Linux in the news
Recommended Reading
Bruce Perens: How Many Open Source Licenses Do You Need? (IT Management)
Bruce Perens wonders how many open source licences we really need. "The Open Source initiative has, to date, approved 73 licenses. How many do you really need? If you're a company or individual producing Open Source software, no more than 4. And you can get along with just 2 of them."
Trade Shows and Conferences
Open Source News from FOSDEM 2009 - Day 1 (LXer)
LXer covers the first day of FOSDEM 2009. "This weekend, the 9th Free & Open Source Developers' Europe Meeting (FOSDEM) took place at the Université Libre Bruxelles (ULB) in Brussels. Your editors Sander Marechal and Hans Kwint attended this meeting to find out for you what's hot, new in the area of the Linux environment and might be coming to you in the near future. Here is the blow-by-blow of the first day with talks about Mozilla's future, the role of Debian, two OSI talks, Reverse engineering and much, much more."
Open Source News from FOSDEM 2009 - Day 2 (LXer)
LXer has a look at FOSDEM Day 2. "In the weekend of 7 and 8 February, the 9th Free & Open Source Developers' Europe Meeting (FOSDEM) took place at the Université Libre Bruxelles (ULB) in Brussels. Your editors Sander Marechal and Hans Kwint attended this meeting to find out for you what's hot, new in the area of the Linux environment and might be coming to you in the near future. This is our report of the second day covering the talks about Thunderbird 3, Debian release management, Ext4, Syslinux, CalDAV and more."
Companies
Freescale adds Android, Xandros netbook support (ZDNet UK)
ZDNet UK reports that Freescale's new ARM processors can now support the Android and Xandros open-source operating systems. "New industry agreements pave the way for non-Intel netbooks, Freescale said, with "dramatically longer" battery life and better portability. Up to half the netbook market — expected to double to 30 million units in 2009 — may go to ARM, the company predicted."
Microsoft blinks first on interoperability with Red Hat (451 CAOS Theory)
451 CAOS Theory takes a brief look at an interoperability deal between Microsoft and Red Hat. "Under their agreement to work together Microsoft and Red Hat will provide testing, validation and coordinated technical support for mutual customers using server virtualization. Red Hat has joined Microsoft's Server Virtualization Validation Program, and Microsoft is now a Red Hat partner for virtualization interoperability and support." (Thanks to Don Marti)
Linux Adoption
Cuba launches own Linux variant to counter U.S. (Reuters)
Reuters reports on the launch of the Cuban Nova distribution. "Cuba launched its own variant of the Linux computer operating system this week in the latest front of the communist island's battle against what it views as U.S. hegemony. The Cuban variant, called Nova, was introduced at a Havana computer conference on "technological sovereignty" and is central to the Cuban government's desire to replace the Microsoft software running most of the island's computers."
Interviews
Interview: Eigen Developers on 2.0 Release (KDEDot)
Jonathan Riddell interviews the developers of Eigen. "Recently Eigen 2.0 was released. You might already have heard about Eigen, it is a small but very high performance maths library which has its roots in KDE. Below, the two core developers are interviewed about it."
Reviews
The Buzztard Project, Part 1 (Linux Journal)
Dave Phillips takes a look at Buzztard 0.4.0. "Buzztard is a good example of the modern design for a music tracker. The program provides a variety of elements necessary for music production, including a composition interface, an instrument design facility, internal audio effects processing, and much more. Buzztard follows the design considerations for the famous Buzz tracker for Windows. The tracker composition interface resembles the standard UI for most trackers, including pages for pattern and song creation. Buzz (and thus Buzztard) added further production amenities, most notably the deployment of "machines", Buzz-speak for instruments designed within and for the tracker itself. I'll have more to say about machines later, but now let's see what we need to build and install the latest Buzztard."
Palm pulls back the curtain on webOS technical details (ars technica)
Ars technica shares some advance information on Palm's Linux-based webOS platform. "The platform supports headless background services that interact with the user through passive notifications and interactive dashboard elements. Persistent data storage in webOS is facilitated by the HTML 5 database features. The platform's integrated media server supports audio and video playback through the open source GStreamer media engine."
Miscellaneous
Silverlight for Linux hits with Microsoft punch (The Register)
The Register discusses the release of Moonlight for Linux. "An open-source version of Silverlight has been released with Microsoft's support, as Flash rival Adobe began crowing about the new media player's death. Moonlight 1.0 from the Novell-backed Mono team was posted Wednesday, having passed all of Microsoft's regression tests. Moonlight plugs into Firefox and is available for all major Linux distributions including openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Fedora, Red Hat, and Ubuntu. Moonlight builds on Silverlight 1.0, coming with a graphics pipeline, video and audio frameworks, and a JavaScript bridge that use the browser's JavaScript engine to execute."
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