Linux OLPC Give One Get One program is now live The OLPC Give One Get One program is now officially open. One learning child. One connected child. One laptop at a time. The mission of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is to empower the children of developing countries to learn by providing one connected laptop to every school-age child. In
Open Source Oracle mulls vote on open source at upcoming shareholders meeting II As a follow up to this post, Jonas just informed me that 127,717,018 shares voted in favor of the proposal. From his email: In the end, we received the support of 127,717,018 shares. That is 3.58% of the vote and approximately $2.8 billion in
Linux Linux wins Nigerian school desktops back from Microsoft It looks like the open letter to Steve Ballmer from Mandriva may have had an impact. From the article: Mandriva had closed a deal in mid-August to provide a customised Linux operating system and support for 17,000 Intel Classmate PCs intended for Nigerian schools, but found out last week
Open Source Constructing the Bazaar: Taking advantage of the open-source development model in your project A great post by Juergen about the Open Source development model. If you truly want external community participation, it's not enough to just throw code over the wall - you have to make participation as easy as possible. Think distributed and think part-time to enable the Bazaar And
Apple Where's my Gphone? Google finally made the highly anticipated Gphone related announcement today: Despite all of the very interesting speculation over the last few months, we're not announcing a Gphone. However, we think what we are announcing -- the Open Handset Alliance and Android -- is more significant and ambitious than
Fedora How badly is CentOS hurting Red Hat? That's the question asked in this article: Why does Red Hat tolerate CentOS? The Community ENTerprise Operating System is an identical binary clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (minus the trademarks), compiled from the source code RPMs that Red Hat conveniently provides on its FTP site. It is
Linux An open letter to Steve Ballmer from Mandriva The CEO of Mandriva just posted an open letter to Steve Ballmer: I’m sure we’re way too small for you to know me. You know, we’re one of these tiny Linux company working hard for our place on the market. We produce a Linux Distro, Mandriva Linux.
GPL BusyBox Developers and Monsoon Multimedia Agree to Dismiss GPL Lawsuit It's great to see that the first U.S. GPL lawsuit filed has been settled with fairly little fanfare. From the press release: The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) and Monsoon Multimedia today jointly announced that an agreement has been reached to dismiss the GPL enforcement lawsuit filed
Open Source New York Times opens up code It's great to see the outcome when someone inside a company truly gets Open Source. From the article: The New York Times likes open source -- so much so that, as it gradually moves more of its print operations online, it is nurturing a Web development team that
Linux Devices Lacking Linux Support Needed Greg KH recently announced that Novell was letting him work on the Linux Driver Project full time. The response was huge, with over 300 developers answering the call. Lack of Linux drivers is usually pretty high up on the list of Linux shortcomings. But a follow up post by Greg
Adobe Mozilla Prism It looks like Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight are going to get some competition from Mozilla. From the announcement: Mozilla Labs is launching a series of experiments to bridge the divide in the user experience between web applications and desktop apps and to explore new usability models as the line
Open Source Sun Sues NetApp: Says "You Cannot Unfree What Is Free" Dave Hitz, Founder and EVP at NetApp, has responded to a post made by Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz. Here's his conclusion: Jonathan’s claim that “you cannot unfree what is free” sets a very dangerous precedent. It says that you can steal anything, as long as you open
Novell Acacia's Latest Target: NetFlix It's not just Red Hat and Novell. From TechDirt Acacia has become one of the most hated firms by technology companies that actually do stuff. That's because Acacia is one of the biggest (if not the biggest) firms out there in the business of buying up
Linux Microsoft and the EU anti-trust battle Earlier this week, Microsoft agreed with the EU Commission’s 2004 ruling that it was abusing its dominance in the market in the workgroup server market and would not appeal against a further EU court ruling, which upheld the Commission’s initial findings. Neelie Kroes, European Commissioner for competition policy,
Open Source ZFS Puts Net App Viability at Risk? It's good to see a tech company acting sanely when it comes to litigation. A few excerpts from Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog: About a month ago, Network Appliance sued Sun to try to stop the competitive impact of ZFS on their business. I can understand why they&
Linux SCO still hanging on After filing for Chapter 11, SCO may have found a buyer for its UNIX operations. From the article: While still fighting in the courts and fresh from filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last month, The SCO Group could soon be selling its steadily-declining Unix business. In a filing in
Linux Sun Open Source "summit" Sun continues to be less schizo about Open Source and recently gathered media and employees at their main campus for an Open Source "summit" briefing. Cited were improvements like a binary release of OpenSolaris and plans for dynamic scripting support in Sun's Java Virtual Machine. Executives
Microsoft OSI Approves Microsoft License Submissions A few moths ago, Microsoft submitted the Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL) and the Microsoft Community License (Ms-CL) to the OSI for approval. Both have been approved, albeit with some modifications, including name changes for both. From the official announcement: Acting on the advice of the License Approval Chair, the OSI
Microsoft Patent Infringement Lawsuit Filed Against Red Hat & Novell III (coverage continues) Via 451 CAOS Theory: It looks like the Acacia lawsuit may indeed have little to do with Open Source and be just another general patent troll case. From the article: The nation's first Linux patent suit currently facing Red Hat and Novell isn't about
Linux Nokia N810 gets official Regular blog readers will know that I really like my Nokia N800. On that note, it's great to see that Nokia just officially announced the N810. The N810 is fairly similar to the N800, but now includes a built in QWERTY keyboard and GPS (which were certainly two
Apple Patent Infringement Lawsuit Filed Against Red Hat & Novell II (A follow up to previous coverage) As you may have guessed, this topic is being discussed heavily around the web. Mark Radcliffe points out that Open Source companies are likely becoming a more tempting target to patent trolls due to the stunning growth in the sector (keep in mind that
Apple Patent Infringement Lawsuit Filed Against Red Hat & Novell Earlier this month, Ballmer reiterated his stance on patents and Linux: Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer has warned users of Red Hat Linux that they will have to pay Microsoft for its intellectual property. "People who use Red Hat, at least with respect to our intellectual property, in a
Open Source Oracle mulls vote on open source at upcoming shareholders meeting I've been chatting with Jonas Kron recently about an issue that Matt just pointed out: On Friday, November 2, Oracle will convene its shareholder meeting. As part of that meeting, this year it's supposed to consider an open-source friendly proposal which, for a variety of reasons,
Linux The Next Leap for Linux It's great to see an article like this in a publication like the New York Times. It's a fairly accurate assessment of the current mainstream status of Linux. The conclusion: After using the operating system for writing, Web surfing, graphic editing, movie watching and a few
Microsoft The .NET announcement from Microsoft Contrary to some of the headlines I am seeing, Microsoft did not Open Source .NET. To be fair, they didn't claim to in the announcement, but many people seemed to misunderstand what they actually did. From the announcement: One of the things my team has been working to
