Tag: open source
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Ubuntu the minor player?
Well that’s according to Dana Blankenhorn on ZDnet … While Dana is not an anti-Linux person, his view is limited to presumably the closed US ecosystem. Meanwhile the rest of the world is speeding on and adopting FOSS at a rate of knots. Ubuntu itself ( and others ) is being used everywhere from education…
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Mono where art thow?
The debate surrounding Mono, the ‘open source implementation of .Net’, has been going on for some years now. And a very roudy debate it has become lately. Some history first. Mono was originally conceived by Miguel de Icasa, now a Novell employee. Originally part of the Ximian project, it was later incorporated into Novell at…
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Viruses, viruses, and more viruses
3 new scenarios for the weekend … I recently had to rebuild a Linux server for a large national retailer, running a console-based app, due to hardware failure. This duly done and the machine back in operation, I was surprised to get a call relating to high traffic usage on that network. As some background…
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Freedom and copyright
A statement by John Sullivan from the FSF in the US has just been posted and sheds a lot of light on the ongoing RIAA lawsuits which the RIAA themselves said they would be dropping earlier this year. What is interesting about the article is the continued view that music, art and software, and the…
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Code/Software quality
Code quality and quality of software development/applications has always been a hot topic. The problem in the commercial world is that because code is closed source, you as a customer of a commercial software vendor, have no idea what the quality is of that application because you have no access to the code. Code could…
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Linux hits 1% market share
This probably sounds like quite an anti-climax, but considering its 60% year on year growth, this is quite an achievement. And Windows has dropped 4% in the last year, which is a considerable dent in its market share. This together with the erosion of Internet Explorer’s browser market, indicates a general downturn for Microsoft. The…
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KDE 4 continues to mature
Much has been said, both negative and positive, about KDE 4 since it’s introduction almost 2 years ago now. Yes it was a rocky start but that was to be expected on a project this large. But the developers kept their cool and stuck to their vision. It’s interesting to still see some negative comments…
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Truecrypt and ext2ifs
I came across an issue this morning ( which has been around for some time already ) concerning using TrueCrypt and ext2ifs together. I would get a blue screen of death in Win XP sp2 when trying to mount a Truecrypt volume and the BSOD would relate to a driver called ifsmount.sys. Some googling turned…
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Mono, Suse and Microsoft – problems all around
Microsoft’s recent patent suit against a prominent printer manufacturer ( that happens to use open source software in some of its products ) has raised more than a few eyebrows. This is the first execution of Microsoft’s threat against FOSS since its announcement over a year ago, when it indicated that FOSS was in violation…
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FSF files suit against Cisco
The Free Software Foundation has filed a law suit against Cisco for alleged breaches of copyright in, specifically, many Linksys products ( WRT-series comes to mind as having OSS software ). Apparently the 2 have been in discussions since 2003 but it appears that Cisco have gone into dormant mode as there are still apparently…
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VMWare: A “significant portion” of our technology may include open source
VMWare’s latest 10-q filing indicates possible large scale use of open source code. Huh? What? Excuse me? Hasn’t VMWare been telling us all along that they were GPL-compliant ( I’ve never seen any code from them ) and that they didn’t use any open source code in their products? Either they’re posturing for the financials…
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And Chrome again
It appears I’m not the only one who is not impressed with Google Chrome – Jim Lynch over at ExtremeTech has written a very interesting article asking the question – why do we need Chrome at all? The answer is of course that we don’t need another browser – the current bunch do just fine.
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Quebec government sued over purchase of Microsoft software
Facil ( Quebec’s open source association ) is suing the local provincial government for purchasing Microsoft software without following government guidelines which requires government organisations to stimulate competition and look for alternatives. They indicate that Quebec has refused to look at alternative bids from open source vendors – apparently they’re spending more than $80million per…
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EU and US coming to disagreement over open standards definition
The EU Commission announced on June 25 that EIF/2.0 (The European Interoperability Framework which defines the rules for software used in e-Government) will hold the line as regards patents on standards. This means that patents will not be tolerated as part of open standards ( well duh!!! ). But apparently the Americans don’t get it…
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Breaking News!!! – CONSEGI Declaration: 6 nations say no to ISO/IEC
The fallout from the ISO confirmation of Microsoft’s Office Open XML Specification as a standard, continues and is starting to lead to some serious consequences. The recent conference in South/Latin America focusing on free software, drew some 2000 registrants to the IT event, many of whom were top government officials. The outcome ( and declaration…