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If there was one word that could get Open Source readers more passionate than Microsoft in 2009, it was Ubuntu. Ubuntu is not the most profitable Linux, and it’s not the distro with the biggest penetration of any major market. But partly due to its commercial arm Canonical, based officially on the Isle of Man but actually located in London, Canonical’s charismatic CEO, Mark Shuttleworth, and to its desktop ambitions, it is the Linux distro you most liked reading about. I was only dimly aware of this at the start of the year. But I learned. Ubuntu 9.04 to be...

2010…a new decade, and with it must come a new round of predictions, right? It’s a particularly interesting time to be a pundit, though. Not only is technology emerging at a blistering pace, but education itself is undergoing some serious transformations as we look towards global competition. I won’t even try to predict how Ed Tech will look in 2020. Ubiquitous WiFi was barely conceivable in 2000; we were just happy that we finally got to party like it was 1999. I can take a pretty good stab at the next couple of years though. Let me know what you...

   Soon there will be a ready-to-use open source option for viewing Web content on your TV: the Boxee Box. In collaboration with D-Link, Boxee will be offering a device that lets users surf the Web for video content without a computer, hard drive or keyboard. Boxee's value is tied to the content it channels into the user's home, remarked Bill Weinberg, principal consultant and independent analyst for Linux Pundit. The Boxee video-on-demand software maker aims to change the way consumers get free movie and TV entertainment from the Internet with its first hardware venture, called "Boxee Box." The open source...

Conclusion After spending several days with Fedora, I find that I'm happy with this release. The live CD by itself was a bit underwhelming, but the distribution as a whole has been excellent. This is probably the most stable and most polished release the Fedora team has put together to date. Security is strong over most of the system, though the hole introduced in the software management system is a concern. Package management is fast and KDE feels like it's getting the attention it deserves. The system is responsive and I have yet to run into any serious problems. Due...

A radical new day has dawned for the operating system. Today Google finally aired its long awaited Chrome Operating System. The operating system was detailed at a press conference starting at 1 p.m. EST, and the open source code was posted online just before the start of the presentation. The new operating system brings a dramatically different look and perspective to the market and just may give Microsoft and OS X some tough competition by reinventing a tired old wheel -- the operating system -- offering the first laptop/desktop OS built around the browser and web applications. A Google engineer...

A programming overhaul of the White House's Web site has set the tech world abuzz. For low-techies, it's a snooze — you won't notice a thing.The online-savvy administration on Saturday switched to open-source code for www.whitehouse.gov — meaning the programming language is written in public view, available for public use and able for people to edit."We now have a technology platform to get more and more voices on the site," White House new media director Macon Phillips told The Associated Press hours before the new site went live on Saturday. "This is state-of-the-art technology and the government is a participant...

An enterprising PC user has been refunded on his copy of Windows, after he rejected Microsoft's operating system and license Reg Reader Graeme Cobbett was paid $115 (£70.34) by Dell after he bought a Studio 1555 notebook with Windows Vista already loaded and complete with a free upgrade to Windows 7. Rather than accept the Windows 7 upgrade, though, Graeme installed Ubuntu-based Linux Mint instead. Why reject Windows 7, an operating system Microsoft's been pushing ahead of Thursday's launch as making PC users happy again, after the misery of Windows Vista? Graeme, who outlined his reasons - with his experiences...

One of the main new features in Apple's new Snow Leopard operating system has been released as open source. Apple has released the code of the userland portion of its Grand Central Dispatch technology under the Apache License, version 2. Mac OS X also has kernel support for Grand Central Dispatch, which is also released as open source via the XNU project. While we're at it, let's take this opportunity to look into exactly what Grand Central Dispatch is.

Apple today made the source code of Grand Central Dispatch available under an Apache open source license. One of the new technologies for concurrency added to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Grand Central is Apple’s attempt to help developers deal with the rise of multi-core. The open sourcing of Grand Central comes as something of a surprise, because it is a core technology in Snow Leopard, and could be seen to give Apple a competitive edge in the new world of multi-core. So why did they do it? Only Apple knows for sure, but there are compelling arguments for...

According to a leak from a BestBuy employee, Microsoft is initiating a sort of "Anti-Linux Training" course for the employees, and those who take part in the said training are rewarded with a copy of Windows 7 for only ten dollars. The leaked screenshots of the campaign show Microsoft's comparison of its own system with an obscure "Linux" and how Windows is better in every way including security, "free downloads", and software and hardware compatibility. When Microsoft said a few weeks ago that its biggest threat was Linux, I suppose a campaign such as this was to be expected. We've...

The KDE team has released KDE 4.3. This release comes packed with improvements and bug fixes - in fact, over the last six months, 10000 bugs were squashed, 2000 feature requests handled, and 63000 changes were checked in by 700 people. We've already talked about this new release in quite some detail last week, but let's take a look at the most important new features anyway. The Plasma desktop shell comes with a new default theme called Air, which looks a lot less heavy than the previous Oxygen theme. Plasma has also been improved performance-wise, and it takes up less...

Back on Friday we published Mac OS X 10.6 benchmarks and found it to offer some terrific performance improvements , but at the same time, there were a few notable regressions. Apple engineers have been working hard at pushing technologies like Grand Central Dispatch (GCD), OpenCL, full 64-bit support, and other changes to their OS X stack to bolster its performance capabilities and reduce the overall footprint. Now that we have tested Mac OS X 10.6, we are seeing how its performance compares to that of Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" will be out in October and does have...

Communal aspects of digital culture run deep and wide. Wikipedia is just one remarkable example of an emerging collectivism—and not just Wikipedia but wikiness at large. Ward Cunningham who invented the first collaborative Web page in 1994, tracks nearly 150 wiki engines today, each powering myriad sites. Wetpaint , launched just three years ago, hosts more than 1 million communal efforts. Widespread adoption of the share-friendly Creative Commons alternative copyright license and the rise of ubiquitous file-sharing are two more steps in this shift. Mushrooming collaborative sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, the Hype Machine, and Twine have added weight to this...

Open-source software is big business. For example, most of what Oracle is getting for it $7.4-billion purchase of Sun is open-source software. Thanks to a Linux Foundation study, we know that creating the Fedora 9 Linux distribution would have cost $11.5-billionin conventional software costs. So, given all that, what do you think OSS (open-source software) as a whole is worth? How's about $387-billion? That's the number that Black Duck Software came up with. Black Duck isn't an open-source ISV (independent software vendor). The Boston area company started as an IP (intellectual property) risk management and mitigation company, but has since...

Open source can help the bottom line, writes Sean Dodson. Richard Stallman once wrote that the point about free software is it is "free as in freedom, not free as in beer", meaning people should be at liberty to do as they pleased with software, rather than subscribe to its restrictive licences. As the economic crisis takes hold, the stress may be on the second half of his aphorism. To the millions downloading free software in an economic crisis, the point is that it is free, as in free beer. Since Stallman first made his rallying cry as the founder...

When big companies release new software, they launch it with lots of hoopla: press tours, technical conferences, free T-shirts. Open-source projects, even the well-known ones, generally release their major new versions with a lot less fanfare. The FOSS (free and open-source software) community is often too busy coding and testing to bother with marketing, even when the new "point release" of the software is really remarkable. And there are plenty of remarkable open-source applications on the way this year. Quite a few projects are quietly (or not so quietly) working on major releases or significant upgrades that they aim to...

For Sun Microsystems Inc., a reported $6.5 billion acquisition offer from IBM Corp. — is being called a "Yahoo moment." The company may be worth more than Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM (NYSE: IBM) is offering, but it also may be more money than Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sun (NASDAQ: JAVA) will be worth if IBM walks away from the table. News of the offer came as competition for data center hardware is heating up and "Big Blue’s" offer is seen as an attempt to respond to San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco Systems Inc.’s (NASDAQ: CSCO) announced plans that it would enter the next...

Nobody questions whether Mac OS X is ready for the desktop. Never mind that switching to it involves learning different assumptions and tools and a new desktop. It has a reputation for being user-friendly, and is backed by a proprietary company, just like Windows. With GNU/Linux, however, the story is different. For over a decade, columnists and bloggers have been explaining how GNU/Linux isn't ready for the desktop -- and, despite all the progress in the operating system over the last ten years, the arguments haven't changed much. Moreover, increasingly, they're outdated when they're not based on complete ignorance. In...

The White House press office announced today that Vivek Kundra, the current chief technology officer of Washington DC, will be assuming the position of Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO) at the White House. The appointment of a top CIO is another first: the position did not exist in any previous administrations. Kundra will also have final say on government technology purchases , and will have the authority to overrule his peers at subordinate agencies.

A small software company on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against open source distributor Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) and several vendors that sell Red Hat products, claiming that Red Hat's JBoss middleware violates one of its patents. In court papers filed in U.S. District Court for Eastern Texas, Software Tree claims that JBoss infringes its patent on database systems and methods "for exchanging data and commands between an object-oriented system and a relational system." Software Tree claims the patent in question, U.S. Patent No. 6,163,776, was awarded in December of 2000. Red Hat acquired open source developer JBoss in 2006 for...