Following the end of the venerable publican tradition of lock-ins due to the new licensing laws, the government is taking aim at software vendor lock-ins.
The new Certified Open programme, launched by the Open Source Academy today, will grade IT vendors on factors such as standards compatibility and the potential for integration with other platforms, enabling […]
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gave an interview to Forbes Magazine last week, an unsurprisingly FUDdy affair. Aspersions were cast on vendors’ willingness to take responsibility for problems with Linux - an accusation refuted here - but it was the vague threat of MS taking legal action against Linux vendors for patent infringement that raised the […]
Govind Uppaluri writes in to tell us about his new website, www.openden.com, a listing site for open source products.
Nearly 1300 products are listed now and the list is growing. The list attempts a
shallow navigation to get to the right type of product.
The list includes many products which are not found in other open source
directories and […]
Vista’s delay has grabbed the headlines in recent days with a tenacity rare for a tech story, Microsoft or not. The news hit just in time to give Novell’s Brainshare conference in Utah an extra shot in the arm and led to some widely reported jibes from senior Veep John Dragoon:
Dragoon found the timing of […]
Free software is vital for good governance and future prosperity in developing countries, according to the United Nations University.
“Being a ‘passive consumer’ rather than an ‘active participant’ is not in the best interests of a developing nation’s government or business sectors. Technological selfdetermination in developing countries is key to their future prosperity and is contingent […]
The industry consortium founded by the likes of HP and Intel has not always enjoyed the best relationship with coders - excepting superstars such as Linus Torvalds and Andrew Morton who reside on their payroll - and so has launched a technical advisory board which aims to improving their standing in the wider open source […]
One of the writers for Australia’s Sys Con took umbrage at our very own Economist Magazine for this article on open source software, describing it as “FUD-ridden” and “uninformed”.
The magazine article questioned open source’s potential for innovation, as well as relating out-of-date intelligence on the SCO saga; priceless quotes include “Linux is good at doing […]
France’s legislature finished drafting a law on Friday that it hopes will open up media content monopolies to competition. However, deputy Frédéric Dutoit warned that open source developers could face prison under a provision that would outlaw software which allowed the circumvention of copy-protection measures.
The France-based developers behind the open source VideoLAN were worried […]
Information Week has an interesting piece on the incursions of open XML formats into government IT.
It opens with the story of a proselytising organisation, the Center for Technology in Government, keen to practise what they were preaching about XML. After shifting their website to XML formats, the agency was able to reduce the maintenance […]
The company’ online entertainment division is to migrate several of the databases serving its gaming community to OSS provided by EnterpriseDB. A company veep justified the decision to go open on the grounds of licensing costs and the decision to go with EnterpriseDB on the grounds of their compatibility with Oracle’s software.
Open source software is not meeting the needs of those in the developing world, according to the United Nations University. People in the developing world are consumers of, not contributors to software projects, and it is leading to a “digital divide.”
Researchers compared the number of open source mailing list postings from different countries with the […]
The European Parliament voted against a proposal to allow companies to defend patents granted by member state throughout the EU. Campaigners against the proposal included the Foundation for Free Information Infrastructure and Florian Mueller of NoSoftwarePatents.com.
Eben Moglen, the legal head honcho at the FSF, seems to spend half his life being interviewed by ZDNet. During the latest sitting, he described OSS as “a big pile of golden eggs” which is not “incompatible with capitalism,” referring to various infamous claims from the likes of SCO and Microsoft.
As if to illustrate […]
The UK government has threatened to cancel a contract to buy $12bn of war planes if the US government continued to refuse to share the source code of the software controlling the aircraft.
In making the threat, the Defence Procurement minister, Lord Drayson, said that the planes would be effectively useless as they could be switched […]
Red Hat have teamed up with LinuxIT to target the many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) who claim a lack of experience is a major barrier to their use of open source software. The pair will be pooling their resources to create how-to videos and literature, as well as holding seminars allowing potential customers a […]
Gnome 2.14 was released on Thursday, and Novell unveiled SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 at CeBit.
Hot on the heels of MIT’s Simputer comes the Solo computer. The challenge: to create a “computer for Africa” with it’s dust, heat and “power issues”. The resultant solar-powered box, created by the Fantsuam Foundation, will run Debian Linux.
Meanwhile, China’s Shanghai Menglan Group are looking to tap demand for laptops in the country’s vast rural […]
Novell, or at least their marketing people, are aiming high with their latest desktop offering, SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. Their recent healine grabbing pronouncements are positioning it as the superior rival to Windows on the corporate desktop. The company claims it will be “more usable than any other desktop product on the market.”
Looking to capitalise […]
Desktop Linux managed to get an interview with Michael Dell on their chosen subject, asking when his company is going to stop pussyfooting around with Linux “workstations” that look like desktops, etc. The problem, apparently, is with the nature of Linux…
“People are always asking us to support Linux on the desktop, but the question is: […]
IBM announced last week that, come the release of Vista later in the year, it will not be installing the new operating software on any of its desktops. Furthermore, the company will not renew its desktop software contract with Microsoft when it expires in October.
They will instead migrate those users still on XP onto its […]