Free Republic

San Francisco (dpa) - A week before the launch of Microsoft's new Vista operating system, its open-source competitor Linux received a giant boost Monday as prominent high-tech companies announced they were forming a consortium to promote the free challenger. The Linux Foundation, formed from two separate support groups, will have the backing of companies like IBM, HP, Intel, Oracle and Novell who aim to boost the free programme by providing promotion, standardisation and legal protection, according to James Zemlin, executive director of the foundation. "It's really a two-horse race now, with computing dominated by two operating-system platforms, Linux and Windows,"...

FreeNAS is a small, powerful, full-featured implementation of FreeBSD as a network-attached storage device. (It also happens to be January's Project of the Month at SourceForge.net.) If you're a Linux user like me, the BSD-speak used for devices and such might give you pause, but other than that small caveat, installation and usage shouldn't be a problem. It's powerful enough to be used in the enterprise, but it's friendly enough so that even a typical home office user can take advantage of it. Here's how I created an easy-to-use NAS device for rsync backups and FTP server on my LAN.

The Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group will merge to form the Linux Foundation in an effort to build strength and increase their influence. Formed in 2000, the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) employs Linux founder Linus Torvalds. The move to combine forces could strengthen the hand of the open-source operating system against Windows. Red Hat and Novell distribute Linux for free but charge for tech support. Oracle and SAP have championed Linux as an alternative to Microsoft Windows. Both groups already have a large list of members. Combined, the Linux Foundation will have 70 sponsors, such...

The Linux Foundation is Born - Updated Monday, January 22 2007 @ 05:35 AM EST OSDL and the Free Standards Group have merged to form The Linux Foundation. If you go to osdl.org now, you arrive at The Linux Foundation. Here's the operative paragraph from the press release:For Linux to remain open and attain the greatest ubiquity possible, important services must be provided, including legal protection, standardization, promotion and collaboration. Successful proprietary software companies, for instance, do several important things well: backwards compatibility, promotion, interoperability, developer support, and more. In the voluntary and distributed world of Linux development, the...

SCO CEO Darl McBride adamantly stated on the company's fourth quarter conference call that the company is not going bankrupt. He did admit, however, that SCO's recent earnings are not very impressive, though he is encouraged by his company's prospects for 2007. SCO (Quote) reported results for its fourth quarter and fiscal year ended October 31, 2006 on Wednesday, and the numbers are none too pretty. SCO reported a net loss for the fourth quarter of 2006 of $3.7 million, or $0.18 per diluted common share. The quarterly loss is nine percent greater that the comparable quarter for the prior year...

Around 25% of enterprises will be running mission-critical business application on Linux platforms by 2009. The prediction comes from analyst Saugatuck Technology, as a result of joint research with BusinessWeek Research Services. The researchers questioned over 130 firms and also found that 45% of enterprises will... Article Continues Below ... be using Linux to run critical applications by 2011. At the end of this year, 18% will be relying on Linux for critical applications. The analyst said Linux and other open source software take-up had now reached critical mass in the market place. It said recent open source announcements by...

Hi, I'm running into a problem I can't figure a way around, trying to create a "shortcut" (as it were) in Suse Linux, to open a Windows program via Wine. There's an option in the program itself to not run maximized, which I set. Originally when I installed the program in XP, that program setting was enough to save the size of the window. Windows has a similar parameter when you set up the properties on an icon - Wine seems to default to the equivalent of the Windows "run maximized" icon setting, and opens the window full-screen despite having...

Hello for those who was in the irc yesterday the promised video, for those don't this is my first attempt of video using xvidcap, it demonstrates some aspects of Sabayon Linux v3.2 64Bits and Beryl 0.1.3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T67kricXYRE Enjoy it Antares

I barely know how to tell you this, but SCO has filed a motion for reconsideration of Judge Dale Kimball's November 29th Order in SCO v. IBM, the one affirming Magistrate Judge Brooke Wells' June 28th Order. I guess they figure things are so bad now, they have nothing to lose by trying. Here's the Notice of Conventional Filing [PDF]. Yes. Of course. It's under seal. So is the memorandum in support. Perhaps SCO will grace us with a redacted version in a bit. But in the meanwhile, we are left with our mouths open. Whatever are they thinking? Delay?...

Give people 12 months warning (time to work out what they're going to do, talk with the legal dept, etc) then make the kernel load only GPL-tagged modules. I think I'd favour that. It would aid those people who are trying to obtain device specs, and who are persuading organisations to GPL their drivers.

The greatest differentiator between OS vendors is no longer a question of features, function, performance, customer support, security, reliability or any feature of the product itself. The future of computing may depend on the lawyers.The last month has seen both Oracle and Microsoft take their gloves off in their competition with open source software. Where Oracle has taken a seemingly straightforward approach of copying the competition and undercutting their prices, Microsoft's move to invoke intellectual property and the terms of the GNU Public License (GPL) to counter open source competition is much more potentially damaging. What's more, while Oracle's success...

After seven years of work, the LinuxBIOS project is on the brink of making a free BIOS a standard option for computers. Serious obstacles remain, including a lack of resources and resistance from some proprietary chipset manufacturers and OEMs, but the advantages of LinuxBIOS indicate that its availability to the average computer buyer may be only months away. LinuxBIOS is intended to provide a philosophically free replacement for proprietary firmware in chipsets. It consists of the minimal amount of code needed to start a mainboard to the point at which a payload -- an executable capable of starting a kernel,...

perspectiveThe uproar in the open-source community over Microsoft's embrace of Novell says a lot. It reveals that many open-source backers fundamentally don't understand the software business. When vendors compete, customers win. This is good. Contrary to the numerous rants in the open-source community, the recent deal between Microsoft and Novell--in which the companies have agreed to interoperability, reselling and patent protection--is actually an excellent business deal and a good thing for the open-source community. The days of kumbaya, where vendors are locked arm in arm singing open-source love songs to "grow the market" through co-opetition are over. Microsoft is growing...

Investors fled SCO Group’s stock on Friday, voting with their feet after a federal judge gutted its lawsuit against IBM. In mid-morning trading, SCO Group (nasdaq: SCOX - news - people ) traded at $1.36, down 64 cents, or 32%. [snip] On Thursday, the judge said SCO Group had provided no evidence to support its claim that IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ) took code from Unix, which SCO claims to have some copyrights, and added it to Linux. Read the rest here.

A celebrity CIO reviews the desktop operating system contenders in search of the next-generation office computer Introduction John Halamka has a penchant for experiments with new technologies. In 2004, the now 44-year-old CIO of the Harvard Medical School and CareGroup, which runs the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, who is also a practicing emergency room physician, was one of the first people to have an RFID chip containing a link to his medical records implanted in his body (it's near his right triceps.) Next April, he and Harvard geneticist George Church will become the first humans to have their DNA...

System builders considering a Linux desktop are faced with a dizzying array of choices. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of Linux distributions to choose from. Narrowing the field of contenders basically comes down to what works best for both the system builder and its customers. Finding that fit often leads system builders to pursue a commercial distribution over an open-source one. Today's commercial desktop Linux distributions make a lot of sense for system builders, mostly because of three factors: recurring revenue, licensing and support. With that in mind, the CRN Test Center set out to compare commercial versions of...

RUSSELS (Reuters) - Supporters of PC operating system Linux are preparing to counter a recent deal penned by Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) which establishes for the first time the principle of paying the software giant for the operating system, whose license requires it to be free. Microsoft signed a deal with Novell, one of the providers of Linux, in which Novell paid it a lump sum in return for a guarantee that Microsoft would not sue Novell's clients for what it calls a violation of its own patents in the Linux program. The prospect of a drawn-out legal...

In a question-and-answer session after his keynote speech at the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) conference in Seattle, Ballmer said Microsoft was motivated to sign a deal with SUSE Linux distributor Novell Inc. earlier this month because Linux "uses our intellectual property" and Microsoft wanted to "get the appropriate economic return for our shareholders from our innovation." The Nov. 2 deal involves an agreement by Novell and Microsoft to boost the interoperability of their competing software products. It also calls for Microsoft to pay Novell $440 million for coupons entitling users to a year's worth of maintenance and support...

Anyone can tell you an interesting story, but when it comes to Microsoft and Novell’s recent deal Linux enthusiasts around the world have more than a couple up their sleeves. Microsoft has a long history at killing competition. They started with Novell’s Server market, they tried to do with Java, and today they are trying to do it against the Anti-Virus vendors. They succeeded against Netscape, gained significant grounds against Sony’s Playstation, and killed a thousand other products that I can’t name because I forgot about them after Microsoft obliterated them out of the market. If any of you are...

The truth of the assertion is in a chart near the back of the report. It shows that 83% of companies expect to support new workloads on Linux next year, against 23% for Windows. The move is slower for larger enterprises, but the direction is clear. At least in the server world, Linux has won.