Free Republic

I’m sure everyone reading this has heard the debate over whether that top dog free operating system should be called “Linux” or “GNU/Linux”, but how big a contribution is GNU or Linux to that operating system? As conventional wisdom has it, it’s the availability of applications that make a system valuable, and this is where free software really shines. Linux contributes only about 6% to the cost value of a full operating system, but then again, GNU contributes only about 15%—who do we have to thank for the remaining 79%?! And why don’t we hear them complaining about what it’s...

Novell chief technology officer (CTO) Markus Rex has hit back at criticism the company included an "unstable" Xen virtualisation environment in its new Linux server, pointing to support from hardware partners. At Novell's Sydney office on Thursday, Rex responded to claims by Linux competitor Red Hat that Xen was not stable enough to be deployed in enterprise environments. Novell has claimed to be the first vendor to include Xen in its Linux distribution, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Xen, primarily developed by US-based start-up XenSource, allows users to run multiple operating systems as guest virtual machines on the same hardware. "If...

On August 4th, we found out that Lenovo Group, the company that has taken over IBM's Personal Computing Division, had made a deal with Novell Inc. to preload SLED 10 (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) on its ThinkPad T60p mobile workstation. For the first time, a major OEM (original equipment manufacturer) has committed to preloading a Linux desktop.

For the second time in three months, a security breach has shut down the marketing website used to promote the Firefox browser. Late Monday, members of the Spread Firefox community were notified that their Spread Firefox site had been hit by attackers looking to exploit a bug in the TWiki collaboration software, which had been running on the server. The Mozilla Foundation does not believe that any sensitive information was compromised in the attack, but it is encouraging the approximately 100,000 Spread Firefox members to reset their passwords. "With these things it's hard to determine the exact nature of what...

Kerala, a tiny coastal state in south India, is a site of significant popularity of free software and GNU/Linux. What lessons can Kerala teach other areas about using free and open source software? Kerala, as a state, is strongly grounded in principles of socialism. Most of the educated middle class is leftist, at least in principle. The state is credited with a near 100% literacy rate and better social statistics than most of the rest of the country. And all this is reflected in a spirit among the people to question any decision imposed on them. They resent lack of...

Three Novell OpenSUSE community web site were defaced on Sunday by politically motivated hackers. Defacement archive Zone-H reports that a group called IHS Iran Hackers Sabotage broke into OpenSUSE.org, wiki.novell.com and forge.novell.com to post a message stating that it was Iran's right to develop nuclear power. All three sites were defaced in the same way.

IBM Woos the World's Geeks - Big Blue will let software developers in Brazil, Russia, India, and China use company products for free. IBM announced an initiative Monday to encourage developers in emerging economies to work on the computing giant’s open standards technology, a computing framework for which hardware and software specifications are publicly available. As part of the initiative, the Armonk, New York-based company said that for the first time, developers in Brazil, Russia, India, China—popularly known as BRIC countries—will get instant access to IBM’s hardware and software portfolio from their desktop at no charge.