Open Source

A collection of 533 posts

Linux

Off to the Ohio LinuxFest

As mentioned on the podcast (the ogg rss feed is in your favorite podcatcher, right?) I decided to drive and in about an hour I'll be off to the Ohio LinuxFest.  I should arrive just in time for the FARK.com/Ohio LinuxFest "pre-party".  If you&

Linux

Freedom more important than price or cost...

(via Michael)  It's great to see that companies are finally starting to grok the true benefits of Open Source: Freedom, Not Cost, Is Key Overall, Forrester's research clearly showed that enterprise open source adoption is steadily increasing, with many businesses showing no marked difference in their

Linux

SCO, Linux and Rob Enderle: A Conclusion

Rob Enderle has posted a final analysis of his involvement in the SCO fiasco.  Unlike Dan Lyons, he's not apologizing.  Let me first say that I think anyone sending death threats is absolutely deplorable.  He never goes into details about specifics, but if it did indeed happen (and

IBM

OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org has been in the news for a couple reasons this week.  On one hand, IBM announced that is was releasing Lotus Symphony, an office suite that is based on OpenOffice.org code and runs in an Eclipse instance.  On the other hand, some of the community is up

Linux

EU Court Holds the Antitrust Line Against Microsoft, but May not have Stemmed its Dominance Tide

Yes, I am a bit late on this one.  I had a couple items on the blog TODO a bit longer than I anticipated.  I'm working my way through those now, but will still post the items I think are especially important. So, as you've surely

Linux

First U.S. GPL lawsuit filed

From Linux Watch: For the first time in the U.S., a company and software vendor, Monsoon Multimedia, is being taken to court for a GPL violation. Previously, alleged GPL violations have all been settled by letters from the FSF (Free Software Foundation) or other open-source organizations, pointing out the

Linux

The Best Kept Secret in Open Source?

John Mark has a point - Intel may very well be one of the best kept secrets in Open Source.  They are working with a ton of projects, employing a lot of Open Source developers and releasing a lot of code.  They are doing all this fairly quietly and are

Open Source

Are You Right With Reality?

Michael Tiemann recently asked why it is that the global IT consumer continues to accept IT-related write-downs of $386B/year.  They do so in a pattern that sees them repeating the mistakes they have made in the past (buying the same or "upgraded" applications and operating systems from

Linux

SCO Files For Chapter 11 Bankruptcy

You've probably heard by now that SCOX has filed for Chapter 11.  It gets worse though, as it seems almost half of its finance department has either quit or been fired.  Two of the people who quit had over ten years' experience.  I've been through

Apple

New iPods reengineered to block synching with Linux II

A quick follow up to this post.  Well, it didn't take long.  I didn't expect that it would.  While the instructions are still a bit convoluted, I'm sure that will change soon enough as well.  I just wish companies would stop making it difficult

Open Source

Yahoo Acquires Zimbra For $350 million in Cash

Those of you who regularly read this blog know I am a huge fan of Zimbra.  I was quite interested to hear that they were just acquired by Yahoo! for $350 million in cash.  As many Open Source acquisitions of late, that's a fairly stunning multiplier (and the

Apple

New iPods reengineered to block synching with Linux

While the title of this Boing Boing article is a little sensationalistic (the move was almost certainly aimed at iTunes lockin, with Linux being collateral damage) it's not too far off the mark: The latest iPods have a cryptographic "checksum" in their song databases that prevents

Linux

Is Embedded Linux on the decline?

Embedded Systems Design just released its annual embedded market study, and it contains some information about Linux.  Embedded Linux is something that I've been following lately, and LQ just added an Embedded Linux Forum.  The report shows that companies "not interested in using Linux" is on

IBM

IBM joins the OpenOffice.org

To the collective cheer of "It's about time", IBM is now officially supporting the OpenOffice.org project.  From the press release: The OpenOffice.org community today announced that IBM will be joining the community to collaborate on the development of OpenOffice.org software. IBM will be

Linux

Microsoft kills its 'Get the Facts' anti-Linux site

A little late on this one, but Microsoft has replaced its Get the Facts site with one that is ostensibly less biased. "The goal of the site is to offer more in-depth information and customer-to-customer opinions about many of the issues IT administrators face," a company spokeswoman said.

Linux

Kudos to AMD - ATI GPU Specs Released

Kudos to AMD for following through on an earlier promise to release GPU specs.  The specs are now publicly available, without the need for an NDA.  The RV630 Register Reference Guide and M56 Register Reference Guide represent almost 900 pages of 2D specs.  3D specs and specs for other chips

Microsoft

Why Microsoft fears Open Source more than other proprietary vendors do

It does seem as if Microsoft fears Open Source more than companies that are just as proprietary as Microsoft is.  Matt has a potential explanation: Now look at Oracle, SAP, IBM, etc. You won't find a single other company making a concerted effort to fight open source. Not

Linux

Are SCO Execs in trouble?

From Mark Webbink: Some have speculated that it would be worthwhile to now take SCO off the market. Heck, their market cap is now under $10 million. The problem is that paying $10 million to buy SCO would not be the end of it. SCO is still embroiled in the

Microsoft

OSI email group gets catty over Microsoft's Permissive License request

In what should come as no surprise, it looks like the discussion surrounding the Microsoft OSI submissions are getting a little cantankerous.  From the article: Another community member, Donovan Hawkins, doesn't like the MS-PL's requirement to keep its code separate from any other code licensed differently.

Open Source

Sourcefire acquires ClamAV

With all the recent talk of proprietary companies snatching up Open Source companies, it's great to see a quality Open Source company aquire a quality Open Source project.  I helped setup the original donation system for ClamAV and am happy Tomasz (who looks to be joining Sourcefire now)

Linux

Citrix Enters Datacenter and Desktop Virtualization Markets with Acquisition of XenSource

In case you've been hiding out the last couple days and hadn't heard, Citrix has acquired XenSource for the lofty sum of $500m (which represents a truly astounding multiple, approached previously only by the likes of Skype and YouTube).  This comes right on the heels of

MySQL

Refining MySQL Community Server

MySQL AB has announced some changes in the way it handles the Community and Enterprise releases of MySQL.  From the post: The changes are in the areas of release policy and stability of MySQL Community Server and in the availability of MySQL Enterprise Server. The changes start from the question:

Linux

Q&A: Torvalds on Linux, Microsoft, software's future

LinuxWorld has posted an interview with Linus, and as usual there are a bunch of interesting sound bits.  A few here: Lest people think that commercial and Open Source don't mix... CW: How did Linux, as a product, benefit by being released as it was? Torvalds: Well, in

IBM

Court Rules: Novell owns the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights

It sure has been a long time since the last SCO related post.  It looks to finally be the beginning of the end for this whole fiasco.  From Groklaw: Hot off the presses: Judge Dale Kimball has issued a 102-page ruling [PDF] on the numerous summary judgment motions in SCO

Open Source

Dilbert goes Open Source

In case you missed it... --jeremy