Open Source

A collection of 533 posts

Linux

Suse Linux Founder Exits Novell

Suse Linux founder, and kernel maintainer for more then a decade, Hubert Mantel has announced his resignation from Novell.  "Too late for me. I just decided to leave Suse/Novell, this is no longer the company I founded 13 years ago." were his parting words.  Novell has a

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Gates/Ozzie Challenge Microsoft to “Alter Its Business” - Birthday Memo

Another leaked memo from Microsoft (Dave has posted the full emails here).  "This coming 'services wave' will be very disruptive," Gates said in an Oct. 30 e-mail to top Microsoft employees. "We have competitors who will seize on these approaches and challenge us."  The

Linux

Should Linux Have a Binary Kernel Driver Layer?

For those of you that follow LKML at all, you know this is a hotly debated topic.  Greg K-H recently posted aboutan OSDL meeting on this topic, along with a follow up.  This is a really interesting topic to me.  Now, we all know that binary drivers are bad.  Here&

Linux

Microsoft: Open Source Not That Open

This article is about a presentation that was made at the OSBC.  LQ was a show sponsor and I had hoped to attend, but that didn't work out.  Jason Matusow, director of Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative, claimed that Open Source is really not all that open.

Linux

Novell to Standardize on GNOME

With the acquisition of Ximian some time ago, you kind of had to see this coming.  Novell will move future versions of SLES and NLD to Gnome.  KDE will continue to be supported in OpenSuse.  This will likely cause a lot of fallout from KDE users and traditional Suse users

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Google Paying for Firefox Installs

What is that thing you ask?  Google is indeed paying for Firefox downloads with the Google toolbar bundled in.  It seems like a win/win/win to me.  You get about a buck, the downloadee gets a good browser and Google not only gets to get a leg up on

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No Respect for Windows Open Source

I've been meaning to blog about this one for a while now, but I've been putting a good deal of time into the upcoming LQ code update so haven't been blogging much at all.  In a recent post, Shaun Walker laments that Windows Open

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MS To Launch Internet Versions of Office And Windows

Has it finally happened?  Has Microsoft realized (at an exec level, many non-CEx's there have realized for a while) that the world is changing in a direction that will eventually severely hurt their two cash cows, Windows and Office?  It would seem so.  Unfortunately, I currently get a

Linux

Oracle to Offer Free Database

Yup, you read that right, Oracle is going to offer a free database product.  This is a gratis version and not a libre version, of course, but for Oracle even that is a huge step.  Now, they have offered a free devel version for a long time...but this is

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OpenDocument Debate Heats Up

As you may have anticipated, this debate has turned political.  The amount of FUD getting thrown around is amazing.  What's also  amazing is that people who clearly don't understand what is being decided are the ones making the decision.  I guess that's not so

Linux

On Educated Consumers

Scoble points out 12 reasons that people may not go with Microsoft products.  There, of course, are more - but on many accounts he hits the nail right on the head.  So why is a Microsoft employee listing these things out?  He wants educated consumers.  That's something everyone

Linux

MySQL 5.0 Now Available for Production Use

I've been talking a lot about MySQL recently, so I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that MySQL 5.0 is now the official GA release.  Congrats the the whole MySQL AB team.  You probably have a tough road ahead, but this is certainly

Linux

Microsoft, OSI Discuss Shared Source Licenses

It seems that Microsoft is talking to the OSI about licensing.  Now, I know that license proliferation is a very real problem, but I think Microsoft having a bona-fide OSI approved Open Source license that they are willing to consistantly use is probably a good thing.  It would be ideal

Linux

A Little More MySQL Info (but I'm not linking)

I found a little more information about the recent MySQL/Innobase topic.  Why am I not going to post the link?  The article is on a SYS-CON site, but that has nothing to do with it.  You may remember that most of the Open Source related SYS-CON staff resigned a

Linux

BitMover Madness

While I've not seen a lot of news about this, it seems quite asinine to me.  When a vendor can tell a customer what its employees can do on their own time, something is wrong.  I'm sure most of you remember the BitKeeper Linux kernel debacle

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MySQL Innobase Follow Up

A quick follow up to this post.  Not a whole lot of details have surfaced unfortunately, but a little moire information is available here.  I'd love to get a hold of some of the "speculation" that was edited out (even off the record), but so far

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Microsoft Says "Maybe Someday" on OpenDocument

A follow up to this post, it looks like Microsoft may consider adding OpenDocument support after all, based on "customer demand".  I'd guess that just one or two state Governments alone would be enough demand.  I hope MA stands firm here.  Unfortunately, one thing I can

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Ward Cunningham leaves Microsoft for Eclipse

Ward Cunningham, the father of the Wiki, has officially left Microsoft and will be joining the Eclipse Foundation.  Luckily for Ward, when Ballmer said "just tell me it's not Google", he could calmly say no and avoid another aeron getting tossed.  This marks a huge change

Linux

Desktop Apps Coming to the Web: Google

In this article, a Google engineer makes a couple comments on Google Maps.  That's not what I find interesting though.  While Google Maps is amazingly slick, it has some major usability holes IMHO (no ability to save your location, no ability to do multiple-stop trips, an odd propensity

Linux

20 Years of Windows

Microsoft Windows just turned twenty.  For a full history of Windows, here's the Wikipedia article.  What I find ironic, and didn't know, is that the very first version of Windows shipped quite late and vastly understated hardware requirements.  Seems not much has changed ;)  Truth is, I

Linux

Open Debate About OpenDocument

FOXNews recently ran a story about the MA decision to move to an OpenDocument standard.  The article was quickly blasted by their own readers, who pointed out that the article was one sided, full of FUD and neglected to mention that the author was funded by Microsoft.  From the followup

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Nessus Closes Source

Looks like as of version 3, Nessus will no longer be an Open Source app.  In doing a little research here, it looks like many people have been suspicious of Tenable Security for a while now though.  One of the main reasons Renaud gave for this change was "A

Linux

The Value Dell Puts on Microsoft Windows

Anyone who's dealt with Dell knows the voodoo involved in their pricing.  It does seem odd though, that a PC with no OS would cost more than one with Windows.  Now, I know the argument - the companies that pay to preload Windows only trial software offset the

Linux

CheckPoint Acquires Sourcefire

The money sure was flowing while I was in the UK, wasn't it? By acquiring Sourcefire, CheckPoint gets the Open Source Snort IDS along with Marty Roesch and a ton of other expertise.  In a letter from Marty, he states: "I’ll start by stating again what

Linux

Oracle Acquires Innobase OY

Oracle recently announced that is has acquired Innobase.  For those who have never heard of Innobase, they are lead by Heikki Tuuri and develop InnoDB.  InnoDB brings transactions, row-level locking, foreign keys and other ACID features to MySQL.  Who uses InnoDB?  Sites like Yahoo! finance, Wikipedia and Google among many