Free Republic

IBM today announced free software and educational resources to help developers in Russia build and deploy innovative applications based on open standards and open source. Tapping into the booming software development market in Russia, IBM is giving software developers, architects and students free access to software and hundreds of new tools and technical and educational resources that will enable them to more easily build open standards-based applications. With a few clicks of a mouse, developers can download free versions of IBM middleware, IBM WebSphere Application Server Community Edition and IBM DB2 Universal Database Express-C, as well as access trial code,...

Thursday February 02, 2006 (03:01 PM GMT) By: Brian L. Shaver Poker is everywhere nowadays, from television to books to poker rooms popping up in almost every casino -- and of course, you can play poker online. Unfortunately, many of the most popular sites say they require Windows. However, as with most software strings that bind you to a particular proprietary operating system, these bonds are easily cut. Looking to improve my game but frustrated by some sites' lack of support for Linux clients, I sent an email to the support for PokerStars, one of the first online gaming sites...

The System Designer allows you to design a Linux system profile which can be downloaded onto a single network install image. When inserted into a target system, the boot image will automatically build the system per your design -- all hands free, all via the network, no additional media required.

Google is preparing its own distribution of Linux for the desktop, in a possible bid to take on Microsoft in its core business - desktop software. A version of the increasingly popular Ubuntu desktop Linux distribution, based on Debian and the Gnome desktop, it is known internally as 'Goobuntu'. Google has confirmed it is working on a desktop linux project called Goobuntu, but declined to supply further details, including what the project is for. It's possible that it's just one of the toys Googleplex engineers play with on Fridays, when they get time off from buffing the search engine code...

Sun is keener than ever to port Linux to its new multicore T1 chip, even if it's not expected to happen for six to nine months. The company has made T1 servers available to Linux developers and is working with unnamed Linux distributors to develop the port. And while a port may be completed this year, it will be a while before Linux on T1 appears in production environments; application certification and support will be needed as well. Mike Splain, chief technologist for Sun’s Scalable Systems Group, believes Linux running on the company’s eight-core chip will open up new options...

The Royal Bank of Scotland has revealed that it is working on a large content management system based on the open source application server Zope. At the end of last year, the bank sent an email to a number of Zope mailing lists, stating that it was looking for a developer to join the CMS development team in its Corporate Markets division, which provides financial services to large and medium-sized businesses and serves around 75,000 customers worldwide. The job advert said that the bank was looking for a developer with three years experience of developing with Zope and Python and...

SmartWin++ is a 100% free C++ GUI library for developing Windows applications, it's free both as in "free beer" and as in "free speech", you can freely use SmartWin++ for commercial applications and for Open Source applications thanx to its BSD license! ... So what does SmartWin++ bring to the table that other GUI libraries don't already have? First of all type-safety! Type-safety, type-safety and yet again a little bit of type-safety! In C++ one of your biggest "features" is that you can pass an object of type "bird" into a function and rest assured that your compiler is gonna...

Linus Torvalds has weighed in on the debate over the draft of version 3 of the GPL in a post on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) this afternoon. Torvalds says that the Linux kernel "in general" has always been covered under version 2 of the GPL, and that that isn't going to change. Torvalds made the statement on the LKML to clarify the version of the GPL covering the Linux kernel. While many GPLed projects include the clause, "version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version," which would allow anyone to license code under the...

One of the most popular and ubiquitous rich media plug-ins for any browser on almost any platform is the Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash player. Thanks to efforts of the Free Software Foundation, a Free Software Flash player called GNU Gnash is now in active development. The development is apparently occurring without the help or support of Adobe in any way. An Adobe/Macromedia spokesperson was unable to comment on the development. Flash player has always been free, but not in the Free and Open Source Software sense, as it is a proprietary application licensed under a closed source license. GNU Gnash,...

The Linux desktop environment KDE is moving a little closer to Microsoft Windows as developers ready a release of QT, the KDE graphical framework, that will run natively on the proprietary operating system. Ralf Habacker, a KDE developer who initiated a project to port the Linux desktop to Windows, said over the weekend that a native Windows port for Qt, the KDE graphical framework, will be released under the General Public License (GPL). "The native GPLed port of QT/Win 3.3.3 will reach production state soon," said Habacker. He said that people who have used the native port to build releases...

A survey conducted by IT consulting firm Optaros and InformationWeek magazine shows that American companies and government organizations are saving millions of dollars with open source software. Conducted in September 2005, the survey is based on responses collected from over 500 companies, government agencies, and organizations. According to the collected data, approximately 87 percent of American organizations use open source software within their technology infrastructure. The survey also addresses the most important question: what motivates organizations to adopt open source software? According to Optaros, cost savings is one of the most significant factors. Optaros says that companies with over US$1...

What's a winner? (That's the late, great Secretariat, one of the all-time winners in my book, to the left.) A winner, in the open source sense, is a project with a lot of support, an active community, and a growing user base. It's something you can bet the company on with confidence. Secretariat went out at something like 1:30 in the 1973 Belmont and the bookies still lost. When you choose an open source winner for your own enterprise system, you know you're going to get help. Questions will be answered. Expertise will be found. Enhancements will become available. And...

Open Source has a bright future as a building block in commercial software that also includes proprietary elements. That seemed to be the consensus among a panel of open source experts at a conference sponsored by the non-profit SD Forum here Thursday. While open source software is often seen as free, labor-of-love projects, that's a misguided assumption, according to VA Software founder Larry Augustin. Recalling the creation of the term "open source," Augustin said, "The whole reason we pushed the term was for the enablement of a commercial industry." Basically, open source (define) refers to the underlying source code in...

A gathering of open source pundits have confirmed that the phrase "open source" is what you make of it. We can all breath a little easier now. The pundits - Tim O'Reilly, Sun Microsystems' Simon Phipps and IBM's Rod Smith - came to this conclusion yesterday at an SD Forum event here. Despite a couple of pleas from the SD Forum crowd, the speakers refused to narrow their definition of open source software or companies. Any vendor that uses Apache, for example, is part of the fabled open source community as they help drive a market for such products, the...

Hewlett-Packard is considering selling services designed to ease customer participation in the open-source programming community, the company's new open-source boss said. "Across HP, there are thousands of people who contribute to open source. We have a number of processes and tools we've developed to allow different folks in HP to interact with the open-source community that protects our intellectual property and is done in a community-friendly way," said Christine Martino, who became vice president of HP's Open Source and Linux Organization in November. "We needed to get some pretty crack procedures together. The team doing that has developed some interesting...

IBM is expected to announce Tuesday that it won more U.S. patents than any other company and that it will participate in three initiatives to improve patent quality. For the thirteenth consecutive year, IBM was awarded the most patents--more than 2,900--by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, according to the company. IBM is also expected to detail three multiparty efforts to increase review of patent applications, in part by tapping open-source developers and collaborative software. Partners include the Patent Office and the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), an industry consortium that launched a "patent commons" for open-source communities in November...

This is the way the world of Linux ends. Not with a whimper, but with a bang. I grew up on a Unix command-line. BSD, I believe. I have dim memories of dialing up on a black and green Wyse50 terminal, sending e-mail with 'mail', reading newsgroups and playing Nethack in all its ASCII glory. I even became rather adept at vi. I was happy, ecstatic even, wrapped all snug and safe in my warm, green world of text and terminal beeps. But my friends all had 'IBM clones', and as I grew, so too did the technology. My early...

Newly formed PC builder/reseller SeaScape LLC will introduce its first batch of pre-loaded Linux desktop computers within the next few weeks, company president James Rhodes told DesktopLinux.com on Friday. The systems will be based on Linspire's Linux desktop. The fledgling Albuquerque-based company, founded last month, partnered with Linspire to use Linspire Five-O in all eight SeaScape microATX models. Customers will be able to purchase customized computers through the company website based on their particular needs and requirements, Rhodes said. "Linspire Five-O is definitely the most user friendly Linux operating system to use on a daily basis," Rhodes said. "We feel...

Over at eWeek Steven Vaughan-Nichols is aghast at news that Massachusetts CIO (and Open Document Format advocate) Peter Quinn has resigned. Microsoft Wins, Open Standards Lose is his headline. Well, maybe in the short run. But in fact, it's time open source advocates learned a valuable lesson. Sometimes it's not about you. A month ago I noted how partisan this battle was becoming, with Democrats taking Microsoft's side and Republicans the side of open source. So what really happened, and what does this resignation really mean? First, the resignation should have been expected. Quinn's patron, Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, has...

NEW YORK--The Nasdaq Stock Market on Friday announced changes to its widely watched Nasdaq-100 Index--comprised of the hundred biggest non-financial companies trading on the Nasdaq--as 12 high flyers such as Google replaced laggards such as Sanmina-SCI. Besides Google, whose shares have soared 113 percent this year, the companies said to joining the index were: Activision, Cadence Design Systems, CheckFree, Discovery Holding, Expedia, Monster Worldwide, NII Holdings, Nvidia, Patterson-UTI Energy, Red Hat and Urban Outfitters. The changes, effective at the start of trading Dec. 19, are good news for shareholders in those companies, since many fund managers who track or try...