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Legal Open source project adds "no military use" clause to the GPL Monday August 14, 2006 (04:01 PM GMT) By: Tina Gasperson Printer-friendly Email story GPU is a Gnutella client that creates ad-hoc supercomputers by allowing individual PCs on the network to share CPU resources with each other. That's intriguing enough, but the really interesting thing about GPU is the license its developers have given it. They call it a "no military use" modified version of the GNU General Public License (GPL). Tiziano Mengotti and Rene Tegel are the lead developers on the GPU project. Mengotti is the driving force...

OpenOffice.org security 'insufficient' Researchers at French Ministry of Defense say vulnerabilities with open source office suite may rival those of Microsoft's version By Robert McMillan, IDG News Service August 11, 2006 With Microsoft Corp.'s Office suite now being targeted by hackers, researchers at the French Ministry of Defense say users of the OpenOffice.org software may be at even greater risk from computer viruses. "The general security of OpenOffice is insufficient," the researchers wrote in a paper entitled "In-depth analysis of the viral threats with OpenOffice.org documents." "This suite is up to now still vulnerable to many potential malware attacks," they...

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.

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...

Linspire, Inc. released Freespire 1.0, a free, Debian-based desktop Linux operating system that optionally combines open source software with legally-licensed proprietary drivers, codecs and applications in its core distribution. Freespire licenses and makes available 3rd-party software where there are not yet viable open source alternatives. Linspire announced the Freespire community project at the Desktop Linux Summit on April 24th, 2006 with a projected release date for Freespire 1.0 of September 1st. Released almost a month ahead of schedule, Freespire 1.0 offers users the ability to choose what software they want installed on their computer, with no limitations or restrictions placed...

Free Software? Perhaps you've heard of the Open-Source software movement, but thought maybe they were cheap, college-student-written, "Brand X" knock-offs. Maybe you presumed the only people who could use such programs wore pocket protectors and broken bifocals. Or maybe you had recent experience and found the installation too confusing, with "targzs," incomprehensible "readme files," etc. The open-source movement has come of age, armed with self-extracting files, crossplaform capabilities, and extensive documentation. (That means you simply download the program, and it installs itself; it works on any operating system including, yes, Windows --not just UNIX -- and it teaches you how...

"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come." Victor Hugo. So states a report from the Department of Defense's Advanced Systems and Concepts Office, which recommends that the DoD move to a roadmap to adopt open source and open standards, maintaining that such a move is not only in the US national interest, but in the interests of US national security. The 79-page report proposes that the DoD adopt what it calls "open technology development," which incorporates open source methodologies and open standards, but also takes into...

"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come." Victor Hugo. So states a report from the Department of Defense's Advanced Systems and Concepts Office, which recommends that the DoD move to a roadmap to adopt open source and open standards, maintaining that such a move is not only in the US national interest, but in the interests of US national security. The 79-page report proposes that the DoD adopt what it calls "open technology development," which incorporates open source methodologies and open standards, but also takes into...

eHarmony.com chooses open source software for its quality, not for its price, says Mark Douglas, vice president of engineering and operations for the popular online dating site. eHarmony.com, with more than 11 million registered users, is expecting an influx of even more new registrations since it launched a site for married couples who want to improve their relationships. With all those paying customers, eHarmony can't afford to have server outages. "Down time on our site costs over $1,000 per minute," says Douglas. So when it comes to selecting the best network monitoring and Web development apps, "we're not driven by...

Excerpt - Microsoft Corp., bowing to pressure from governments, will offer free software that will let Word, Excel and PowerPoint handle documents in a rival technology format promoted by Sun Microsystems Inc., International Business Machines Corp. and others. The Redmond, Wash., software maker today will post on the Internet software that will let users of Microsoft applications view and create documents in the OpenDocument Format. ~ snip ~

Normally, we expect new Linux desktop users to come from the ranks of disgruntled Windows users. After all, they're the ones who have to deal with high-prices and endless security problems. Now, it seems that some Mac gurus are also making the switch to Linux.

OSvids.com, a new site launched last week, is a twist on the traditional Linux screenshot gallery. It provides video views of dozens of distributions, giving potential Linux users a glimpse of open source desktops in action. Jonathan Buys started Osvids.com as an "offshoot" of his technology blog. He's been testing Linux distributions since 2000, beginning with Mandrake. "I've seen Linux advance by leaps and bounds over the years," he says. "I've lost count of how many distros I've tested. I figured that since I was loading the distros anyway, I might as well share my experiences on my site." OSvids.com...

This is not a gripe against windows. I use windows on a daily basis and I know how to get the most out of the experience. With a little work, it’s a highly polished and reliable OS. But how much “a little work” can we expect of an inexperienced new computer user. I have also recently installed the latest release of Ubuntu Linux and have found that its ease of use is second to no other OS I’ve used as of yet. What this is, is a gripe against the mainstream OS and computer manufacturing business. Mainly, new computer users...

Linux now forms a quarter of Dell's server business and is growing fast, the company says. Should Microsoft be worried? Long hailed as the provider of choice for companies looking for PC solutions based on Intel hardware and Microsoft software, Dell says that Linux now makes up 25 percent of its enterprise market. The company also claims to have made inroads in the Linux services market and to have reached a comfort level with Linux systems where it can now solve over 90 percent of Red Hat Linux service calls without need to involve Red Hat. The figures were revealed...

Yet more stupid lawyer tricks from our good friends at SCO: Long after the deadline for disclosing its allegations, SCO seeks by indirection to change them. In three of its eight expert reports, SCO alleges the misuse of material nowhere identified in the Final Disclosures, the very purpose of which was to fix the parties' allegations once and for all last year. Indeed, with respect to its allegation that Linux infringes SCO's alleged UNIX copyrights, SCO proffers expert testimony that has no support in the Final Disclosures and, if allowed, would reinvent the case at the eleventh hour. SCO's attempt...

Love it, hate it, heard lots about it, but still don't have enough of a handle to form a firm opinion? Then we must be talking about Linux, the open-source operating system that's alluring because it's heavy duty and it's free. Simultaneously, it's intimidating to newbies because it's typically more difficult to install and configure than Windows. However, now is an opportune time to get past those concerns. Interest in Linux is expected to spike throughout the year, thanks to Microsoft's delay of its consumer version of Windows Vista. The hang-up could cast a pall on the year-end PC sales...

The Dogtail and Autobuild automated certification and testing tools will be offered to customers as part of Fedora initially, but could become a commercial value-added service in the future, Red Hat's CEO said at a conference this week. Red Hat is on track to ship its Enterprise Linux 5 by the end of the year but certification, testing and standardizing the testing process have become more important to customers than the operating system, its CEO said. At Red Hat Summit in Nashville, Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik said Fedora Core 6 -- the open source precursor to Red Hat Enterprise...

Mozilla.org today released Firefox 1.5.0.4, an important security update to the open-source browser. The update fixes 12 different security issues, including a privilege escalation using addSelectionListener and XUL persist, website XSS using BOM on UTF-8 pages, file stealing by changing input type, a buffer overflow in crypto.signText() funcion, HTTP response smuggling, and fixes for crashes with potential memory corruption.

Stallman-headed group's increasing politicization leaves a sour taste When Richard Stallman created the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in 1985, it was organized around a radical idea: Software should be free, not just as in free of charge, but free as in the concept of liberty. During the next 20 years that idea turned out to be not just radical, but surprisingly practical. Beginning with Stallman's Emacs text editor, to the various Gnu utilities, the Linux kernel, and beyond, free software has proved to be an enduring success. Much of the credit for that can be given to Stallman himself. Through...

Picasa is a photo organizing and editing tool from Google that does most of what most people need to do with their digital pictures. Now Picasa, previously a Windows-only program, has binaries available for most popular GNU/Linux distributions. The Linux version of Picasa is still a beta release, but it's ready to handle photo storage, organizing, and light photo editing on your Linux computer. Even if you don't want to use Picasa, Google's creation of the Linux version may help make your Linux computer more versatile. The Picasa Linux port is being made with Wine, and in the process more...