Free Republic

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...

What is Google Pack besides free Windows software, with some promotional offers, that you could get from many places on the Web? A software distribution mechanism hooked into Google's infrastructure. Smart move. Google does software provisioning for the masses…for starters–OpenOffice may come soon to the Pack. Larry Page introduces the software and then Robin Williams comes on stage to entertain the crowd. From the Web site: Google Pack also takes the hassle out of downloading, installing, and updating software. You can download and install the entire Google Pack in just a few clicks. And the included Google Updater helps you...

New thread for this week. Congrats to all new members who joined this week! We've made excellent progress so far and have smoked the DUmmies and Kossacks. Let's keep folding!

A continuation of the Freeper Folder Thread

OK, new thread to celebrate reaching a major milestone! Within a few hours Team FreeRepublic will be in the Top1000!!!! We should pass Dean for America, around noon tommorrow. Other liberal teams want to challenge us (DUmmies and Kos) but we're humiliating them beyond description.

Sony BMG has struck a deal with the plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit over copy-restriction software it used in music CDs, according to a settlement document filed at a New York court Wednesday. The record label has agreed to compensate buyers of CDs that contained the XCP and MediaMax DRM programs and to provide software utilities to allow consumers to uninstall both types of software from their computer. The furor over Sony's DRM software began at the end of October when a U.S. programmer discovered that XCP software on a Sony music CD had installed copy-restriction software on his...

It was only a matter of time before a trojan or virus targeted AdSense or YPM for malicious activity, and the time has come. A new trojan horse discovered by an Indian publisher replaces Google AdSense ads with their own ads, advertising sites including dating, sex, viagra and weight loss. This trojan is very recent, because it not only converts regular AdSense ad units, but also the Google AdSense and Firefox referrer buttons into text links. Techshout.com reports that a new, deceptive Trojan Horse program has surfaced. The program is engineered to produce fake Google ads that are formatted to...

What software is available to print sheets of address labels from an .XLS file? Thanks.

Technology is playing a big role in China's rise as a world economic superpower, but that nation still lags in one area: software. As a provider of outsourced software services — developing software programs for U.S. or other firms seeking low-cost, high-quality work — China has a ways to go. Outsourcing will be key for it to emerge as a global force in high tech.

OK, new thread for the next week. First, a big shout out to the SETI members who have added CPUs to the effort. Remember, its Team 36120, NOT Team 0. Next, congrats to all for bumping our team up to 104 processors and 76 users. We have a number of new users in the team, with Clara Lou, fzx12345, SamfromLivingston, brityank, manwiththehands and Tami all popping onto the hit list this week. Malsua, uriah and Ken in Texas are solidly in the top 10. Malsua is continuing to add systems and now accounts for 10% of the FR total. Great...

A critical software bug has been discovered in several of the most widely used anti-virus programs. It could be exploited to take control of a computer or to steal information, according to an analysis produced by the independent security analyst who made the discovery. The glitch affects 39 different Symantec products - including both home and enterprise versions of its anti-virus software. It resides within the Symantec anti-virus library, which is used by all of the packages. The analyst, Alex Wheeler, discovered that a critical error occurs when the Symantec anti-virus library decompresses files from "RAR" format for analysis Symantec...

OK, new thread for the next week. First, a big shout out to the SETI members who have added CPUs to the effort. Remember, its Team 36120, NOT Team 0. Next, congrats to all for bumping our team up to 65 processors. ArgentCent is the latest to have joined our happy band of folders and jumps in at # 36 with his first completed WU. We now have 51 members in the team, and about 45 active participants. Malsua, uriah and Ken in Texas are solidly in the top 10. One of these will probably be the new Numero Uno...

The worldwide storage software market grew 10 percent year-on-year to $2.1 billion in the third quarter of 2005, making eight consecutive quarters of double-digit year-on-year growth, research company IDC said Monday. Storage replication made the largest gain with 16.8 percent year-on-year growth, while the back-up and archiving markets increased by 12.7 percent. This growth was due to increasing demand for information protection, recovery and retrieval, the greater prevalence of remote working, and the need for compliance to regulations, IDC said. "We see strong demand in the backup, archive and replication segments driven by fundamental user requirements to protect, recover, and...

FreeRepublic Team Ranked #1,550 (of 41,708 teams)

FR Team ranking up to number 1782 of 41608

Software giant and Italian University to open center that concentrates on life sciences softwareMicrosoft Corp. and an Italian university will open a computational research center Wednesday to focus on the creation of software applications and computational tools for scientists striving for breakthroughs in biology, the life sciences and drug discovery. About 30 researchers will work at the Microsoft Research/Trento University Center for Computational and System Biology in Trento, Italy, said Stephen Emmott, director of Microsoft's European Science Initiative, at the company's European Research and Innovation Day in Brussels on Tuesday. Over the last 10 years, great strides have been made...