Reports that China Unblocks Wikipedia have appeared on mainstream sites: Editor & Publisher, Forbes, vnunet (somewhat underwhelmed), Wikipedia itself, …
Jimmy Wales was in Bangalore last week to participate in the Infovision summit and also to meet up with the Wikipedia community in India. Priya Padmanabhan of CyberMedia News caught up with him […]
A team of US academics has been given $750,000 to study the collaborative process by which open source software is produced:
The team will focus on the Apache Web server, the PostgreSQL database and the Python scripting language. They intend to collect information from message boards, bug reports and e-mail discussion groups to build up a […]
Down under, something very big has happened very quietly. Kennards Hire, a major machinery rental company, engaged in a massive migration to desktop Linux, the biggest the country has yet seen, with nary a peep from the national media. Steven Deare of ZDNet Australia noticed this and decided to investigate:
[ZDNet] tried to cover the rollout […]
Matt Asay, over at InfoWorld, had this to say about companies (mis)using the term “open source”:
I’m growing a wee bit impatient with the major enterprise ISVs and their alleged support of open source. Oracle has been out in front of they “we love open source” hype, yet the company continually underwhelms on delivery. Last week […]
So say Trend Micro - and they should know, they make anti-virus software - for reasons that go to the heart of the open source development model.
Trend claimed that one reason open source software has fewer security issues is the variety of Linux distributions. Although they use the same kernel, if one distribution is compromised […]
With Gartner predicting a “new wave” of open source software of great use to businesses, new research suggests 95% of the top 2000 companies in the world will have an open source procurement and management strategy by 2008.
Companies are attracted by the low cost, but the availability of technical support is still raising concerns within […]
Continuing the Latin American country’s longtime commitment to open source, Venezuela will today begin registration for free courses on OSS and IT fundamentals.
A program to train over 400 thousand people in open source software - as part of Mission Science - will start on Monday, June 12 in Venezuela. This training program will be […]
From Computer Weekly:
MPs have told the government that it should not legislate to make digital rights management systems mandatory.
The recommendation from the All Party Parliamentary Internet Group follows its inquiry into digital rights management (DRM), which considered evidence from publishers, the film and music industries, lawyers and others.
More at The Reg.
You can find the report […]
A slew of news came out of Novell this week as the company wound up to today’s release of SuSE 10.1.
Parallel to the release new iteration of their OS was the release of a desktop package bundling various pieces of OSS. The suite includes Novell’s Open Enterprise Server, ZenWorks desktop management tools, Novell Linux Desktop […]
The media remains abuzz this week with speculation about Oracle’s Linux intentions.
CNet brought together the opinions of various Oracle watchers who suggested that CEO Ellison’s comments should be viewed as part of the company’s strategy, and could be read variously as a threat or flirtation with the likes of Red Hat and Novell.
Channel Insider and […]
A report released this week by anti-virus software company McAfee has blamed the increased prevalence of rootkits on the open source community. Rootkits, which exploit security vulnerabilities to allow third parties covert access to a computer system, exist for several operating systems but are a particular problem for Windows users.
According to Stuart McClure, senior vice […]
Microsoft has launched a new website, called Port 25, with which it hopes to foster dialogue between the open source community and itself. The website, officially announced by Bill Hilf at LinuxWorld in Boston and expanded upon in an interview with Search Windows IT, will share some of the findings of the company’s Open […]
Following a re-evaluation of their IT strategy, Bristol City Council have decided to consolidate their office software - currently a mixture of Microsoft Office, Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect - around a single software suite. The “obvious choice” of Microsoft Office was rejected in favour of Sun’s StarOffice on the grounds of cost, licensing and standards […]
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 […]
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 […]
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: […]
Search Open Source has a piece on one of the barriers to Linux adoption, the lack of an iteration of Microsoft Office for the platform. Focusing on the inevitable comparisons between OpenOffice.org and MS’s offering, it includes the sage advice “Stop whining and embrace change”:
There’s a contingent of IT folks, however, who discount these complaints […]
An OSDL-funded independent survey - cheekily entitled “Get the Truth” - looking at the use of OSS by IT organisations has concluded that Linux is both cheaper and easier to deploy and maintain than Microsoft software. EMA, who conducted the survey, contacted thousands of organisations using OSS and mixed solutions to interview their CIOs and […]
… and he’s been telling everyone who’ll listen. ZDNet’s in-house Microsoft contrarian John Caroll, on the other hand, had some very bad words for the new license, and for Richard Stallman in particular, that were just a hair’s breadth from the c-word*.
* “communism”
South African open sourcerer and cosmonaut Mark Shuttleworth appears to have set off a number of rumours after letting slip that Google has developed its own version of the Ubuntu distro - Goobuntu - in an interview for SA’s Business Day. The Register picked up on that yesterday, but not everyone bought it, with Daily […]