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"Wow, in just one day, Firefox 1.5 has already been downloaded more than 1.5 million times. That smashes our 1.0 first day downloads by half a million," said Dotzler in his blog. "If you haven't downloaded Firefox 1.5, get it while it's hot!" This demand appears to be continuing, according to a blog post from Chris Beard, the vice-president of products at Mozilla. "There are now more than two million people enjoying a better Web experience with Firefox 1.5. Demand continues to be high, greatly exceeding what we saw last year with the release of Firefox 1.0," said Beard. Firefox...

Sun Microsystems Inc. said today that it will offer all its core software products as open-source, making all of its middleware, management and Java development tools free to use. The move follows Sun’s decision last year to offer Solaris as open-source and is aimed at developers. The decision doesn’t change pricing for corporate users, who will still have to pay for service and support for these products if they want them, said Sun officials. Corporate users can use the company’s Java Enterprise System (JES) middleware stack for free, but they won’t have support or service. Sun believes corporate users won’t...

The SCO Group Closes $10 Million Private Placement to Institutional Investors LINDON, Utah, Nov 30, 2005 /PRNewswire-FirstCall via COMTEX News Network/ -- The SCO Group, Inc. ("SCO") (Nasdaq: SCOX), a leading provider of UNIX(R) software technology for distributed, embedded and network-based systems, today announced the completion of a private placement of 2,852,449 shares of common stock to existing SCO institutional shareholders and a member of the company's board of directors. The shares were sold to institutional investors at $3.50 per share and to the board member at $3.92 per share. No special warrants or rights were issued in connection...

Given that the mozilla corporation released FireFox 1.5 today I thought I would ask freepers: What is your favorite firefox entension and how does it help your experience on FreeRepublic or elsewhere on the internet.

The much-anticipated release of Firefox 1.5 has finally been posted on Mozilla's FTP site. This is the full release, unlike the Release Candidates 1, 2 and 3 that were posted on the Mozilla.org website on November 1, November 10 and November 17, respectively. The Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit foundation that supports Firefox development and promotion, in addition to its for-profit Mozilla Corporation subsidiary, plan to accompany the release with a media marketing blitz some time this week. The centerpiece of the marketing blitz will be user-submitted videos of Firefox users evangelizing their favorite web browser. These videos will be made...

The KDE Project Tuesday released the long-awaited KDE version 3.5, which will serve as the final iteration of the KDE 3.x line. Since being taken over by a new developer team, KDE Kicker -- KDE's much-improved desktop application-launcher menu bar -- has seen a wealth of small but useful improvements, the project spokesman Tom Chance said. The pager now shows the application icons of each window to help distinguish between them, and allows users to drag and drop windows from one desktop to another, the project said. In response to user feedback, the pager and taskbar now have three default...

After a host of test releases and one false start, a new version of the Firefox browser will be ready on Tuesday, according to a media alert issued by the Mozilla Foundation on Monday. Firefox 1.5 will be available for free on Tuesday afternoon, U.S. Pacific Standard Time, at www.getfirefox.com and www.mozilla.com, according to the open-source group. A complete press release outlining the new features in Firefox 1.5, as well as some additional Mozilla news, will be issued at the time the new version is available. New features in Firefox 1.5 include a better system for updating software, faster navigation...

Mozilla is gearing up to launch a large-scale marketing drive when Firefox 1.5 is released. Christopher Beard, the vice-president of products at Mozilla, said on Monday that there is a "strong likelihood" that Firefox 1.5, the next major version of the open source browser, will be released on Nov. 29. Beard said the corporation is planning a "big marketing push" that will coincide with the release of 1.5. This will include a community marketing campaign that will encourage Firefox fans to tell the world about their favorite browser by publishing home-made videos on a Mozilla Web site. "You will have...

The $100 laptop designed by the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT) and the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) association, previewed at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) conference in Tunisia last week, will be using a Redhat Linux variant as its operating system. The lime-green laptop, which uses a 500Mhz AMD processor and has 1GB Flash RAM instead of a hard drive, will only use open source software, despite an offer from Apple for it to use Apple's OS-X operating system for free. The laptop is still in development, and it is estimated that the screen alone (currently...

Sun Microsystems announced on earlier this month that it would begin including the PostgreSQL database with Solaris 10 sometime in the 30 days, and will immediately offer full support for it, as well as fully integrate the software into the operating system over the next several months. PostgreSQL will be the second database included with Solaris, though it is expected to be made a more major part of the OS than MySQL, the database already included, said Chris Ratcliffe, director of Solaris software for Sun. He added that the 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week support would mimic that which is provided for the...

Ok so lets say you have some time to kill and want to try something new. Maybe youre strictly a Windows user and feel lfet out of the flame wars that erupt between KDE and Gnome people about which interface is better... Well here is your chance to start up flame wars about which windows interface is better... Emerge Desktop is an alternate shell for Windows 2000 and XP. you don't need it :-) Unless you like to customize your desktop and have a lighter interface. This is not a new feature introduced by Emerge Desktop. There are plenty of...

Microsoft will on Tuesday announce it is opening up access to its Office file formats to competitors, as part of a move to ensure the software giant does not lose lucrative government markets for its Office software. The move will ensure that computer users will be able to open and work with Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents without having to buy the Microsoft Office software to do so. Had Microsoft failed to act on the issue, the European Commission could have stopped using Microsoft Office for the creation of public documents and advised all 25 national governments in the...

The open standards of Mac OS X have been trounced by open source software in a project to develop a $100 computer to help bridge the digital divide. An organisation, One Laptop Per Child, is developing the machines to bridge the gap between the developed and the developing world. (The link goes to the MIT website, the organisation that got the project off the ground). The project team want to develop a low-cost computer to distribute to millions of school-age children. OS X spurned for Linux The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple CEO Steve Jobs offered to furnish the...

NEWTON, MASS. -- According to experts, the dominant operating systems in the data center by the end of the decade will be Windows and Linux -- and Microsoft is getting ready for that standoff by learning from the competition. Jason Matusow, director of Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative, got in front of the audience at the Open Source Business Conference to promote Microsoft's simplified licensing scheme, as well as the other merits of the Shared Source Program. He also took the opportunity to suggest that the commercialization of open source leads to less openness over time. Experts said that by addressing...

I've had mostly positive things to say about the free OpenOffice.org suite, so in the interest of equal time, here's a link to an interesting ZDNet blog item (via Scobleizer) which looks at the speed and resource requirements of Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org. It's far from exhaustive--the numbers reported relate only to launching the applications and opening a spreadsheet--but it shows OpenOffice.org as being far more memory- and CPU-hungry than the Microsoft suite.

SimpleAssets is a web based asset management system to track assets, employees, software licenses, ip addresses and asset sign in and sign out. Supports importing from existing DB's. An online demo is available to try before you download. (PHP/MySQL) * Development Status: 3 - Alpha * Intended Audience: End Users/Desktop * License: GNU General Public License (GPL) * Operating System: OS Independent (Written in an interpreted language) * Programming Language: PHP * Topic: Financial, Distributed Computing, Software Distribution * Translations: English * User Interface: Web-based

This is release 0.9 of Wine, a free implementation of Windows on Unix. After 12 years of development, this release marks the beginning of the beta testing phase. Everybody is encouraged to try it; while there are still bugs, most applications are expected to at least install and do something useful. Binary packages for various distributions will be available from: http://www.winehq.org/site/download About Wine: Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X and Unix. Think of Wine as a compatibility layer for running Windows programs. Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a...

VirtuaWin - The Virtual Desktop Manager Introduction Using a virtual desktop manager is a way to organize applications over several "virtual" desktops. For example if you use two virtual desktops you can put a webbrowser on desk 1 and by using a desktop manager "switch away" the webbrowser and it will seem like you have a new empty workspace (desk 2) to put another application/applications on. Virtual desktops are very common in the Unix community and once getting used to this, it is very hard to manage without it. One of my own little projects is a virtual window manager...

A small team of developers in California on Friday launched a cutting-edge Firefox-based Web browser dubbed Flock, which integrates next-generation Web technologies such as RSS content feeds, blogs and bookmark and photo sharing. The team of developers was spearheaded by Bart Decrem, who is well known in the open-source community due to his involvement in the Mozilla Foundation and his ill-fated start-up Eazel, which from 1999 until its demise in 2001 aimed to bring greater usability features to the Linux desktop. "Indeed the time is upon us," wrote Flock co-founder Geoffrey Arone on his blog shortly before the release. "We...

Microsoft has launched an attack on existing open source "licensing proliferation" claiming that the system is confusing and unnecessarily challenging for software developers. Jason Matusow, director of Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative, told vnunet.com that the large number of open source licences currently in use is counterproductive.  "I believe that there are 55 or 56 open source approved licences. These have come about because source code is somebody's property and they have chosen to license according to their needs. We believe that developers should license code as they see fit," he said. "But the biggest challenges come from additional licences. Let's...