Linux in the news
Recommended Reading
Microsoft Fights Piracy In China, Linux Wins (InformationWeek)
InformationWeek has posted a lengthy article on how "anti-piracy" efforts in China are pushing the country toward Linux. "China in particular will see compound annual growth rates of 25.6 percent in the number of developers in the next three years, predicts IDC analyst Stephen Hendrick. It's a good bet that many of them will be working on the Linux platform, especially since Linux is already gaining traction among Chinese college students."
Moving on With Patents and Open-Source Software (ComputerWorld)
HP's Stormy Peters has a column in ComputerWorld urging the free software community to start playing the software patent game for real. "Building its own portfolio of actual patents, not just the right to use them, enables the open-source community to effectively defend open-source software and to use its patents to negotiate cross-patent agreements. Open-source developers should file for as many software patents as they can and stockpile them. By working with the system, you can file for patents, accumulate them and use them to protect your software rights."
Trade Shows and Conferences
aKademy 2005 Concludes on Sunday (KDE.News)
KDE.News reports from aKademy. "The 2005 KDE conference aKademy in Malaga, Spain, ends on Sunday 4th of September. Up to now the conference has been hugely successful with more than 250 visitors. The Users and Administrators Conference and the Developers and Contributors Conference have both concluded, the Coding Marathon is continuing for two more days."
Usability Events at aKademy 2005 (KDE.News)
KDE.News looks at the presentations by the KDE-Usability group, at aKademy. "Usability has grown over the year since the last aKademy. During the Coding Marathon portion of the conference, the KDE-Usability group gave several presentations and tutorials so developers can learn more about usability, and get live usability support while they hacked away. It was a great success and there were a lot of great bug fixes completed during the weekend. The following is a summary of the presentations and tutorials from the conference."
Collaboration and Integration at Developer's Conference (KDE.News)
KDE.News provides wrap-up coverage of the aKademy conference. "The aKademy 2005 KDE Developers Conference finished yesterday with a second day of talks to prepare for KDE 4. Topics of the day included integration with other programming platforms, marketing KDE and accessibility. In their keynote, David Carson and Deepika Chauhan from Nokia described the challenges involved with porting KHTML to the series 60 platform."
Companies
IBM gets own facts out for Linux v Windows (the Register)
The Register covers the IBM version of the Windows vs Linux TCO comparison. "IBM is kicking some total cost of ownership (TCO) dirt in Microsoft's face, releasing a numbers survey that claims Linux is cheaper to deploy and manage than Windows. An IBM-sponsored Robert Frances Group study found it is 40 per cent cheaper to buy, implement and run an application server on an x86 server running Linux than on a similar server running Windows. Robert Frances polled IT executives at 20 mid-sized and large companies with 250 or more employees."
Interviews
Mozilla as a Development Platform: An Interview with Axel Hecht (O'ReillyNet)
Edd Dumbill talks with Axel Hecht, a member of Mozilla Europe's board of directors, and a major contributor to the Mozilla project, on O'ReillyNet. "ED: Are there any recent technical changes that have helped Mozilla become a more viable platform? AH: There is a considerable amount of energy going into XULRunner these days. This is the platform that we will port our applications to. We are going to start with Firefox, but there are already people actively using the IRC client Chatzilla as an XULRunner application. XULRunner will include Gecko and a set of other modules usable for application creation."
The first Power Architecture Technical Briefing (developerWorks)
developerWorks talks with Stanley Kwong, who will be giving a technical briefing about Power Architecture in the People's Republic of China. "Stan Kwong: I'm in charge of the worldwide technical briefings and also a lot of the technical events. You can kind of look at us as the evangelists for IBM, the face-to-face evangelists. I started with developerWorks about four years ago. Given the background of how we try to evangelize, specifically in terms of the Web and the developer online community, IBM started feeling that there was a major need in terms of the entire world to have evangelists going out there to talk a lot about our technology and also about products. So from a very small staff, we began doing technical briefings."
Reviews
Kontact personal information manager (Linux.com)
Linux.com reviews Kontact, a personal information manager. "KDE's Kontact personal information manager acts as a centralized viewing and editing interface for email, contacts, to-do list, calendar, and notes. Kontact provides you with a Summary view of all the important information you have stored on computer. It also warns you when birthdays and anniversaries are fast approaching, and can even tell you the weather conditions in as many cities as you set it up to show. It's pretty good-looking to boot."
Introduction to the Xen Virtual Machine (Linux Journal)
Rami Rosen introduces Xen in a Linux Journal article. "The Xen VMM (virtual machine monitor) is an open-source project that is being developed in the computer laboratory of the University of Cambridge, UK. It enables us to create many virtual machines, each of which runs an instance of an operating system. These guest operating systems can be a patched Linux kernel, version 2.4 or 2.6, or a patched NetBSD/FreeBSD kernel. User applications can run on guest OSes as they are, without any change in code. Sun also is working on a Solaris-on-Xen port."
Miscellaneous
MA Chooses OASIS OpenDoc XML as Office Standard (Groklaw)
Groklaw reports on a plan to migrate all of the Massachusetts state agencies to the OpenDocument standard by the beginning of 2007. "As they themselves acknowledge, "Given the majority of Executive Department agencies currently use office applications such as MS Office, Lotus Notes and WordPerfect that produce documents in proprietary formats, the magnitude of the migration effort to this new open standard is considerable." Considerable, yes, but if your goal is interoperability, both necessary and worth the effort, as anyone who has ever tried to interoperate in WordPerfect with someone working in MS Office can testify."
Open Source: upsizing is unpleasant for some! (IT-Director)
This IT-Director article describes the frustrations some developers feel regarding the commercialization of free software, and comes to a strange conclusion. "Inevitably, the pioneer spirit is eroded as commercial organisations pick, choose and adapt Open Source software to meet their own strategy. Open Source will lose its original ethos. Ultimately, Open Source software which does not make commercial sense, or at least indirectly contribute towards the commercial strategies of the software vendors and their corporate markets, is doomed to a dead end."
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