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February 2005 On Topic - Past ArticlesMaking the switchMigrating from Windows to Linux is only as as stressful as you want it to be. By Dan Heilman From most of what's written and said about the subject, it would be easy to presume that open source is largely the province of hardcore programmers and dedicated shade-tree computer mechanics. However, taking advantage of what open source--and in particular, Linux--has to offer can mean widely varying degrees of commitment to the platform. If you're thinking of adopting it for your business, here are a few pointers to keep in mind. Take it...

Gartner urges caution before downloading Firefox The Web browser may not be an unstoppable juggernaut News Story by Matthew Broersma FEBRUARY 10, 2005 (TECHWORLD.COM) - Companies should think twice before jumping on the Firefox bandwagon, according to research firm Gartner Inc. The open-source browser has been gaining market share steadily over the past few months, helped by industry support and user enthusiasm, but Firefox isn't the unstoppable juggernaut it might seem. Browser switching is taking place at the level of individual users, rather than organizations, and some of the factors that make Firefox more appealing than Internet Explorer are likely...

Experts: International domain names may pose threat The new trick is a variation of the 'homograph attack' The new trick is a variation of a known technique called the "homograph attack" and takes advantage of loopholes in the way some popular Web browsers display domain names that use non-English characters. It could allow malicious hackers and online identity-theft groups to trick unsuspecting users into divulging sensitive personal information, according to an advisory from The Shmoo Group, a hacker collective, and from Secunia. snip For example, attackers could register a Web domain "bloomberg.com," which looks identical to the popular business news...

The Mozilla Foundation has released the first version of Sunbird, its standalone calendar application, for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Sunbird 0.2 offers various features, including the ability to create scheduled events and to see an overview of events on a particular day, week or month. The calendar can be shared by publishing it to a WebDAV (World Wide Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning)-capable server. WebDAV is a set of extensions to the basic HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) underlying the Web, enabling people to collaboratively edit and manage files on remote Web servers. The Sunbird application is available for...

A pint-sized linux guru who installed her first Debian server before her tenth birthday is to speak at this year's linux.conf.au Thirteen-year-old Elizabeth Garbee may not know as much about Linux as her father Bdale Garbee, Linux CTO for HP and former Debian Project Leader, but that won't stop her from presenting at linux.conf.au 2005. Elizabeth, who has had a computer since she turned two, has been running Debian since the time she was nine. According to her bio on the conference speaker’s list, her installation of Debian GNU/Linux on a server before she had reached 10 years of age...

Sun Microsystems (Profile, Products, Articles) on Tuesday launched its OpenSolaris program, which provides access to the Solaris operating system via an open source format, and also announced the release of 1,670 patents to the open source community. The initial piece of Solaris being made available now is DTrace performance analysis technology. Other Solaris source code, such as file system and security technologies, will be offered in the second quarter of this year. Sun Chairman and CEO Scott McNealy, a surprise participant on Tuesday’s conference call pertaining to the announcements, declared Sun as likely the largest donor of code anywhere on...

SCO has gained access to two billion lines of code in its wrangle with IBM. This may be a costly battle to have won "Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises." Chapter 1, Bleak House, Charles Dickens. Last week, SCO won a point against IBM in...

Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect, has been talking about the digital future. The other Bill, technology critic Bill Thompson, has been reading between the lines.Bill Gates thinks I'm a communist. Not the old-fashioned state socialist concerned with five-year plans for boot production in the eastern provinces, but a "new modern-day sort of communist", the sort who "want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and movie-makers and software makers". Admittedly, Mr Gates probably does not know who I am and I doubt if he spends a lot of time reading the BBC news site. But he...

.B.M. plans to announce today that it is making 500 of its software patents freely available to anyone working on open-source projects, like the popular Linux operating system, on which programmers collaborate and share code.The new model for I.B.M., analysts say, represents a shift away from the traditional corporate approach to protecting ownership of ideas through patents, copyrights, trademark and trade-secret laws. The conventional practice is to amass as many patents as possible and then charge anyone who wants access to them. I.B.M. has long been the champion of that formula. The company, analysts estimate, collected $1 billion or more...

8/31/2002 ... I wrote for the first time on Venezuela and Linux, due to an article which appeared in Linux Today entitled Venezuela’s Government shifts to open source software. The article generated a big discussion in Slashdot, most of which was useless as most writers have no idea how inefficient the Venezuelan Government is. 9/01/2002 A scandal broke out because it turned out that two of the three “advisors” to the Minister of Planning happened to have very strong ties to Linux commercial efforts. It was that and not some Microsoft plot that stopped that effort. 9/29/2004 Right after Venezuela...

December 19, 2004 New Microsoft Patch Blocks Firefox Downloads by Scott Ott (2004-12-19) -- Microsoft Corp. today released a new security patch for its Internet Explorer (IE) web browser which prevents users from accidentally or intentionally downloading the new free, open-source Firefox browser from The Mozilla Foundation. "Firefox is a dangerous and contagious browser that could seriously jeopardize marketshare ," said an unnamed Microsoft spokesman. "Unless consumers take action to block Firefox, it could speed up web surfing and return control of user computers to the users themselves." The source added that Internet Explorer is a superior product because it...

What an amazing year we're having. First the phenomenal successes for Firefox, and now it's Thunderbird taking the world by storm! In just ten short days, Thunderbird 1.0 has been downloaded over 1,000,000 times -- and in 21 languages!! There is no doubt that this is our most successful e-mail application release ever and we're not alone in thinking that. Steve Segal, in his Tribune Review article Mozilla outfoxes Microsoft raves, "it's the first free e-mail client that should give Outlook a run for its money and is one of the best first versions of a program I've ever seen....

SCO seals deal for legal expense cap Published: November 5, 2004, 10:30 AM PST By Stephen Shankland Staff Writer, CNET News.com The SCO Group has signed a previously announced agreement with two law firms that will cap legal expenses for its Linux and Unix litigation at $31 million, the company said in a legal filing Thursday. The expense cap agreement--announced Aug. 31 but signed Oct. 31--puts to rest some uncertainty about the company's abilities to pay the hefty legal fees incurred through its legal attacks against IBM, Novell, AutoZone and DaimlerChrysler and its legal defense against Red Hat. SCO's stock...

After a year and a half of being flamed, dissected and dismissed on the Groklaw.net Web site, The SCO Group (Profile, Products, Articles) Inc. (SCO) has decided to set up a Web site of its own to cover the latest happenings in its many legal disputes. "We will be launching a Web site in a few weeks to tell our side of the story," said Darl McBride, SCO's president and chief executive officer (CEO), speaking at the Etre conference in Cannes Tuesday. "We think IP (intellectual property) is very important and to go back to the Wild West metaphor there...

Joining a growing debate over the role of patents in open-source software, Novell on Tuesday said it will use its patent portfolio to defend its open-source line from legal attacks. "Open source threatens entrenched interests, some of whom are fighting back with vague accusations of intellectual property risks in open-source technologies," Novell Chief Executive Jack Messman said in a statement. "Novell today is taking an active stand in defense of the software we offer--both proprietary and open source--by stating our willingness to use our own patent portfolio to help our customers." One of the potential barriers to corporate adoption...

'Open Source Solaris' to debut this year Published: September 13, 2004, 12:49 PM PDT By Martin LaMonica Staff Writer, CNET News.com BURLINGTON, Mass.--Sun Microsystems will create an open-source project around its Solaris 10 operating system by the end of the year, company executives said Monday. Through the initiative, Sun engineers, partners and other programmers will be able to contribute to the development of the Unix operating system. Sun is testing the program right now with customers and will finalize it by the end of the year, according to Mark McClain, Sun's vice president of software marketing. Sun discussed its open-source...

With the US Presidential Election coming up, we've had a lot of story submissions that we would like to post, but they don't fit very well on the Slashdot main page. To address this, we'll be running special political coverage between now and the election in our new Politics subsection of Slashdot. Please submit stories directly to the section for consideration. As with all sections on Slashdot, there will be stories available within that section that don't get posted to the main page, so please visit the section if you are interested in more coverage. We'll do our best to...

Take a look at the largest companies in the world. Of them, only Microsoft makes the majority of its money from software licensing. A handful of them ..... make some of their money from software sales, genally a small part. A few... make a small portion of their revenue from retail sales of software. So the vast majority of large global companies consume software rather than produce it...if the cost of software is driven down by competition from open source, and thus a major cost of doing business is reduced for global industry, will it be a net gain or...

The open-source movement has had a remarkable run of success that has seen software such as the Linux operating system and the Apache Web server emerge as major challenges to Microsoft. However, the movement is now facing a crisis. At its heart is a question that has been around from the very beginning: How does software owned by everyone and by no one survive in a world where copyrights and patents shape the legal landscape? The question is being forced on a number of fronts, and if open source is to play an important role in software's future, the issue...

"Based on our analysis, Microsoft Windows has one half the Total Cost of 0wnership (TC0) of modern Fedora Core Linux based technologies." [Source link is a PDF, Adobe Reader required.]