● 08.30.09

● Links 30/08/2009: Dell’s GNU/Linux in Europe

Posted in News Roundup at 6:46 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Currently Microsoft is feeling the full impact of the global economic slowdown. Reduced demand for its Windows OS & other software products has had a negative impact on Microsoft. Both sales & profit are down. Meanwhile, Linux isn’t feeling any impact at all.

Applications

• For anyone that extensively uses Skype on Linux, you will probably want to head on over to the Linux Skype Developer page to fetch the latest beta. Skype has just rolled out the first 2.1 beta (2.1.0.47 Beta) of the Linux Skype client, which adds several new features and also brings a number of fixes and other improvements.

• While most open-source games still lack the graphics quality and features that the latest proprietary game engines support within retail games that are backed by the large studios, their quality has been improving as with their artwork and other characteristics. As an example of this, Warsow 0.5 made it out this week with a horde of new features and improvements.

• If you’ve seen one online word processor–or even a handful of them–you haven’t seen them all, not by a longshot. In addition to Google Docs, Zoho Writer, and emerging competitors such as EtherPad, other online offerings you might want to try include AjaxWrite, Writeboard, picoWrite and MonkeyTeX, to name a few.

• There are many reasons why you would want to run your own private microblog, but how do you actually do that? The easiest way is to install Bilboblog, a tiny, no-frills PHP/MySQL-based microblogging engine.

Dell

• With their new Latitude 2100 laptops, Dell is finally allowing Dutch consumers to pick Ubuntu as pre-installed operating system for their netbooks.

Free Software/Open Source

• About 80 programmers, led by Apache developer (and Collabnet employee) Brian Behlendorf, will spend about four hours trying to stamp out bugs in the open source software gateway, which is based on National Health Information Network (NHIN) conventions.

• The eighth European BSD conference is a great opportunity to present new ideas to the community and to meet some of the developers behind the different BSDs.

• FoxyProxy, the Firefox extension that automatically switches an Internet connection across one or more proxy servers.

• Bangalore: Economic slowdown had a huge impact on the financial institutions around the world. Recession has forced these financial institutions to take a look at their budget as well as the technology that they are using. In times like this open source technology is growing in the capital markets because of increased cost pressures. Many Wall Street companies are now adopting open source even though there are many who still believe that any software that they develop is proprietary and has a competitive edge.

• The Tamil Nadu Industrial Investment Corporation Limited (TIIC) is a State Financial Corporation engaged in industrializing the state of Tamil Nadu through various financial schemes, including term lending. We commenced computerization in 1987 and have completed the IT enablement of our core operations such as loan disbursement, financial accounting and MIS, HRM, etc. However, these areas are not integrated with other business functions. Therefore, during 2008-09, the corporation took up integration of these functions on a centralized database concept similar to core-banking solution on an open source platform. The project is expected to be completed in 2010-11.

• Though Linux started about 15 years ago, the open source movement has only started to gain momentum.

• [...]

• There are a few developments needed in the open source world. We need more open source system integrators that specialize in the implementation of open source solutions and deliver support. We need more big organizations that lead the way and share their open source success stories. Once these two develop, open source will become a normal way of ‘doing software’.

• OpenXava 3.1.4 is an open source framework to rapid development of Portlet Enterprise applications deployable in WebSphere Portal 6.1.

FSF/GNU

• Since I ended my internship with the FSFE in May, my main priority has been the establishing of a Free Software cooperative in Göteborg. The result is about to unfold itself, and it’s name is Gnutiken, or “the Gnutique” if you want to be English about it. Together with two of my favourite hackers, Jeremiah Foster and Patrik Willard, I have been able to establish a for-profit NGO (ekonomisk förening), and spent a lot of time wading through all the bureaucratic windings needed to start a business. I am now happy to say that we are about to launch. We have found a nice shop in central Göteborg and are awaiting the last formal answers to some of our applications.

Government

• For the first time, it looks as if IT will become a significant political battleground at the next election, says Mark Taylor.

• With an election on the horizon, Labour and the Conservatives are increasingly homing in on issues they believe will win them votes. Nothing unusual in that, but what is remarkable this time is that IT is heading for centre stage.

• The Public Sector Remix project will aim to reduce the cost of desktop computing for the public sector by demonstrating the viability of free open source software.

• A number of central, regional and local government agencies are working to run trials using free software for common desktop tasks. The Remix project will deploy open source software to nominated staff to use and then evaluate the results.

Open Access

• Over the years, we’ve heard a lot from people who’ve unearthed hidden treasures in Google Books: a crafter who uncovered a forgotten knitting technique, a family historian who discovered her ancestor once traveled the country with a dancing, roller-skating bear. The books they found were out of copyright and in the public domain, which meant they could read the full text and even download a PDF version of the book.

• In the battle to win readers for the books of the future, Sony has sided with Google over a controversial, proposed copyright lawsuit settlement that lets Google build out the library and bookstore of the future.

• That pits Sony and Google against Yahoo, Microsoft and Amazon, all of which have allied in opposition to the settlement. (See Wired.com’s Google Book Search FAQ to learn more.)

• It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

• For example, the “open” in open source is not nuanced at all and has been artificially binary-ized. The open source definition tells us very clearly what a license must and must not do in order to be permitted to describe itself with the trademarked term “open source.” In the eyes of the defenders of the “open source” brand, if you’re not open enough you’re not open at all.

• In the paper, I take a couple of stabs at creatively reinterpreting existing copyright law to fix the problem, before ultimately throwing up my hands and kicking it over to Congress. I’ll post the abstract of the paper after the jump.

• Why not, indeed? For as Neylon points out:

• Which is only possible, of course, in open access journals adopting a funder pays approach, since traditional publishers need to be able to point to the uniqueness of their content if they are trying to sell it – after all, why would you want to buy it twice? Open access journals have no such imperative, since they are giving it away, so readers have no expectations that the stuff is unique and never seen before.

• Today the State Services Commission is releasing the draft New Zealand Government Open Access and Licensing framework (NZGOAL) (HTML with comments [*]). This document provides guidance for State Services agencies on:

• * open access to non-copyright information; and * open licensing of copyright works,

• in both cases with a view to allowing their re-use by others. (It does not apply to information or works containing personal or other sensitive information).

• This is a crucially important issue. At the moment, some publishers are trying to create a new copyright in public domain materials just because they have been digitised. This is not only absurd, but threatens to nullify much of the huge potential of turning analogue knowledge into digital form.

• The European Commission on Friday will propose drafting rules that would make it easier to put many books and manuscripts online. The move is a part of the commission’s effort to bolster access to information and to encourage online businesses.

• I’m thrilled to announce that Steve Schultze will be joining the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton, as our new Associate Director, starting September 15. We know Steve well, having followed his work as a fellow at the Berkman Center at Harvard, not to mention his collaboration with us on RECAP.

• “User fees are not on their face an absurd proposition,” said RECAP co-developer Stephen Schultze, who is also a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “On the other hand, there may be enough benefits to open access . . . and justice that it would be worth funding it out of general taxpayer dollars.”

Standards/Consortia

• “Google’s support of this format lends even more credibility to EPUB as the industry standard for e-books. Book publishers are going to celebrate the emergence of one industry standard, because it means that they don’t need to incur the cost of converting their content to multiple proprietary formats in order to work with partners like Sony and Google,” Epps told InternetNews.com.

Leftovers

• Former McAfee President Kevin Weiss, exonerated of wrongdoing in a stock option-backdating scandal, plans to ask a judge on Monday to unseal the arbitration award that cleared him of wrongdoing and ordered McAfee to pay damages for firing him without proper cause.

• The Home Office has confirmed that the volume of data on a lost memory stick was much larger than originally reported.

• Years ago, when giving advice on how to avoid identity theft, I would tell people to shred their trash. Today, that advice is completely obsolete. No one steals credit card numbers one by one out of the trash when they can be stolen by the millions from merchant databases.

• Last summer, Zoho, a web-based software suite that includes document, project and invoicing management tools, integrated Google and Yahoo sign-ins, allowing users to sign into Zoho using a Google or Yahoo account. Today, Zoho is launching sign-in integration with Google Apps, letting users login to Zoho using their Google Apps credentials.

• Google is talking up its maps application and the apps ability to use the location and speed data from a users phone to make a crowdsourced traffic map for an entire city.

Censorship/Web Abuse

• Yesterday I wrote a quick analysis of the insane U-turn effected by the UK government over “three strikes and you’re out”. Below I’ve posted the corresponding letter that I’ve sent to my MP on the subject.

• The mystery of how Lord Mandelson managed to afford a £2.4 million town house in Regent’s Park took a new twist this week with his claim in a newspaper interview that he did not possess a mortgage on the property.

• Online campaigners 38 Degrees have launched an attack on Mandelson’s plans to give himself the power to order internet cut-offs without trial. Other campaigners from a range of NGOs are getting in touch with us about this: there is a growing sense of outrage among people who know that the internet is the most important political tool we have.

• [by] Peter Mandelson

• Suppose, now, that people use some of those million hotspots to download copyright material: how easy is it going to be (a) establishing exactly who downloaded it and (b) cutting off that person?

• Gives a new meaning to the term “hotspot”…

• It seems the British government is going loony for anti-piracy rhetoric from the likes of U2 and David Geffen.

• The government frequently cites pornography as the most important reason for China’s controls on the Internet, but right now, the censors are particularly nervous for political reasons including the recent riots in Xinjiang, and the possibility of something going wrong on October 1, when the People’s Republic celebrates the 60th anniversary of its founding.

• Quite alarming to report that all of the most popular Tibetan language blog hosting sites (except one) have been inaccessible for almost three weeks now.

Intellectual Monopolies

• As the government rethinks penalties for illegal downloaders, a new political party is campaigning for laws to keep pace with technology, Kevin Anderson talks to its leader

• This week the latest news in the Digital Britain debate caused a wave of protests as it was revealed the government is considering disconnecting Internet users on allegations of copyright infringement. TorrentFreak caught up with a British independent film company to gauge their response to the news.

• Two quotations from James Murdoch’s speech at the Edinburgh International Television Festival…

Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the DayKevin Foreman, General Manager at RealNetworks 04 (2004)Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating. Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

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