● 07.21.09

● Links 21/07/2009: Indian Chip Chooses GNU/Linux, Palm Pre SDK Coming

Posted in News Roundup at 7:39 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• First, because GNU/Linux is well proven, to say the least; it means they can take decades of work and use it straightaway.

• Secondly, it’s open, so the Indian government can be sure (a) it doesn’t contain any backdoors that US secret services might have placed in other operating systems and (b) it won’t go away.

• These are pretty compelling reasons for adopting GNU/Linux in these circumstances, and I’d be surprised if anything else is ever used. Interestingly, China has already taken this route with its own Loongson chip.

• I will let you decide the answer to this and also consider how many Linux only magazines are on your local shelves AND how many of the mainstream PC magazines cover Linux too.

• The first half of 2009 is over and after your summer vacation, you might want to start gearing up for the new distro releases. Once again open source proved that developers collaborating all over the world deliver constant platform improvement. Let’s see what they have in store for us this time.

• Part I of this series on how openness and Linux are unlocking innovation, outlined the many definitions that can be applied to the term “openness” and examined how Linux is impacting the evolving mobile ecosystem. However, to fully appreciate that impact, a greater understanding of ecosystems, particularly the open mobile ecosystem, is needed.

• For openness to successfully generate innovation, it has to create a rich ecosystem that both attracts developers and enables them to thrive and prosper. Currently, various platform providers are vying for the attention of the third-party developers by revealing APIs and providing software marketplaces.

• Myself, I don’t think I’d use it either, I’m too much in love with my KDE setup right now. But it was just technically stimulating to try to visualize how the PhDs in Google would strategize something like this.

Events and Newsletters

• Just like the international gang summits in Los Angeles, Linux needs a collective, “sit-down” to discuss the future of this now formidable operating system. I’m not talking about a nice little get together with keynote speakers with high-powered, 10,000 foot views of where Linux is and where it’s going. And I’m not talking about vendor booths touting the latest and greatest Linux toys or big blowout parties from a spectacle-making platinum sponsor. What we need is a nuts and bolts, sound-proofed room, gathering of the minds and Linux thought leaders to discuss Linux, its current state, its legal standing and its future as an operating system.

• The Open World Forum, (www.openworldforum.org), the leading global forum for Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) worldwide, aims to bring together all the key players in the open software ecosystem.

• The Open World Forum 2009 will feature a number of different tracks where community and technical leaders, CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, legal experts, investors, political leaders, and other senior executives can get involved in group activities, brainstorming sessions, panels, discussions and networking/social events.

• The Florida Linux Alliance Group, Inc. (flagroup.org) and the Florida Linux Show (floridalinuxshow.com) are forming a committee to work on putting TUX in the “Spherion Orlando Citrus Parade” (Citrus Bowl Parade held in Orlando, Florida).

• Welcome to the 29th issue of DistroWatch Weekly for 2009! Leading the news this past week is Mandriva, who has released several new projects including updated 2009 Spring USB and MLO Live CD editions, as well as Enterprise Server 5. We also take a look at the issues and difficulties involved in making CentOS 5.3 run on a netbook. Elsewhere this past week, Moblin benefits with contributions from HyperSpace, while version 4 of ULTILEX is released – a new distro which ships several other distros on a single live CD or USB stick. We also include interviews with Richard Stallman and Mark Shuttleworth, and finally a case study which looks at the relationship between distributions and upstream projects. Have a great Monday and the rest of the week!

Server

• The agency has contracted with Fujitsu to build a parallel Linux super based on its new Primergy BX900 Dynamic Cube blade servers, which were announced in early May.

Applications

• I ran out of money last month quite early (in NL you usually get paid once a month) and I did not understand why. Since Skrooge got imported last month in KDE SVN, I wondered if that could help me determine why. As usual with financial applications I did not get my hopes up very high. Normally they just don’t do what I want, that’s why I wrote my own application for my Office 9 years ago in php/mysql. But to use that for my personal finances was not a very tempting outlook.

• The Sims 3 runs fairly well with WINE. My test rig (E6550, 8800 GTS, 2 GB RAM) performs good on medium-high settings.

• Clutter, the free software tool-kit that makes it easier to develop compelling user-interfaces that use OpenGL / OpenGL ES, is now nearing its version 1.0 release. Emmanuele Bassi with the Intel Open-Source Technology Center has announced the release of Clutter 1.0 Release Candidate 3.

• Recently, I did a series of articles covering the Claws Mail email client. When I first started writing them, I figured it would be another one of those applications I would use during the writing and then I would put it away and go back to my usual Thunderbird. I was surprised to find out, after I had completed the series, that I didn’t want to go back to Thunderbird. I had found an email client that made Thunderbird look weak, slow, inflexible, and unreliable. In its place was a powerful, flexible, fast, reliable email client that epitomizes what good software should be: Powerful enough to entice power-users, yet easy enough for newbies.

Desktop Environments

• So, the state of the KDE union, as it were. Solid. There is direction for sure, but work still needs to get done. I, for one, will be using the 4.x branch moving forward. I urge you all to not only think about supporting KDE, but to try using KDE. I think you will be impressed.

• KDE and GNOME developers drafted a secret storage API designed to be a common interface for desktop applications that need to store passwords and other confidential data.

Distributions

• While PCLOS still is very similar than it was back in 2007 and it doesn’t have the bleeding edge core components, it still has the potential to be a very good Linux desktop environment for new Linux users and especially if your hardware is slightly aged. What the project now needs to do is to rebuild the confidence by showing that they can provide a steady flow of updates to the repositories and that they can stick to their new quarterly schedule, while focusing on quality control and implementation. It will be interesting to see how the year goes for them, and I certainly wish them all the best.

• Version 1.2.3.of GeeXboX is released. GeeXboX is a free embedded Linux distribution which aims at turning your computer into a Home Theater PC, or Media Center. Being a standalone LiveCD-based distribution, it’s a ready to boot operating system than works on any Pentium-class x86 computer or PowerPC Macintosh, implying no software requirement. You can even use it on a diskless computer, the whole system being loaded in RAM.

Devices/Embedded

• Palm has opened access to its WebOS development kit, Mojo, allowing anyone to develop Pre applications – though no one outside the USA has a Pre as yet.

• Not that anyone will be able to distribute developed apps as yet: the Palm Application Catalogue won’t be open for business for a few months yet. Until then Pre users are stuck with the 30 or so applications developed by Palm partners or those who got early access to the SDK.

• According to a report by Juniper Research, the number of smartphones shipped with open source operating systems will increase from 106 million this year to 223 million by 2014.

Free Software/Open Source

• Adobe Systems will offer more of its Flash rich media application platform up to open source Tuesday, a move viewed by analysts as reactive to the fierce competition Adobe faces…

• Wikipedia’s decision to support Ogg Theora for video uploads may be the last chance to break the proprietary video monopoly embodied in H.264.

• Microsoft, Google and Apple have all built H.264 support into their products because it readily adapts to Digital Rights Management, without which studios and other video rights owners have been unwilling to make content available online.

Business

• To most people, the term “open source” immediately conjures an image of two geeks sitting in a dark room (probably a basement) — curtains drawn, McDonald’s remains strewn across the desk, and 42 oz sodas within arms’ reach — coding away at their computers, listening to Linkin Park or a game soundtrack.

• But some entrepreneurs have found ways to build their companies on a shoestring using open source software, and they have figured out how to make money off something generally considered free.

• Take Brian Behlendorf, an open source pioneer who recounts those early days. “The term ‘free software’ made it sound like an anti-capitalist movement, yet the reality is we were hardcore capitalists,” he says. “We liked a lot of the attributes of that type of software and felt a rebranding effort was needed. That is when the term ‘open source’ was coined.”

CMS

• As you can see, the growth in demand for people skilled in open-source CMS platforms, in particular Drupal and Joomla, is huge. Part of the reason these particular platforms are ushering in more jobs for tech workers is that many publishers are switching to free, open-source content management systems from expensive proprietary ones. (In this post over at OStatic, I discussed that shift, and how the first major online publication in the UK is now running completely on Drupal.)

• According to this report, existing investors Sigma Partners and North Bridge Partners participated in the second round financing for Acquia, but not O’Reilly Alphatech Ventures, which was one of the first round investors. Acquia has a new CEO, Tom Erickson, who joined the company in March.

Government

• I sincerely believe that this is the right model at the right time. Hamilton could be a real leader, generating local expertise in city/public collaboration, realizing efficiencies and improving city business, and engaging the public more effectively in developing innovative solutions to the city’s challenges.

• The most successful organizations today are those that have embraced the concept of openness: of deriving value from a collaboration platform, of sharing information and resources, of aggregating the contributions of a wide array of participants, and of committing to the kind of continuous improvement that comes from respectful peer review.

Openness

• The Genome Center at Washington University in St. Louis has been at the forefront of genomics since its formation in 1990. Helping to lead the sequencing and analysis of the first multi-cellular organism, C. elegans, and the Human Genome Project, The Genome Center has long leveraged free/libre/open source software (FLOSS). One hallmark of these sequencing efforts has been the rapid dissemination of sequence data for all to download and use.

Programming

• “Think of it as an externship,” said Leslie Hawthorn, open source program manager with Google. Basically, students work from home — instead of in an office — on a three-month open source coding project while paired with a mentor from the industry or academia who is well-versed on that particular project.

Standards/Consortia

• Taking an open-source approach, Rackspace’s 43,000 cloud-computing customers played a major role in the API specifications, explained Emil Sayegh general manager for The Rackspace Cloud, formerly branded as Mosso cloud hosting. They overwhelmingly preferred the newer lighter-weight REST approach to the older heavy-duty SOAP standard that Amazon uses, he said.

• The next step in Rackspace’s strategy is to open-source the API, which according to Sayegh will be announced soon. He notes that Amazon has no announced plans to go to open source.

Leftovers

• A wide range of different modules were needed for different phases of the Moon mission, from the operating system to the user interface and the programs for each phase of the flight in both the command module computer and the lunar module computer. That meant applications for ascent, orbit, the trans-lunar injection on the way to the Moon, coasting, lunar orbit, trans-Earth injection on the return to Earth and re-entry. The same sorts of applications were needed for the Lunar Module, including descent, surface operations, ascent, rendezvous and descent abort, if it would be needed.

Censorship/Web Abuse

• Last week Amazon did something despicable. They violated the privacy of every Kindle user when without warning they remotely deleted copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from Kindle Readers. It seems that Amazon had determined these books had been purchased “illegally.” (The irony of choosing these particular books goes without saying.)

• Library groups have joined forces with the EFF and others to demand a seat at the table when it comes to negotiating the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Also, they want all Internet regulation stripped from the treaty.

Intellectual Monopolies

• The Postal Service got permission to use the photograph that appears on the stamp, but not the column depicted in it, so the sculptor sued the Postal Service for infringing his copyrights in the sculpture.

• With the rise of Web 2.0 which has been sold to us as the next version of the Internet that allows the end user to feedback into content – not to mention that the subsequent content no longer belongs to us. How it is the transfer of ownership seems to take place so liberally in one direction only? What part of the Web that supposedly now belongs to us more than ever actually now belongs to us?

• Solo. Religion was singled out here on Sunday as the major reason why city officials were having trouble persuading skilled batik designers to put their names to their creations so they could be registered for copyright.

• Welcome to the “ownership” and “entitlement” society, where people feel that you can’t do anything without paying everyone. The latest such example is a lawsuit against the US Postal Service over a recent stamp that is a photo of part of the Korean War Memorial in Washington DC.

• If you’re an independent musician looking for as many ways to sell and promote your music as possible, and you or a friend has some experience with software development, you’ll want to check out the upcoming Rock Band Network, for which Harmonix and MTV Games plan to begin beta testing in late August.

• The music industry will attempt to seize money paid to acquire the Pirate Bay, according to a high-level music industry source and a spokesman for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the trade group representing the music industry worldwide.

• I have been rereading the legislative history of the 1909 Copyright Act. I have come to the conclusion that 100 years ago we were smarter about copyright, about disruptive technologies, about intellectual property, monopolies and network effects than we are today. At least, the legislative hearings were much smarter. The hearings I am looking at took place in 1906 — thanks to the wonder of Google books you can read them yourself, if you are really nerdy.

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