start the machines and get online quickly, Carr said. "There are also lots of tweaks for the Intel Atom chips, and optimization, too, for the flash drive [rather than disk-based spinning hard drives] and for other underlying technologies. Probably the major difference ... is that this is very much a device-tied OS" aimed specifically at netbook architectures."

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