Linux in the news

Google To Launch Ad-Free Open Source Project Site (LinuxWorld)

LinuxWorld reports that Google is adding open source project hosting to its services. "The heart of an open source project hosting service is the version control system, which keeps track of changes to software and allows developers to fix conflicting changes or roll back to previous versions. Google will be using Subversion, an open source version control system to which several Google developers contribute, [Google engineer Greg] Stein said."

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Fedora wants to draw in women (ZDNet)

ZDNet covers the launch of the Fedora Women project. ""A large portion of the Fedora user base is made up of women. They are often under-represented within the community, with many people not even realizing how big a share of the community they are. The Fedora Women program aims to improve that representation and to provide a forum for the women of the Fedora community," the group said."

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OSCON kicks into full gear (NewsForge)

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier covers day three of the O'Reilly Open Source Convention on NewsForge. Covered sessions and events include: Open Technology Development: Open Source and the US Government, Greg Kroah-Hartman's Current State of the Linux Kernel, Lightning States sessions, and the exhibit floor.

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OSCON day four: Zen and tomatoes (NewsForge)

NewsForge covers day four at O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON). "Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python, gave an talk on "Python 3000," the minor revamp of Python, which will eventually result in Python 3.0. During his session van Rossum discussed the philosophy of the new design and gave a tentative timeline for development."

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Final thoughts on OSCON - with video! (NewsForge)

NewsForge presents an OSCON wrap-up. "The eighth annual O'Reilly Open Source Convention wrapped up Friday with a half day of talks and a farewell address by Eben Moglen, general counsel for the Free Software Foundation and chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center, on the importance of software licenses. Moglen's talk provided a perfect end to an excellent conference."

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SCO Group's stock falls (Salt Lake Tribune)

The Salt Lake Tribune observes a minor milestone in the SCO case: "After a sustained slide fed by sustained poor earnings results and courthouse reversals, SCO shares closed Tuesday at $2.28 per share. That was 2 cents per share lower than the company's stock sold for on March 25, 2003. That was the same day SCO, alleging IBM had transferred SCO's proprietary Unix code into its Linux releases, filed its $5 billion complaint against Big Blue in Salt Lake City's U.S. District Court."

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Pervasive exits open-source PostgreSQL business (ZDNet)

ZDNet reports that Pervasive Software is getting out of the PostgreSQL support business. "In a letter to the PostgreSQL community of developers, Pervasive Software President John Farr said last week that the company "underestimated the high level of quality support and expertise already available within the PostgreSQL community.""

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Medsphere sues company's co-founders (Modern Healthcare)

Modern Healthcare has an article about a suit by Medsphere Systems against its co-founders. "According to the lawsuit, these alleged acts include posting proprietary source code known as 'OpenVistA Client' -- also known as 'Kickstand' -- and 'Jumps' on June 6 and June 7 on the SourceForge.net open-source development Web site..." Note that reading the full article requires an intrusive registration step - and isn't worth it. (Seen on Linux Med News).

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People Behind KDE: Olivier Goffart (KDE.News)

KDE.News has announced an interview with Olivier Goffart in its People Behind KDE series. "Today's star of People Behind KDE is a member of what was once described as "the younger generation of Kopete developers". This man talks Messenger and Jabber nativly but only communicated on IRC thanks to Babelfish. Learn about the trials of a Kopete developer in our interview with Olivier Goffart."

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Eben Moglen explains highlights of GPL3 second draft (NewsForge)

NewsForge talks with Eben Moglen about the second draft of GPLv3. "Moglen stepped us through the highlights of the new draft. They include language simplifications that make the GPL easier to use and lead to greater internationalization, clarification of issues about potentially restrictive technologies and peer to peer downloads, and a radical simplification of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). Although some issues remain, he believes that this draft is the first clear indication of what the final version of GPL3 will look like."

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Deploying BIRT (O'ReillyNet)

Jason Weathersby shows how to deploy BIRT in an O'Reilly article. "The Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) project is an open source, Eclipse-based reporting framework that enables the creation and deployment of complex report designs. Development with BIRT can usually be thought of as a two-step process: the creation of the report designs within the Eclipse BIRT Report Designer, followed by the deployment of the designs and framework to an application for dissemination."

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The Generative Internet, by Jonathan Zittrain, Esq. -- RFC (Groklaw)

Groklaw has published an article by Jonathan Zittrain entitled "The Generative Internet", the author is requesting comments on the work: "I've just finished a new paper on the future of the Net, in which I extol its open qualities but fear that a focus on an open Internet can too often exclude worrying about an open PC -- which I define in a broader fashion than the divide between free and proprietary software typically contemplates. I think it's critically important that users retain general purpose PCs, even some with proprietary OSes, instead of "information appliances." I fear these appliances, like TiVo, can come to predominate -- or that the PC itself will morph towards becoming one, with new gatekeepers determining what code will or won't run on them, rather than the users themselves."

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A geo-located photo album in five easy pieces (Linux.com)

Kevin Quiggle and Mike Whitton explain how to add GPS location information to a photo album in a Linux.com article. "Open standards, and openness in general, enables people to combine a variety of technologies in new and interesting ways. For example, using a camera with Exif support, a GPS receiver, the Google Maps API, and Perl, PHP and JavaScript, Mike Whitton created a Web-based photo album in which the photographs are automatically placed on a map at the exact location they were taken. Let's take a look at how this is done."

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August Linux Gazette available

The August issue of the Linux Gazette is out; topics this month include XMMS effect plugins, low-fat Linux, concurrent server design, and more.

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Mainstream Parallel Programming (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal looks at parallel programming. "Whether you're a scientist, graphic artist, musician or movie executive, you can benefit from the speed and price of today's high-performance Beowulf clusters."

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CLI Magic: Feh for image viewing (Linux.com)

Linux.com reviews Feh, an image viewer. "Too many Linux image viewers are tinged with little annoyances -- they take too long to load, are slow to redraw the display, have limited format support, sport inconvenient controls -- so when you want to settle on one, inevitably there's something to make you utter feh! in general discontent. Good call -- feh is the name of a speedy little viewer that packs in a surprising number of features for its size."

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KDE 3: All About the Apps (Part 4) (KDE.News)

KDE.News covers some KDE 3 applications. "This is part four of the the successful series All About the Apps, reminding us that while KDE 4 development may be fun, to watch to find great apps working today KDE 3 beats them all. This time we report on the Linux equivalent of Cubase - Rosengarden, the great Basket, KPhotoAlbum and the next version of KDevelop."

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Thunderbird 2.0 preview (NewsForge)

NewsForge looks forward to Thunderbird 2.0. "The tag system has three advantages over the old label system. First, you can define as many tags as you want (labels were limited to five). Second, you can apply as many tags as you want to each message (labels were limited to one per message). And third, tags are hot, new, and Web 2.0 buzzword-compliant (labels are not)."

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Review: VMware's worthy new option for virtual servers (NewsForge)

NewsForge reviews VMware Server 1.0. "VMware offers the VMware Server software as an RPM or a tarball with the installer and necessary components -- no Debian package at this time, unfortunately. I decided to go with the RPM install on a dual Pentium III 1.0GHz server with 2GB of RAM, running CentOS 4.3. VMware Server should install on most x86 or AMD64 Linux distros. The main prerequisites are GCC and the kernel headers for your system."

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Does dual licensing threaten free software? (Linux Journal)

Glyn Moody examines some issues behind the dual-licensing of software projects, in a Linux Journal article. "A whole new generation of open source companies like MySQL, SugarCRM and JasperSoft have shown that such an approach can be highly successful, and this is encouraging others to adopt the same model – Scalix is the latest to join the club. Before this becomes established as the de facto standard for open source business in the dotcom 2.0 world, now might be a good time to examine whether it is really is such a good thing for free software, or whether it might even represent a threat to its fundamental principles."

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