Free Republic

It has been gratifying to see the number of businesses and personal computers moving to Open Source software and the Linux Operating System. In our organization alone, the numbers, while small on a grand scale, are quite significant from where we stand. We've installed hundreds of Linux systems in the past two years and the retention rate of those systems are what we get excited about. However... I have received a spate of emails in the past 60 days, complaining about various universities and corporations that are disallowing most anything but Windows to access their systems. A good focal point...

KDE 4.2 "The Answer" has been released, which the K Desktop Environment community is confident will even be able to satisfy the needs of normal non-technical end-users.

In what may come to be seen as a deeply symbolic moment in the history of operating systems, Red Hat is on the verge of surpassing Sun Microsystems' market capitalization for the first time. Sun, perhaps unfairly, represents a fading Unix market. Red Hat, for its part, represents the rising Linux market. As I write this, Red Hat's market capitalization sits at $2.62 billion, while Sun is just ahead, at $2.7 billion. The stock prices are way out of whack with revenues: Red Hat pulled in $627 million in 2008. Sun? More than $13 billion. Such is Wall Street's confidence...

The hedge fund industry is hurting. Perhaps more collaboration among funds will help I read closely BusinessWeek.com's recent special section for CEOs about open-source software, and I wanted to offer some modest suggestions about what open source might do for the hedge fund industry. I run a San Francisco-based hedge fund called Algert Coldiron Investors. Our industry is in a lot of hurt right now, and I want to see some open-source love, too. The financial-services implosion was like an atomic bomb hitting our industry. It nuked profitability. Experts predict anywhere from 30 percent to 70 percent of hedge funds...

Microsoft isn't going away anytime soon. The software giant's presence is deeply anchored in homes and businesses globally. Microsoft is guaranteed a place in the annals of technology history. But, due to a recent spate of mishaps, it sure looks like that when it comes to the desktop and end-user side of things, Microsoft's days may be numbered.

In an age where Windows and OS X reign supreme, it's no wonder that a local AISD middle school teacher became enraged after discovering one of her students distributing what she believed to be bootlegged copies of an operating system in class. While teacher "Karen" was clearly operating under the assumption that she'd scored a minor victory for the Microsofts and other downtrodden software giants of the world, the particular operating system that she ended up disciplining her student for was a freely distributable version of Linux. To wit, the following is part of an email that the teacher sent...

As the recession puts pressure on tech spending, many companies are turning to open-source software to handle more IT tasks After the tech bubble burst, E*Trade's technology chief, Lee Thompson, needed to find a way to do more with less. In 2001 and 2002, the online stock trading company shrank its tech budget by one-third. "We had to go through and figure out every penny that we were spending…and make alternatives to reduce those costs," says Thompson, vice-president and chief technologist of E*Trade (ETFC). So he began using software that can be downloaded at no cost via the Internet. By...

Published today are four programming guides to cover the VX800/820 Graphics Core & 2D (100 pages), VX800/820 3D & video (157 pages), CX700/VX700 Graphics Core & 2D (100 pages), and CX700/VX700 3D & video (91 pages). This is essentially just about 450 pages worth of register descriptions. We are still looking over this documentation to gauge its completeness. If you are a developer interested in this information, it can be found on the X.Org web-site. In addition to releasing 2D, 3D, and video register guides, VIA has also announced today it has partnered up with the OpenChrome team. A press...

OpenOffice 3 has been officially released, with one of its biggest enhancements being support for file formats in Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Office 2007. The debut of the open source productivity suite follows a three-year development cycle. Nevertheless, some reviewers questioned whether the upgrade was sufficient to be billed as a full upgrade. Released on Monday, the upgrade attracted enough attention to overwhelm the OpenOffice.org Web site. On Tuesday, the site still appeared to be having trouble with the load. "Apologies -- our Web site is struggling to cope with the unprecedented demand for the new release 3.0 of OpenOffice.org," the...

By Maggie Shiels Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley Giving up some rights means you still have protection under the law Advocates of open source software have hailed a court ruling protecting its use even though it is given away free.The US federal appeals court move overturned a lower court decision involving free software used in model trains that a hobbyist put online. The court has now said conditions of an agreement called the Artistic Licence were enforceable under copyright law. "For non-lawgeeks, this won't seem important but this is huge," said Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig. "In non-technical...

Symbian's decision to make its source code freely available tips the scales in favor of open-source software in smartphones and could make it harder for Microsoft, and even other open-source platforms like Google's Android and Linux, to compete.On Tuesday, companies including Nokia, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, LG Electronics, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, AT&T, Texas Instruments, STMicroelectronics and Vodafone announced that they will work together to make the Symbian OS open source. They will offer it under a royalty-free license to members of a new nonprofit group called the Symbian Foundation. Symbian is used in about 60 percent of the world's smartphones, which...

Two recent events should give for-profit companies new reasons to re-evaluate the ways in which they use open source software as well as the extent to which they use it. These events are: (1) the release of a new version of the widely used license that covers such software, i.e., the General Public License version 3, and (2) a round of lawsuits filed by the Software Freedom Law Center against for-profit companies using the software for commercial gain. Four companies to date, the largest of which is Verizon Communications Inc., have been sued for violation of the GPL. Although the...

Back in May 2006, a few programmers working on an open-source security project made a whopper of a mistake. Last week, the full impact of that mistake was just beginning to dawn on security professionals around the world. In technical terms, a programming error reduced the amount of entropy used to create the cryptographic keys in a piece of code called the OpenSSL library, which is used by programs like the Apache Web server, the SSH remote access program, the IPsec Virtual Private Network (VPN), secure e-mail programs, some software used for anonymously accessing the Internet, and so on. The...

Ten minutes to open storage blissFind out how to eradicate 99.7% of spam Having been worked over by the rise of Linux servers, Sun Microsystems wants to capitalize on what it sees as the next major "open systems" movement. The company believes that storage systems - or more specifically storage software - will transition to favor lower-cost, less proprietary plays. Sun this week took what feels like a rather minor step in the open storage direction with the release of two "how-to-guides" meant to help with the creation of a storage server and a NAS (network attached storage) appliance. The...

I'm looking for an alternative to Outlook, for a computer that runs Vista. I was disappointed that the OpenOffice "main" suite doesn't include a calendar. Has anyone used Chandler? What are your opinions, for a computer running Vista? What alternatives do I have? I'm looking for calendar and contact manager, not e-mail (because I'm using Windows Mail for that purpose). Thanks.

Press release excerpt - Microsoft Makes Strategic Changes in Technology and Business Practices to Expand Interoperability New interoperability principles and actions will increase openness of key products. REDMOND, Wash. — Feb. 21, 2008 — Microsoft Corp. today announced a set of broad-reaching changes to its technology and business practices to increase the openness of its products and drive greater interoperability, opportunity and choice for developers, partners, customers and competitors. Specifically, Microsoft is implementing four new interoperability principles and corresponding actions across its high-volume business products: (1) ensuring open connections; (2) promoting data portability; (3) enhancing support for industry standards; and...

More good news for the open source community just in: an analysis of its enterprise customers by OpenLogic found that for 2007 as a whole, the use of open source among enterprise customers is up 26% year-on-year. Enterprises on average used a whopping 94 different open source packages last year, compared to 75 in 2006… OpenLogic -- which provides enterprises with a certified library of open source software that encompasses hundreds of open source packages via OpenLogic Exchange (OLEX) – also found that Apache is still the most common license in packages used in enterprises today. Its breakdown of licenses...

Every (Open-Source) Software Project needs a Business Model Most software developers have little interest in entrepreneurship, but an open-source software project will survive and thrive only by delivering value into a market (users) with business partners (contributors) and against competitors (other open and closed source software). If you want to run a successful open-source project, it helps if you consider the key questions that apply when defining a commercial business model. I'll expand on Chesbrough's and Rosenbloom's list of 6 themes to demonstrate why. 1. Value proposition - a description of the customer problem, the product that addresses the problem,...

WordPress secures $29 million in funding By Lisa Hoover on January 24, 2008 (2:02:00 PM) Printer friendly page Print Comment on this article Comments Automattic, the parent company of popular open source blogging platform WordPress, announced this week it received $29 million in funding from four investors who will take a minority stake in the company. Though this isn't the first round of financing for the not quite three-year-old company, it has drawn a lot of notice because one of the investors is the New York Times. It's an unusual pairing of two industries -- blogging and conventional media --...

Photoshop CS2 on Linux: Just the Beginning The Wine team has recently announced that Adobe Photoshop CS2 works under Wine, a program to enable Windows programs to run on Linux. (Softpedia news article) Although Photoshop CS2 on Wine may not be perfect yet, it may well be soon, potentially opening Linux up to many people who rely on Photoshop. CS2 is one version back from the current version, but it has not been long since CS3 was released, so it is likely that most users are still on CS2. While it is great that Photoshop CS2 works, this is just...