Linux in the news

Defending Openness (Linux Journal)

Glyn Moody looks at challenges to open access and open data. "What this shows is that however many battles are won, the war against closed, proprietary approaches goes on. Open source and open standards have made huge strides, but in other areas - open access and open data, for example - the fight is only beginning. If you want to track what's happening here the best place to go is Peter Suber's Open Access News. This will not only keep you completely up to date on the latest developments in the open access and open data worlds (with a fair amount of related open source stuff thrown in for good measure), but it will also highlight all the important campaigns and petitions that need your help. As recent events in the open source and open standards world have shown, individuals can make a real difference."

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Printing Trends in Linux (O'ReillyNet)

Andy Oram covers efforts by the Linux Foundation's Open Printing Working Group on O'Reilly. "Printing has been a notoriously difficult capability to configure in Linux, but work by the Open Printing Working Group is designed to change that. Andy Oram has been examining what we can expect in the future from this initiative, which includes distribution-independent drivers."

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Looking for Algae--the Next Voyage (Linux Journal)

Jon maddog Hall spent the winter in Brazil before setting sail in a search for algae. "How does [algae] fit in with computing? Most of the readers of Linux Journal have at least one computer in their houses. I lost count of my own computer stock at about 15, and some of them are real electrical power-eaters. A lot of them have really dangerous chemicals in them, like lead and acidic materials. Fortunately, over time, power requirements per CPU and graphics cycles have gone down, as have costs for the hardware. Manufacturers, either through legislation or social and civic concern, have moved to making their systems from more environmentally-friendly components."

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Snowed By SCO (Forbes)

As SCO fades away, some of the pro-SCO journalists are being asked some hard questions. Here is the closest thing we'll get to an answer from Dan Lyons on Forbes. "This time, I figured I should at least give SCO the benefit of the doubt. I flew to Utah and interviewed their managers. I attended a SCO conference in Las Vegas and did more interviews. They told me all sorts of things, like they'd found a 'smoking gun' that proved IBM was guilty, and that they were preparing to sue big Hollywood companies that use Linux server farms to make movies. I reported what they said. Turns out I was getting played. They never produced a smoking gun. They never sued any Hollywood company."

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SCO, Linux and Rob Enderle: A Conclusion (TG Daily)

For anybody who has wanted to see Rob Enderle explain himself with regard to SCO, TG Daily has that explanation at great length. "I thought I'd run into the cover up of the century. I was even told, as the senior research fellow, I was not allowed to talk about Linux anymore and I was lectured by the Head of Research on how I should have written the column who, upon actually reading it, agreed I had done everything he had just lectured me to do. He concluded that he must be thinking of another column I had written (this was my first column and there was no 'other' column). I saw this as a clear ethics problem and resigned the next day, focused like a laser on the Linux supporters I then viewed as criminals. And if they were criminals, than SCO must be the victim, right? Well, that was my thought back then."

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Russian OS to be installed in every school (CNews)

Russia plans to install a Linux-derived "Russian OS" in every school in that country, as reported by CNews. Pilot programs are to start in three regions in 2008, with 2009 being targeted for a full rollout. "The main aim of the given work is to reduce dependence on foreign commercial software and provide education institutions with the possibility to choose whether to pay for commercial items or to use the software, provided by the government."

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Microsoft's secretive standards orgs in Former Yugoslavia (LinuxWorld)

Ivan Jelic, a member of the Free Software Foundation Europe, looks at which European countries voted for the OpenXML format as a standard. "Romania and Bulgaria, members of European Union, together with Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia, gave a green light for Microsoft's format, with comments from Bulgaria. In this story, we take a look at the decision processes and reactions in those countries."

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Want to meet four men who dared to fight MS -- and won? (Groklaw)

Groklaw features an interview with Georg Greve, Jeremy Allison, Volker Lendecke and Carlo Piana on the recent EU Commission's antitrust ruling against Microsoft. "Sean Daly: Now, tell me a little bit more about the "blue bubble" because I wasn't present at the hearings, but in the hallway, coming out of the hearings, I kept hearing about this blue bubble bursting. What's going on here? Georg Greve: Well, the blue bubble was a theory that Microsoft invented in order to justify that it had kept parts of the protocol secret. They said that there's a difference between the internal protocols and the external protocols, if you want to describe them like that. They said that certain protocols that are so secret that they are in this blue bubble, because they had visualized this with a blue bubble, that this could never be shared without actually sharing source code, without sharing how the program exactly works."

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Building a community around your open source project (Red Hat Magazine)

Red Hat Magazine has some nice ideas about building a community around an open source project. "If you have an open source project, most likely you are a designer/developer and not a marketer. Marketing is part of the job though (sorry!), but it doesn't have to take a lot of effort. For starters, think of the related mailing lists you are active on. If you aren't active on any mailing lists, start! Open source lives through free exchange of email. If you see a problem posted that might be solved by your software, it's perfectly acceptable to mention your app. Other projects may exist as alternatives to your own, and you want to respect them, as you want to also respect other users on the lists. Help, but don't advertise."

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GNOME 2.20 arrives on Linux desktops (DesktopLinux)

DesktopLinux takes a look at GNOME 2.20, with screenshots. "The first major update of GNOME, version 2.20, has arrived almost two and a half years after GNOME 2.10, its last big step forward. GNOME 2.20 boasts not just improvements to the desktop itself, but multiple significant improvements to GNOME's applications as well."

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MontaVista readies new Linux mobile phone OS (LinuxDevices)

LinuxDevices.com looks at MontaVista's Mobilinux 5.0, an upcoming distribution aimed at mobile phone use. "'Typical' phones based on Mobilinux 5.0 are said to be capable of booting in under five seconds, and placing calls within 10. Boot times are reduced through XIP (execute-in-place) technology that runs applications directly from flash, without first instantiating them in RAM. Application startup times are reduced by prelinking, including to glibc."

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My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

Carla Schroder, author of the Linux Cookbook pens this installment in the Women in Technology series. "[You] definitely need a thick skin in the FOSS world. It's a self-selected group, so it's chock-full of mavericks, the socially-inept, just plain trolls, and all manner of folks who don't understand the importance of courtesy and respect. But these are not representative of the excellent people who really do things. The best FOSS people are polite and pleasant. I do not believe that anyone is so invaluable and indispensable that they can be excused from common courtesy. The world itself is full of mean people, and there is no remedy other than learning how to deal with it. Girls are still often raised to be passive doormats, and they are not taught how to set and achieve goals, or that they are even worthy of going after what they really want. There are no shortcuts; all we can do is dig in, do our best, and not allow the naysayers to derail us."

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