Linux in the news

Microsoft takes on the free world (CNN)

According to this Fortune article (by way of CNN), Microsoft is starting to rattle the patent saber in a more serious way. "But [Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith] does break down the total number [of patents] allegedly violated - 235 - into categories. He says that the Linux kernel - the deepest layer of the free operating system, which interacts most directly with the computer hardware - violates 42 Microsoft patents. The Linux graphical user interfaces - essentially, the way design elements like menus and toolbars are set up - run afoul of another 65, he claims. The Open Office suite of programs, which is analogous to Microsoft Office, infringes 45 more. E-mail programs infringe 15, while other assorted FOSS programs allegedly transgress 68."

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Schwartz: Free advice for the litigious

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has some advice for Microsoft regarding its patent claims. "All of which is to say - no amount of fear can stop the rise of free media, or free software (they are the same, after all). The community is vastly more innovative and powerful than a single company. And you will never turn back the clock on elementary school students and developing economies and aid agencies and fledgling universities - or the Fortune 500 - that have found value in the wisdom of the open source community. Open standards and open source software are literally changing the face of the planet - creating opportunity wherever the network can reach."

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2007 Red Hat Summit coverage

The 2007 Red Hat Summit is underway in San Diego, California. Here are some of the news reports and press releases from the event:

• Red Hat shows its Global Desktop cards (DesktopLinux.com)
• Red Hat Offers Global Desktop for Linux (CIO Today)
• Red Hat tries new desktop Linux angle (ZDNet)
• Red Hat to Build a Virtual Appliance OS (eWeek)
• Red Hat launches desktop Linux offering for emerging markets (eWeek)
• Red Hat Shuns 'Windows Clone' Model for Global Desktop (eWeek)
• Red Hat Summit 2007: Day 1 - desktops and licenses (News.com)
• IBM, Red Hat team to reinforce Linux on mainframes (Network World)
• Linux On Mainframe Program, IBM and Red Hat (Tech News)
• Red Hat releases Liberation fonts
• JasperSoft Business Intelligence Software Now Available on Red Hat Exchange
• Scalix joins Red Hat Exchange
• Sybase and Red Hat Announce Plans for Expanded Alliance
• Zimbra Launches as Charter Member in Red Hat Exchange

Comments (8 posted)

Red Hat Summit 2007, Day 2: Red Hat Exchange and interesting presentations (Linux.com)

Linux.com covers day 2 at the Red Hat Summit. "In addition to the seven official tracks, this year's Red Hat Summit has an unofficial eighth track for the press. Day 2 saw two official announcements: Red Hat Exchange and a new partnership with Sybase. In addition to covering the press conferences, I had time to sit in on some interesting presentations."

Comments (4 posted)

Awards and Moglen mark Red Hat Summit finale (Linux.com)

Linux.com covers the last day of the Red Hat Summit. "The third annual Red Hat Summit in San Diego concluded on Friday with a half-day schedule of sessions capped off by the presentation of the first annual Innovation Awards. I missed the awards ceremony in favor of a one-on-one interview with Professor Eben Moglen, during which I learned the secret of how to change the world."

Comments (4 posted)

KOffice ODF Sprint Kickoff (KDE.News)

KDE.News covers the KOffice meeting in Berlin. "What are the KOffice developers planning to work on, or what do they want to discuss with their fellow hackers? Inge Wallin explained his main goals for the Berlin meeting in an email sent a few days before the meeting started. The big target for the meeting is ODF. First, the KOffice hackers will go through the current ODF support and try to improve it. It is important to create a good infrastructure to support ODF throughout KOffice, so developers won't have a hard time getting their apps to use it."

Comments (2 posted)

KOffice ODF Sprint Report (KDE.News)

KDE.News covers the KOffice ODF sprint. "The two days of the KOffice ODF sprint were very productive. Most time was spent on group discussions, and designing specific parts of KOffice in smaller groups. Of course, code was written as well, and for an overview of what happened, read on!"

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Art meets open source at Libre Graphics Meeting (Linux.com)

Linux.com has a report on the Libre Graphics Meeting. "Unlike a typical Linux get-together, at the Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM), half of the attendees are developers and the other half are artists. The conference, which was held earlier this month at the Polytechnique Montreal, featured speakers from as far as Australia and Europe. In three rooms, speakers presented techniques for everything from generating photorealistic vector drawings to producing full movies to magazine production."

Comments (3 posted)

Linuxfest Northwest 2007 Report

Scott Dowdle has written a report on the Linuxfest Northwest 2007 conference. "Linuxfest Northwest has been an annual event since 1999 held at Bellingham Technical College in Bellingham Washington which is approximately 90 miles North of Seattle. To allow for the largest participation, it is held on a weekend. Linuxfest Northwest 2007 was held on April 28-29th and was attended by approximately 900 people."

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Meeting on Future Mozilla Firefox Support Forums Held (MozillaZine)

MozillaZine covers a recent meeting on Firefox support. "The notes from the second meeting on the future of Mozilla Firefox support have been made available online. The telephone conference was organised by the Mozilla Corporation and took place on Thursday. The discussion concentrated on ways to improve forum-based Firefox user support offerings. The MozillaZine Forums currently host the most popular Firefox support boards and the discussion included opinions on the current strengths and weaknesses of the present site. However, the usefulness of the meeting was somewhat limited by the low number of regular MozillaZine Forums participants present."

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Microsoft Won't Sue Linux Users, Company Exec Says (InformationWeek)

InformationWeek reports that Microsoft doesn't want litigation. ""We're not litigating. If we wanted to we would have done so years ago," said Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft's VP for intellectual property and licensing, in an interview. Instead, Microsoft wants to create more arrangements that mirror the company's deal with Linux distributor Novell. In November, the two agreed to share intellectual property and pledged not to sue each other's customers. "We created a bridge between two worlds that before were perceived to be unbridgeable," said Gutierrez."

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Novell and Microsoft detail 12 new Linux coupon customers (CBR Online)

CBR Online reports on the signing of twelve new Linux coupon customers to the Novell and Microsoft interoperability agreement, which offers support for SUSE Linux Enterprise. "Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse and AIG Technologies signed up in December 2006, a month after the scheme was announced, while Wal-Mart came on board in January and HSBC in March. Now added to that list are: 1blu, Arsys, Fujitsu Services, Gordon Food Service, Gulfstream Aerospace, hi5 Networks, Host Europe, Nationwide, Prisacom, Reed Elsevier, Save Mart Supermarkets, and California's Department of Fish and Game."

Comments (15 posted)

Progeny's closure highlights problems of small FOSS companies (Linux.com)

Linux.com examines the demise of Progeny. "Branden Robinson, former Debian Project Leader and a Progeny employee from the company's start, makes clear that Progeny's failure was not due to lack of business. According to Robinson, when the company closed, it had half a dozen clients, and was in negotiations with at least one other company. In addition, Progeny was still providing update services for three or four clients. "In some ways, I feel like we had no competitors," Robinson says. One company, he adds, "was really disappointed to hear that Progeny was going out of business, because they weren't really sure who to turn to.""

Comments (2 posted)

Who Leads The Real-time Linux Niche? (InternetNews.com)

Here's an article on InternetNews.com covering the petty back-and-forth between real-time Linux distributors. "Currently Red Hat employee Ingo Molnar is leading the real-time Linux development effort at kernel.org. It's a fact that doesn't faze MontaVista. 'It is not a competitive advantage even if that was implied,' MontaVista's [Tom] Kelly said. 'Leadership is a service to the community and a role that we appreciate and everyone should bear the burden of helping and MontaVista has done it in the past.'"

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Sun hopes for Linux-like Solaris (ZDNet)

Stephen Shankland looks at Ian Murdock's role as Sun's chief operating systems officer in a ZDNet article. "Sun has been trying for years to restore the luster of Solaris, a version of Unix that peaked in popularity in the late 1990s, but that since has faced a strong challenge chiefly from Linux. Sun has worked to reinvigorate Solaris by boosting its performance, offering it as a free download, making it an open-source project called OpenSolaris, and pushing a version that runs on servers using Intel's and AMD's mainstream x86 processors. Linux and Solaris are cousins that stem from the same Unix heritage, if not from the same source code. But Linux fans simply have a hard time trying Solaris, Murdock said Tuesday."

Comments (21 posted)

GPL likely to regain Apache compatibility (ZDNet)

ZDNet covers an effort to bring the GPL v3 license together with the Apache License. "In a significant change of course, the Free Software Foundation is working to make the upcoming version 3 of the General Public License (GPL) compatible with an alternative, the Apache License. "I think a final change we'll see for the release of GPL 3 will be that compatibility," said Free Software Foundation Executive Director Peter Brown in a panel discussion Tuesday at Sun Microsystems' JavaOne conference here. The Apache License compatibility had been removed as a result of an "11th-hour" decision before release of the third draft of GPL 3."

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Eight common misunderstandings about GPLv3 (IT Manager's Journal)

IT Manager's Journal attempts to clarify GPLv3. "To separate the confusions and half-truths from the reality, we went to the source: members of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) such as compliance engineer Brett Smith, founder Richard Stallman, and executive director Peter Brown; and the Software Freedom Law Center's Richard Fontana, who is one of the main drafters of the new license. Taken together, their comments help to create a clearer picture of the goals behind GPLv3 and the final form that the license will probably take."

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Java goes back to the PC (ZDNet)

ZDNet talks with James Gosling. "In 1995, Sun Microsystems introduced Java as a way to endow Web surfing with fancy graphics and more sophisticated interaction than just basic pointing and clicking. By introducing JavaFX Script this week at the JavaOne conference here, Sun is trying to reinvigorate that original idea. Gosling helped invent the Java programming language, initially called Oak in the early 1990s. He was involved in its early spread as a Web browser plug-in and its commercial success in server software and mobile phones."

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An Interview with Robert Brewin (O'Reilly)

David Bock interviews Robert Brewin on O'Reilly. "If you have been paying attention to any of the news from Sun lately, Robert Brewin is probably not a stranger to you. Robert has been strategically involved in if not outright responsible for some of the major announcements from Sun, from the open sourcing of the JDK, to the embracing of scripting languages like Ruby, and most recently this week's announcements of JavaFX Script and the JavaFX Mobile platform. I had the chance to sit down with Bob and talk to him about JavaFX Script, JavaFX Mobile, the announcement of the new consumer-focused JRE, and several other impressions and events from JavaOne."

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Understanding ActiveRecord: A Gentle Introduction to the Heart of Rails (Part 2) (O'ReillyNet)

O'Reilly is running part two in a series on the Rails ActiveRecord Persistence layer. "In the second part of Gregory Brown's in-depth examination of the Rails ActiveRecord Persistence layer, he looks at how to model relationships such as one to many and many to many. This comprehensive introduction to ActiveRecord will let you hit the ground running when you need to integrate a database into Rails."

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Release of Foundations of GTK+ Development (GnomeDesktop)

GnomeDesktop.org reviews the book Foundations of GTK+ Development. "Foundations of GTK+ Development is the first book completely dedicated to GTK+ development since 2001. It contains examples and instructions for using almost every single widget available in GTK+ 2.10. In addition, five appendixes provide a reference to often under-documented properties and signals."

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Pocket-sized PC runs Linux (LinuxDevices)

LinuxDevices looks at the Linutop PC. "Linutop claims that its Linutop PC draws "less than 6 Watts" -- less energy than many computing appliances such as printers and scanners dissipate in standby mode. The device measures 3.7 x 1.1 x 5.9 inches (9.3 x 2.7 x 15 cm), and weighs 9.9 ounces (280 grams). Its compact wall-wart-style power supply incorporates a European-style plug."

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