● 01.29.10

● Links 29/1/2010: Many New Releases of GNU/Linux, Oracle Makes Promises

Posted in News Roundup at 7:59 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• The following Linux-based operating systems were announced last week: Android-x86 1.6, Linux Mint 8 RC1 KDE Community Edition, Ubuntu Electronics Remix 9.10 and Tiny Core Linux 2.8. In other news: the Ubuntu Manual team needs your help to make the upcoming manual, for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) operating system, better and useful! The weekly ends with the video clip of the week, the latest Linux distributions released/updated and the development releases.

• Virtual machines are the entire state of a computer, frozen into a memory file, and saved. You can run them in the corner of the memory of your PC. Like a picture in a picture or a baby in a womb, a virtual machine is an entire, self-contained image of a computer, running inside your own computer. You can have as many virtual machines running as you want and that your computer can bear. I’ve seen Mac laptops running Windows 7 in one virtual machine, Linux in another. And that Linux image is, itself, running a simulation of the veteran Commodore 64 microcomputer, just to be perverse.

• I found this site reports 4.4% GNU/Linux visitors from their webloag. The site is a dial-up ISP and co-location service so they may have more visitors who are techie but at least we know that up front. It shows MacOS at 4.7%. Now to find reports far and wide, wherever Debian goes…

Audio Shows

• This week on Linux Outlaws: Sun/Oracle deal approved, Zonker leaves Novell, Linux-powered roboboats to invade Wales, 17 year old flaw in Windows uncovered and much, much more…

Server

• Migrations can be made from Sun Solaris to Linux or IBM AIX.

• Cisco today announced the launch of a new Linux-powered router, “the Linksys by Cisco Wireless-N Broadband Router with storage Link (WRT160NL)”, for the Indian market.

• Cisco Systems Inc. has launched a new Linux-powered router, the Linksys by Cisco Wireless-N Broadband Router with Storage Link (WRT160NL) in India. This new product complements the existing Linksys by Cisco consumer router line-up and is essentially the next generation of the popular WRT54GL router.

• In February 2009, Georgian College went into production with a four-node Oracle Database cluster running industry-standard servers and Linux powering enterprise applications used by students, faculty and administration.

• Zarafa is a Linux-based groupware product which offers its own WebAccess web client, IMAP/POP3 access, a CalDAV gateway and native MAPI integration with Outlook.

• “I created CloudLinux OS based my previous work developing the H-Sphere Control Panel. I could see the need to give providers a way to control the CPU and IO demands of individual users to achieve high level of server stability,” states Igor Seletskiy, CEO of Cloud Linux Inc. “This work is based on a lot of research that has been done over the years. We went deep into Linux kernel to achieve high level of resource isolation. We also wanted to be able to offer the OS with a professionally staffed, 24/7 support operation and at a low cost for providers. So on behalf of my team and after these many months of hard work, I am proud to be introducing this new technology here at the Parallel’s Summit.”

• The Linux server market is proving to be big business for San Francisco-based Polywell Computers, a manufacturer and distributor of servers and desktops to the corporate market. In fact, the 23-year-old maker of low-cost PCs and servers has experienced a steady and significant rise in demand for Linux boxes over traditional Windows PCs and servers.

• “Ten years ago, 99% of our servers were Windows-based, and today 99% are Linux-based,” says Polywell CEO Sam Chu (www.polywell.com). “We see all sizes of companies, and government, moving from Windows to Linux.”

• We had all but given up on the FOSS MIS in UK schools and had resigned ourselves to virtualising an MS server instance on what otherwise would have been a pure Linux server stack just to run SIMS.

• However, it seems to me now to be a MIS-take! To elaborate on this it is necessary to look at the trends in the market.

• There’s news that the London Stock Exchange plans to move to GNU/Linux within 12 months. There is also a story on Groklaw about GNU/Linux meeting the needs of Intel better than that other OS ten years ago. GNU/Linux is a great OS.

Kernel Space

• How big? How many? How long? Questions about the limit on things in Linux abound.

Linux Foundation

• Hitting back at Microsoft’s recent denunciation of Mobile Linux, the Linux Foundation’s outspoken director Jim Zemlin has defended the open source platform against charges of fragmentation.

• The Linux Foundation is offering global training programs, including a free webinar series, to help prospective job searchers meet the rise in demand for Linux-related jobs.

• Research shows the demand for Linux talent is on the rise with some firms reporting a 50 percent increase in Linux-related jobs just in the last year. This is certainly good news if you already know how to work with Linux, and perhaps better news if you are looking for a new technical role.

• A little less than a year ago, the Linux Foundation launched a program to provide a variety of training opportunities for Linux professionals. Just a few months later, the Foundation moved the program online, offering web-based sessions of select courses to reach a wider audience. On Tuesday, they took it one step further, announcing the free — as in beer — Linux Training Webinar Series.

• The courses are VENDOR-NEUTRAL. I think this is an important detail because the huge variety of distro’s, applications and the like are all running on top of a common kernel.

Applications

• In my dressing down of Wine, I noted that users are unlikely to find Wine mentioned in their ISV’s support matrices, but, as I learned, two of the most frequently-recommended MySQL query tools I encountered, PremiumSoft’s Navicat Lite and the open source HeidiSQL, owe their Linux support to none other than the Wine project.

• When I stumble into the kitchen table at midnight, I’ve been known to cry, “It’s a virtual dark room in here!” But that has nothing to do with darktable, which is virtual darkroom software that lets you develop your digital negatives (comparable to UFRaw), and also bundles in the same application a virtual light table to organize your image collections (comparable to F-Spot).

• strace is a mighty tool. It’s so simple to use, yet it offers rewards almost instantly. I do admit it’s not for everyone, definitely not the majority of home users, but with some patience, basic investigative instinct combined with a curious soul and desire to learn, you can put strace to smart use.

• Marave (nothing, in guaraní) is a relaxed text editor. Its goal is to let you focus in your writing, free of visual distractions and clutter.

• It is written using PyQt, so it should work in all major platforms, and it is licensed under the GPLv2 so it is free software.

• People often ask why there are so many Linux distributions. No one seems to ask why there are so many items in a buffet spread or so much variety in a botanical garden. The large number of distributions sure makes it difficult to pick the right one for a particular task; but having picked the right distribution, you have it better adapted for the task at hand.

Instructionals

Games

• A Linkedin profile from Valve Software’s Chris Green reveals that the company is apparently “REALLY looking for senior Linux + Mac engineers.” As of yet there has been no official announcement of any upcoming Mac related projects. Valve is known for its Half-Life series as well as its Steam digital download service.

• It seems as if Half-Life and Left 4 Dead developer Valve is looking for a few good men to engineer things for Linux and Macintosh. Several sleuth sites, as well as more than a share of Mac-focused sites, have been reporting on a rogue sentence not-so-tucked-away in Valve’s Chris Green’s LinkedIn profile, indicating that the studio is indeed doing as much.

• As many of you know, I’m still quite interested in virtual worlds and 3D immersive environments though I certainly don’t spend as much time in Second Life as I did several years ago. So from time to time I poke around and see what people are working on, and tonight I came across the Sirikata project from the Stanford Virtual Worlds Group in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University.

• Play Amiga, Atari, Amstrad, Arcade Machines, Colecovision, Commodore (64/128/VIC20/PET), GameBoys (GB, GBC, GBA), GameGear, Genesis, MasterSystem, MS DOS, NeoGeo, NeoGeo CD, NES/Famicom, PC Engine/TurboGrafix 16, PSX, Scumm, SNES and ZX Spectrum.

K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

• Akonadi is the central point of accessing PIM data for all KDE applications. It abstracts all the different implementation details of various sources so that the mail program or calendar application does not need to know the details of how to access the sources itself. However, Akonadi does need these details, which is where its resources come into play.

• Last week, the KDE Community had their yearly Americas event, this year in sunny San Diego. Despite California not living up to its sunny reputation, the attendees certainly had a good time. The first three days featured talks about a variety of topics (day 1, day 2 and day 3), there were CMake and Qt development courses and of course several small meetings and work to be done. However there was more than sitting in the conference room at UCSD. We had a great time at Banana Bungalows on the beach, went out for a variety of food, had a few dragons and babies visit us and risked our lives getting to and from the university. Read on for some general impressions on the event, and for some motivation to attend Camp KDE 2011 next January, at a location still to be determined.

• The booth will need to be staffed from 9am-6pm. The great news is that you will get into SCALE for free, and because you will not need to be at the booth the whole show, you can take time to check out the talks or visit other booths.

• KDAB, the Qt Experts have issued a new release of the Qt Addon collection KD Tools. This release goes along with a significant extension of KDAB’s training course offering, now including in-depth trainings and more advanced topics. KDAB developer Stephen Kelly has been interview after he won the Qt Contribution Award. He, and all other KDAB developers are now Qt certified.

Distributions

• Mandriva, Europe’s leading Linux publisher, announced today the launch of its brand new website for its Brazil’ subsidiary: www.mandriva.com/br

New Releases

• Tiny Core lead developer Robert Shingledecker has announced the availability of version 2.8 of Tiny Core Linux. Tiny Core is a minimal Linux distribution that is based on the 2.6 Linux kernel and is only about 10 MB in size. In addition to the usual bug fixes, the latest update includes a number of changes and updates.

• The guys over at Linux Outlaws are always talking about Tiny Core Linux because it always seems to be releasing a new version. I was impressed back in the day that Damn Small Linux could have a working Linux distro in only 50 MB. I know that Tiny Core Linux is technically not a full Linux distro, but I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. It came in a recent LXF disc and I decided to check it out.

• The Elive Team is proud to announce the release of the development version 1.9.57

• On January 25th, François Dupoux released version 1.3.5 of the SystemRescueCd Linux-based operating system. The new SystemRescueCd 1.3.5 is now powered by Linux kernel 2.6.31.12, with an updated Btrfs filesystem from Linux kernel 2.6.32. The popular GParted application for partitioning tasks was updated, as well as the FSArchiver and NTFS-3G.

• We are proud to announce that we have just released the newest release of PC/OS. PC/OS OpenWorkstation and PC/OS WebStation are the two editions released. These replace PC/OS 2009 OpenWorkstation and WebStation. This release is based on the Ubuntu 9.04 series. Some of the higlights that target the new release are as follows.

• Yesterday evening, January 26th, Roberto Dohnert proudly announced the immediate availability for download of the PC/OS 10 Ubuntu-based operating system.

Red Hat Family

• The idea of open source need not be limited to software — it can also apply to subjects like education, business, law and life in general. That’s the philosophy behind Red Hat’s new Web site, anyway. Could opensource.com be Red Hat’s attempt at reviving excitement in the open source movement? Perhaps the site was put up in an attempt to clarify the difference between open source and collaboration.

• I’m kicking off my third year at Red Hat this month and would like to take a step back as we move into 2010 to reflect on the past year. In keeping with the U.S. presidential tradition of delivering a “State of the Union” address each January, I’d like to maintain a similar tradition at Red Hat and highlight some of our milestones from 2009.

• Last weekend I went through a somewhat lengthy process of upgrading one of my servers from Fedora 6 to Fedora 12. The server is vital for a company that uses it, there is more than 2 TBytes of data on that machine, and I only had a weekend to go through the upgrade.

• Fedora is a very dynamic distribution, with new releases coming out roughly every 6 month. An upgrade backward compatibility is maintained only for the last 2 releases. So, I had to first upgrade from Fedora 6 to Fedora 8, then from Fedora 8 to Fedora 10, and then finally from Fedora 10 to Fedora 12.

Oracle

• Several of the concerns about Oracle’s acquisition of Sun have revolved around how Unix technologies led by Sun would continue under the new ownership. As it turns out, Solaris users might not have much to worry about, as Oracle executives on Wednesday affirmed their commitment to preserving the efforts.

• If you want to know what Oracle’s roadmap is for Linux, just watch what Red Hat does. Oracle Enterprise Linux is just a clone of RHEL. Getting a sense of what Oracle really has planned for Solaris – aside from deploying it in SMP systems and clusters – is going to take some time. Oracle’s plans for virtualization and system management are more clear.

• Linux was referenced a lot. Larry is a Linux fan, and so are his colleagues — there’s no doubt. ZFS was referenced a lot as one of the most powerful filesystems (it can do snapshots), I really hope that Linux fans will be able to truly enjoy ZFS on Linux kernel level because as of now it works so slowly via Fuse (Filesystem in Userspace).

Debian Family

• Ubuntu 9.10, code-named Karmic Koala, debuted in late Oct 2009. And unlike the commercial operating systems, Ubuntu is totally free;it doesn’t cost you a dime. Eric Geier tells you all you need to know about this nifty Ubuntu upgrade.

• AMD has made available its first new ATI Catalyst driver release of 2010, introducing support for Linux operating system Ubuntu 9.10.

• “The guidance at Canonical is that we encourage our employees to sign copyright assignment agreements for the projects they participate in (as far as I know we’ve done so for MySQL, Zope, FSF, Novell, Red Hat, Intel and others) in order to facilitate the upstreaming of their work. There are variations on the language used. Canonical’s was highlighted in a recent LWN article, but I think the article created the very mistaken impression that Canonical’s agreement is materially different from any of the others I’ve mentioned.”

• The Ubuntu developers have announced the availability of Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS, the fourth maintenance update to the Long Term Support (LTS) version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, first released at the end of April 2008. The maintenance release of “Hardy Heron” includes 77 updates, covering several bugs, security issues and errors in the installation system. These issues include, Nautilus not displaying Samba shares for certain networks, specific hardware fixes for Dell computers and GRUB installation failures on certain non-Ext3 file systems.

• Interestingly enough, the amount of open bugs has stayed relatively steady since Ubuntu 8.10, with Intrepid (8.10) containing 290 bugs compared to 272 in Karmic (9.10). In contrast to this, the last Long Term Support edition of Ubuntu (Hardy – 8.04) contained the most open bugs with a whopping 466 bugs remaining open to this day.

• I have recently converted all but one of my personal computers to Ubuntu. To be more specific I am now using Ubuntu 9.10 on two desktops and one Netbook. Windows XP is only surviving on my laptop for support reasons and handling accounting backups on a program that only works in Windows. That conversion is also in development and sometime soon I have a very good feeling Windows XP will die on my notebook and Ubuntu will rise. Wait, I am being too harsh in my descriptive passage. Windows XP meant a lot to me over the years and it was truly great! But it is time to move on. It has been a gamble but so far so good.

• A prime example: Back in April 2009, Austin told us Rezitech was leveraging Ubuntu Linux at the heart of his data center. Most folks consider Ubuntu a desktop operating system. But Rezitech spotted the server and cloud opportunities early. Now, Austin is looking to do the same in the MSP middelware market.

• Mailspect is pleased to announce a new email defense and archive solution that instantly transforms any Ubuntu server into a highly scalable email security and archive device. With the introduction of our new APT installation a single apt-get command will install Mailspect and all related components on Ubuntu and Debian servers thus providing a substantial improvement over the open source antispam tools provided in Ubuntu.

• Each day, the drumbeat for Ubuntu Server Edition is getting slightly louder. In recent weeks, a growing list of ISVs (independent software vendors) has vowed to support Canonical’s Linux server operating system. The latest example involves Mailspect launching antispam and email archiving solutions for Ubuntu Server.

• Ecocyn today announced new Linux Ubuntu offerings for the Epoch iGx mainframe to help clients run smarter and more efficient data centers that maximize the use of IT resources and reduce energy costs.

• I have previously described Linux Mint as “Ubuntu plus all the stuff you would probably add to it yourself after installing”. Of course, you need to be aware that a lot of the things which are added are proprietary or otherwise non-FOSS, so if you are a GNU/Linux/FOSS purist, you should be aware of that at the beginning. I am not of that persuasion, and Mint is one of my two favorite distributions (SimplyMEPIS is the other). Now, with the quality of Mint and the care that the Mint Community contributors have taken in adding KDE 4.3, this is sure to be an excellent distribution. If you are a KDE devotee, and you have been disappointed by Kubuntu (I know that a lot have), I would strongly encourage you to take a look at this distribution.

Devices/Embedded

• RamSan-20 open source drivers for Linux and Solaris are now available to provide economical, high performance PCIe Flash storage.

• The PlayStation 3 up until now was the only one of the modern consoles that hasn’t been hacked. Reason for this, people often reasoned, was that Sony had already catered to the “hackers” needs by granting the ability to install Linux on the platform.

• I’ve gotten confirmation the exploit works on 3.10. Also I’ve heard about compile issues on Fedora. I did this in Ubuntu. I would really like someone to write up a nice tutorial

• The hacked console means that players can now run pirated games, unrestricted versions of Linux or home made software.

• Enhance Technology announced an eight-disk, Linux-based network-attached storage (NAS) device, offering up to 16TB of SATA storage. The UltraShare NAS8000-P4 incorporates an Intel Xeon (Nehalem) CPU clocked at 2.0GHz, four gigabit Ethernet ports, and an optional gateway for expanding to up to 176TB.

• MSI announced an ATX-format motherboard based on Intel’s P55 chipset that supports LGA1156-socketed Core i3, i5, and i7 processors. The “P55-GD85″ offers connections including USB 3.0, SATA II, SATA III ports, RAID , PCI Express, PCI, and FireWire, and offers a Linux-based fast-boot OS called “Winki.”

• Kontron announced an “AM4020″ AMC module and a VPX format “VX6060″ computing blade, both equipped with Intel’s 32nm-fabricated Core i7 processor. The Linux-ready products are the first of many Core i7 systems Kontron plans to introduce this year in formats including AMC, CompactPCI, and COM Express, says the company.

• [...]

• Kontron also announced a Linux-ready, VPX-format 6U computing blade for parallel data and signal processing applications. The Kontron VX6060 is equipped with dual Intel Core i7 processing nodes linked to an Ethernet and PCI Express infrastructure, says Kontron.

• Xport Pro is available running Linux and IPv6, providing Linux developers with a compact compute platform, along with an industry standard development environment.

• From a software point of view, the CM-T3530 is supported in the mainline Linux kernel from rev 2.6.33, and offers full Openembedded Angstrom Linux distribution and full support for Windows CE 6.0 R3.

Phones

• The Motorola Moto ZN300 utilises a Linux/Java-based MOTOMAGX operating system, which makes it somewhat different from many handsets market. Reliability and stability are key elements and the use of this operating system provides that and more. The unit itself is aesthetically pleasing to the eye, as well as being a functional slider phone. Measuring 95 mm x 46 mm wide and only 15 mm thick it is somewhat compact. At only 103 g, this impressive social media handset is also lightweight.

Android

• To recap, the Mini 5 is a 1GHz Snapdragon-powered netpad (did I just coin a phrase?) running Android 1.6 with 5 megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and 3G mobile. It should be selling for $1,098 before carrier subsidy.

• Cypress Semiconductor announced a touchscreen device driver for Android and Linux that supports Cypress’ TrueTouch touchscreen controllers, complete with “all-points” multi-touch signaling support. Meanwhile, “Cyanogen” has hacked a multi-touch interface for Google’s Nexus One phone, and Google is upgrading the Android-based phone’s spotty 3G support, says eWEEK.

Nokia

• A hacker called Brandon Roberts has worked out a way to dual-boot the native Maemo-Linux operating system on the Nokia N900 and also the Android operating system.

• A video has recently shown up on SlashGear showing a Nokia N900 running Google Android, as standard the N900 runs the Linux-based Maemo OS.

• Nokia has announced its second Push N900 developer contest meant for developers to push themselves creatively by figuring out creative uses and hacks for the Maemo Linux based Nokia N900.

• The Nokia N900 smartphone is the first open-source handset to use the pioneering Maemo 5 software, delivering a PC-like experience on a cellular handset.

• This means you can adapt the phone’s software (built on Linux) to integrate many applications such as Facebook, Skype and open-source add-ons.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Do you want your computer to be adorable? If so, you might want to look into one of Haleron’s new machines. These tinier-than-netbook ‘Swordfish’ (via Netbooked) have a 7″ screen, VIA ARM 300 MHz processor, 128 MB of RAM (up to 256 MB) and 1 GB flash storage (up to 4).

• [...]

• 3G support is optional, and you can also choose to run Windows XP or Linux if you wish.

• Inside the X2390 is an Intel Atom processor Z530 clocked at 1.6GHz running Microsoft Windows XP Embedded, XP Professional or Linux.

• The screen resolution is set at 800×480 pixels, while a webcam is built into the device’s frame.

• There is of course an Archos 7 Tablet on the Archos site running on Linux. This new scoop from ArchosLounge points to an Android-based Archos 7 tablet. The specs also indicates a flash-storage device instead of a hard drive one. It should be the same 7-inch 800 x 480 touchscreen tablet with WiFi. The Archos 7 Android comes with a 180 euro price or about 150 British pounds.

Free Software/Open Source

• I ran my first Linux live CD in January 2007. I’ve been using free, open-source operating systems on my personal machines for much of my work for the past two years, more intensively in the last year.

• New York University anthropologist Gabriella Coleman says the open-source software movement has emerged relatively unscathed from the economic downturn.

• Ms Coleman was the opening keynote speaker at Linux.Conf.Au, a trans-Tasman conference held in Wellington last week that attracted more than 600 open-source software developers and enthusiasts.

• Waiting for open source to give Microsoft a much-needed kick up the jacksie has seemed like waiting for Godot. We wait, we wait and we are still waiting.

• The Editorial Committee of the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review (IFOSS L. Rev.) is proud to announce the immediate availability of the publication’s second issue. IFOSS L. Rev. is a peer-reviewed biannual legal review dedicated to analysis and debate about Free and Open Source Software legal issues. It is published by an independent Editorial Committee.

• The International Free and Open Source Software Law Review (IFOSS L. Rev.) is a collaborative legal publication aiming to increase knowledge and understanding among lawyers about Free and Open Source Software issues. Topics covered include copyright, licence implementation, licence interpretation, software patents, open standards, case law and statutory changes.

• Nuxeo, the Open Source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) company, announced today that it has enriched the value of its Nuxeo Connect support and maintenance offering with the introduction of Nuxeo Studio.

• In the world of product development, time-to-market keeps shrinking and demand for better quality keeps growing. Open Source, which is often thought to be the definitive solution to meet both objectives – faster development cycle and better quality, is on the mind of many OEMs and product companies.

• In reality, the companies find it difficult to overcome the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) to make a final decision and say, “Yes, we will use open source in our product.”

• In the product development process, at the one end are the engineering people – developers, architects, engineering managers – who are aware of open source and its benefits, but lack the power to take decisions. At the other end, are the management and the legal people, who can take decisions, but may not have sufficient ground-up information. How do we bridge this gap? How can the engineering team convince the management to boldly embrace open source?

• An open source real-time operating systems (RTOS) has been developed by a UK-based engineer.

• “As a professional embedded systems developer working in the UK, I started writing the OS a while back in my spare time,” said designer Kelvin Lawson.

• Red Hat’s President and CEO Jim Whitehurst does a “State of the Union” blog (which I think should be a mandatory action for all CEOs) during which he talks about the company’s double-digit growth rates for both revenue and headcount throughout the course of the recession. Open source appears to have thrived in during the downturn (whether we are out of it or not) and I think that might just be because open source likes the going to be crunchy.

• If you had to ascribe the terms ‘wealth and sogginess’ and ‘crunchy and on the edge’ to a) proprietary software systems and b) open source software – which way round would you put them? See what I mean? Open source is all about survival of the fittest rather than survival of the fattest. Now of course that’s doing proprietary vendors a huge disservice, but I am trying to make a point.

• A caveat is included stating you need to be an expert in PIC assembly, electronics, and the devices source code to make it work.

• Kitware, a company that builds open source platforms and develops advanced research solutions to overcome the challenges of our time, today announced it is opening up the main infrastructure of MIDAS under a nonrestrictive license allowing freedom to install the MIDAS server on location and build on top of the platform for free.

• Jackrabbit 2.0 has been updated to now require at least Java 5 and common components have been spun out into separate projects for better re-usability. Support for database connection pooling is now available for all supported database back-ends and a local data store feature is enabled in the default configuration.

• In 2010, Eucalyptus is going to focus more on refining what they have and finding new business opportunities, Wolski said. But the eventual goal is to become to the cloud what Linux is to desktop operating systems: the free, customizable alternative platform that has the potential to put gray hair on the bigger, better-funded competition’s heads.

VoIP

• If you’re a solution provider, vendor, developer or technologist with a vested interest in open-source PBX and VoIP, particularly Asterisk, your time is now.

• That was the resounding theme of last week’s Digium Asterisk World conference in Miami Beach, where a number of open-source devotees said the opportunity to push Asterisk platforms further into networking and infrastructure is pronounced like never before.

• The time is now for engineers, developers, providers and vendors of Asterisk solutions, ChannelWeb has said.

• A web interface to BIANA providing basic functionalities is also available. The software can be downloaded under GNU GPL license from http://sbi.imim.es/web/BIANA.php.

Healthcare

• How important is an open-source solution for HIE, when interoperability is required for compliance with federal mandates? The Nationwide Health Information Network, and the fact that it is using open-source technology, really led us to start our own in-house project. Given that, it was a natural for us to move over to Misys.

• Proponents of open-source health IT systems have some concerns about the recently proposed “meaningful use” rules, including the time frame for electronic health record certification and adoption.

Mozilla

• After Maemo, Firefox Mobile (aka Fennec) is about to conquer another Linux-based platform – Android. This is not to say something’s wrong with the built-in Webkit-based browser, quite the contrary, but as you know – more choices are always welcome.

• With the final version of Firefox for Maemo just around the corner, and with more stable versions of Firefox for Windows Mobile down the pipe, the guys over at Mozilla are also gearing up for the first release of Firefox for Android, it seems. The company already announced back in 2009 that they were considering a move in the Android area, and it seems that we are nearing the first step to be taken in this direction, with a usable flavor of Firefox for Android expected to arrive in February.

Sun

• You’ve probably seen the news – the Sun/Oracle transaction has closed. With the passing of that milestone, I can once again speak freely.

• Having had nine months to accelerate down the runway, there’s not a doubt in my mind Oracle’s takeoff and ascent will be fast and dramatic. I wish the combined entity the best of luck, and have enormous confidence in the opportunity.

• “Kenai today is a good idea but we don’t think it is quite working” said Ted Farrell, Oracle’s Chief Architect and Senior Vice President for tools and middleware.The plan is to close the public facing version of Project Kenai and bring the project “inhouse” where, Farrell says, there are a number of internal projects which are a good fit for Kenai.

• Oracle promised during its five hour webcast Wednesday to continue Sun Microsystems open source commitment by throwing money and support behind MySQL, Open Office, and Solaris, promising to make each offering better. As expected, open source users are skeptical.

• Oracle executives have said they intend to use Sun Microsystems’ storage product portfolio to compete in the disk and tape business – in support of and outside of Oracle’s software applications — now that the sofwtare company’s acquisition of Sun is finally complete.

• If yesterday’s epic five hour webcast discussing Oracle’s plans for its finally acquired Sun assets was a long time coming for the analysts listening in, you can imagine how much of a wait it’s been for those on both sides of the transaction. It’s been roughly nine months, remember, since the database giant announced its intention to acquire the one time dot com darling.

• Several of the concerns about Oracle’s acquisition of Sun have revolved around how Unix technologies led by Sun would continue under the new ownership. As it turns out, Solaris users might not have much to worry about, as Oracle executives on Wednesday affirmed their commitment to preserving the efforts.

Business

• Among the new Zenoss Enterprise customers in 2009 were Hosting.com, Agilent Technologies, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and Real Networks while leading organizations such as Carlson, Deutsche Bank, Rackspace Hosting, iStock International, and Motorola renewed their agreements with Zenoss.

• Here’s some short but sweet (and lucrative) news involving money in the open source industry. Opengear, provider of an open source console server, scored its first $1 million deal in December 2009. Next up, Opengear has won a deal involving Linode, a cloud and VPS (virtual private server) hosting company. Hmmm…. are solutions providers waking up to these niche open source opportunities?

Releases

• Translate.org.za are the proud parents of a new Zulu spell checker.

• What makes us such proud parents? We’ve ported the spell checker from the Myspell platform to Hunspell. Which means what exactly? It means that we can now spell check Zulu text at much higher precision. It also puts the platform in place to ratchet up the checkers performance.

• Mozilla has released Weave 1.0, the Firefox extension and service that provides Firefox user data synchronization among computing devices like laptops, desktops, and starting tomorrow, with Firefox for Maemo release, mobile devices. It is also great for users who dual-boot, and what don’t want to bother remembering where they did what.

• Weave is open source and licensed, like Firefox, under the GPL/MPL/LGPL tri-licence.

• Bonita Open Solution is released under version 2 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv2).

CMS

• In January, Acquia (news, site) announced its private beta launch of DrupalGardens.com, a hosted Drupal (news, site) solution. They also launched an Open Government program to help US government agencies meet the requirements of the Open Government Directive.

• Popular Open Source Software offerings such as Linux and Open Office have seen substantial increases in market share as the recent global recession has prompted more and more organisations to look for additional value from their software. The UK Government is already heavily backing Open Source Software, accelerating its use in public services.

• Technology services company East Summit, Inc (DBA ESI Web Services) has launched a campaign to reveal the true power of WordPress to the small and medium enterprises that can benefit most from its features.

• I was greeted by the ominous discriminatory phrase “To join the Webinar, please use one of the following supported operating systems”. Oh, what a surprise. Linux isn’t one of the supported operating systems.

• This is all the more incredible because the vast majority of Drupal installations are on Linux web servers.

• Perhaps what Klause is currently best known for is being the man behind the move of Whitehouse.gov to open source Web CMS Drupal. He returned to the public sector during the run-up to the 2008 elections, and regardless who won, there would be a new administration.

• Such an event requires that the outgoing administration’s final message be archived for posterity. You can see the results today in the US government archives.

Government

• The new U.S. Administration has demonstrated an immediate commitment to investing in green energy technologies and developing the new regulatory frameworks required to address the crisis of climate change. We have a unique historical opportunity to incorporate these open elements into the policy framework, but we must seize this opportunity now if we are to achieve the pace of innovation and adoption required to avert the climate change crisis. Government spending commitments and economic incentives of well over $100 billion for green technologies provide the necessary commercial leverage to drive an open innovation model, much as the U.S. Department of Defense’s spending on computer equipment in the 70s enabled it to drive the adoption of the Internet Protocol that led to the modern Internet. This leverage needs to be exercised now while contracts and governance for these large taxpayer investments are still being put in place and while policy frameworks for regulation and market mechanisms are being detailed.

• The Obama Administration has forced Sourceforge to deny service to its anti-terrorism sanction list.

• Open Source for America’s Guidelines for Open Government Plans will help inform the different agencies about what policies and practices should be included in their mandated Open Government Plans. OSFA has opened this discussion on its website and plans to finalize its set of guidelines the second week of February, thus providing the agencies with sufficient time to take them into account before the April 7th deadline. Later in the year, the organization will issue a report card about the agencies, using these Guidelines as part of the process of the grading system.

• Greens communications spokesman Scott Ludlam has called for the Commonwealth to better audit its software licensing and support costs and to encourage the adoption of open source software where a robust alternative exists.

• [...]

• The Commonwealth is understood to spend more than $500 million annually on software licences and support.

• Some 95 percent of Malaysia’s government agencies have adopted open source software (OSS), but the remaining 5 percent have not warmed to the concept–and is unlikely to anytime soon, according to a government official.

• The UK Government has revised its 2009 Open Source strategy and will now require suppliers to show they have considered open source. Although the government says that the new strategy documentPDF “does not represent a wholesale change to Open Source Open Standards Reuse Strategy” they have taken account of feedback from writetoreply.org.

• The UK government has rejigged its open source and open standards software procurement policy, following pressure from OSS vendors last autumn.

• Early last year the Cabinet Office revised its rules on public sector open source software purchases, but many OSS players complained that the policy amendments didn’t go far enough.

• Clearly, much of this is just words, words, words, as someone once said. Moreover, the time scales are depressingly long: 2015 is a generation away in technology terms. Still, the fact that open source is mentioned explicitly in the ways described above, and that there is a growing understanding of the problems it faces, gives me some slight hope that one day we might even start seeing free software being widely used by the UK government.

• The government’s planning to overhaul its entire computing system, focussing on open source software and cloud computing.

• The UK government’s stance on open source is meaningless without any significant means of enforcement. That’s the view of the open source community which has bemoaned the lack of teeth in guidelines issued this week. Although there was a broad welcome for the new Cabinet Office strategy document, particularly the passages affirming the support for open source, several commented that there was a need to go further.

• The Cabinet Office seems to have got its PR strategy all wrong. The period leading up to the launch of the iPad would have been a perfect day to have buried bad news #169;Jo Moore but the new ICT strategy seems to be something to celebrate: a move that saves money, cuts carbon emissions, sets out a cloud computing policy and offers more to the open source community should be trumpeted loud and clear on a day free from any other distractions.

• [...]

• So, if we accept that public procurement should be more loaded in favour of open source software, what can be done about it? Should we adopt a policy like Hungary’s where 20 percent of public procurement has to be open source? (although the open source community in Hungary is not entirely convinced it should be a poster-boy for European open source adoption) Should we adopt a policy like the Netherlands where open source has to be adopted, all other factors being equal? Or should it like France where there’s no set policy but open source has taken off to such an extent that 96 percent of public sector bodies are now using it.

• The government’s revamped open source procurement policy will continue to lack teeth unless a single body is made accountable for enforcement, a member of the open source community have warned.

• The measures, which have taken a total of five years to overhaul, are intended to promote open standards and encourage the reuse of software.

Liberation

• As part of its exploitation strategy, Telefónica I+D decided to release as Open Source a number of components developed during the research on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Clouds. These components will be integrated in the Claudia Platform that will offer a Service Management toolkit to deploy and control the scalability of service among a public or private IaaS Cloud. Telefónica I+D chooses MORFEO Project to release the software because it guarantees the access to the results of research beyond the end of the project.

• I’m constantly amazed and heartened by the new domains in which free software is turning up. Here’s a nice one: setiQuest.

Openness

• The Wikimedia Foundation, publisher of Wikipedia and other online sites, has hired open-source veteran Danese Cooper as chief technology officer.

• We are entering an era in which the mark of an open society is the way in which it guarantees access to open knowledge through the internet. It is therefore vital that liberal democracies do not send mixed signals to closed societies that seek to restrict internet freedoms for their citizens. The anti-counterfeiting trade agreement that is being discussed in Mexico might inadvertently do that, so may we have a debate in the House so that hon. Members can test that notion and find out more about our negotiating position?

• We can only promote the commons as a new narrative for the 21st century if they are identified as a common denominator by different social movements and schools of thought. In my point of view, enforcing the commons would be not only possible, but strategically intelligent. Here are 15 reasons why:

• This dissertation is an exploration of alternative visions of social organization beyond the horizon of capitalism.

• A South American group has managed to shrink virtually the full content of Wikipedia onto a CD which can be read with on-the-fly compression.

• The Argentinian Python users’ group, PyAr, aims to distribute the CDPedia CD to remote schools which lack connectivity.

• ‘We are putting into practice the philosophy of open-source software: that given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” So says Zakir Thomas, project director of Open Source Drug Discovery, or OSDD. Established in India, OSDD has established a novel open-source platform for both computational and experimental technologies to make drug discovery for infectious and neglected diseases cost effective and affordable to the people of the developing world.

Programming

• Interaction design and strategy company ZURB focuses on helping businesses create Web sites that get noticed and keep visitors. The company recently launched a tool called Notable, an interactive method for teams to use internally while building a Web site.

• As Ashlee points out, R is being used by academics, university students, and enterprises. If ignored, R could very well have become a threat to the SAS and IBM/SPSS franchises. IBM has a history of utilizing open source for competitive advantage. Instinctively, I thought SPSS decided to support R after being acquired by IBM. I’m encouraged to learn that SPSS made the decision to support R well before the IBM acquisition. It’s also great that SAS has followed suit.

• Qt framework Qt is a C++ framework for high performance cross-platform software development. Qt port (Qt 4.6) is available on Embedded Linux, Windows, WinCE, and Symbian. This means, any application that is developed on Qt for Linux will run on Qt for WinCE.

• The GCC announcement comes a day after an separate announcement by Taylor on the golang-nuts mailing list that the Go licence would now include an explicit patent grant.

Standards/Consortia

• Today, just 11 years after the first release of XML, there are hundreds of XML languages, schema and supporting standards. Because of standards like XML (and HTML and the Unicode), the noosphere has morphed from a philosopher’s foil to a boundless resource to be mined by the great and the humble, the rich and the poor, wherever they may be.

• XML will not be the last standard we will need to fully capture the promise of the noosphere. But it is one of the small set of foundational standards that have set us on our way into a future that could not have been imagined but a short time ago. Except by visionaries, like de Chardin, who were able to look past the horizon of time to imagine a world that it will be our privilege to experience first hand.

Leftovers

• Witnesses could be charged with a misdemeanor for failing to report violent attacks in California under legislation approved by the state Assembly.

• The bill by Democratic Assemblyman Pedro Nava of Santa Barbara follows the October gang rape of a 16-year-old girl outside Richmond High School’s homecoming dance. Investigators believe as many as 10 people participated while another 20 or so watched without calling police.

WWW

• The inside story of how Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt kickstarted a revolution in public data sharing

• About 18 months ago, we published a graph showing that Unicode on the web had just exceeded all other encodings of text on the web. The growth since then has been even more dramatic.

Security

• Labour has introduced 14,300 new offences since taking office in 1997, with Gordon Brown’s administration inventing crimes at a rate of more than one a day.

Environment

• The Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies released the results of a new national survey on public responses to climate change. This report finds that public concern about global warming has dropped sharply since the fall of 2008:

• * The percentage of Americans who think global warming is happening has declined 14 points, to 57 percent.

• * The percentage of Americans who think global warming is caused mostly by human activities has dropped 10 points, to 47 percent.

Finance

• As speculative pressure intensified against Greece in European financial markets on Thursday, senior figures in the Greek government sought to bolster confidence that it will repay its debts on time.

• Rep. Stephen Lynch (D) seen in this video grilling Treasury Sec. Timothy Geithner at the House Oversight AIG hearing today…

• Representative Stephen F. Lynch grilled Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on why regulators propped up AIG in the fall of 2008 when they let Bear Stearns fail earlier that year and why they allowed AIG to fully reimburse business partners, such as Goldman Sachs, with what was essentially taxpayer bailout money.

• Yesterday’s release of detailed information regarding with whom AIG settled in full on credit default swaps (CDS) at the end of 2008 was helpful. We learned a great deal about the precise nature of transactions and the exact composition of counterparties involved.

• When Goldman Sachs (GS) decided to pay out bonuses to the top 30 employees in stock, a big issue was where the strike price–so to speak–will be set. That is, how much stock would it take to get the bonus level. It depends of course on how the calculation is made.

• The Obama administration may have made bankers’ pay a focus of criticism, but its recent initiatives may have actually helped boost the bonuses of firms like Goldman Sachs.

• Joint press conference at 85 Broad Street. Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, Goldman Sachs chairman Lloyd Blankfein, and Senator Chuck Schumer were present.

• Today, Jim Cramer was getting hysterical on his defense of Goldman Sachs. Just like he did last Thursday when the stock was breaking the 160 level on CNBC. Now its close to breaking 150, so he’s upping it a noy=tch.

• Senior executives from J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. also got involved. Rainmaker James B. Lee, who serves as a firm vice chairman, and Jes Staley, who runs the investment bank, each placed calls to senators over the weekend urging support for Mr. Bernanke, according to a person familiar with the situation.

• In the testimony of Timothy Geithner and Henry Paulson about the decision to pay AIG counterparties full value on credit derivative contracts, Congressman Dennis Kucinich’s (D-OH) questioning disclosed that Goldman Sachs had not expected full payment on those contracts from AIG for over a year, and that Goldman Sachs was in fact exposed to up to $2.5 billion AIG losses once the Government stepped in to rescue the ailing company, contrary to Goldman’s public statements. The decision by the New York Fed to pay 100 cents on the dollar gave Goldman Sachs a better deal than it was legally entitled to receive.

• Goldman Sachs Group, one of the biggest recipients of funds from the US bailout of American International Group, was seen by the public as favoured by regulators, according to an internal Federal Reserve Bank of New York e-mail.

• Goldman Sachs Group Inc., one of the biggest recipients of funds from the U.S. bailout of American International Group Inc., was seen by the public as favored by regulators, according to an internal Federal Reserve Bank of New York e-mail.

• Mr. Geithner, who was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York during the A.I.G. bailout, said during the hearing that he was faced with a “stark, tragic” choice when the decision was made to pay off A.I.G.’s counterparties at par instead of at market value, but that it was the right one considering the circumstances at the time.

• New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman lashes out at Goldman Sachs today, writing, “The behavior of some leading Wall Street banks, particularly Goldman Sachs, has been utterly selfish. U.S. taxpayers saved Goldman by saving one of its big counterparties, A.I.G. By any fair calculation, the U.S. Treasury should own a slice of Goldman today.” This is a flawed line of reasoning, for at least four reasons.

• This is truly remarkable. Three amazing things happened in a period of 6 minutes.

• 1. A Democrat is not closing ranks with his fellow Democrat 2. A Democrat from MA recognizes that the money the Federal Government is spending belongs to the American Taxpayer. You know, the American Taxpayer the one who pays the bills a.k.a “those rich people”. He states this repeatedly as well. 3. The Democrat from MA recognizes that the folks at Bear Sterns got a crew cut, but the folks at Goldman Sachs got 100 cents on the dollar. This is typically called “picking winners and losers.” Behavior that any resident of a banana republic would recognize.

• Friedman said New York Fed staff kept sensitive information away from him and other officials with private-sector ties to avoid conflicts. He testified today before a U.S. House committee on what some lawmakers are calling the New York Fed’s “backdoor bailout” of banks, including Goldman Sachs, that did business with American International Group Inc.

• Goldman Sachs’ speculation and profiteering was a major cause of the recession and now their CEO is giving out $16.7 billion in bonuses. They got a bailout, what do all of us get?

• Recall the Rolling Stone description of Goldman Sachs (GS) as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” So is that good thing or a bad thing? For some, this is a virtue, as long as the blood funnel is properly jammed. It’s clear to many that the bank does not randomly throw its funnel around. It’s culture makes it as circumspect as could be, if you ask its supporters.

• Wall Street is cutting back on cash bonuses, which means paper-rich banksters are forced to choose between preschool tuition and new wine cellars until their restricted shares mature. Goldman Sachs is lending a hand by offering mortgages to its staff.

• Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has already taken a beating in the press and more blows are on the way.

• Some of the punishment follows the less than impressive testimony on Wednesday by U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner about his role in rescuing AIG Inc., the failing insurer. The rescue resulted in a multi-billion-dollar payout to Goldman, which held credit default swaps with AIG.

• Unless it dramatically changes the way it does business, Goldman Sachs will lose access to the discount window of the Federal Reserve under the new financial regulations proposed by Barack Obama last week.

• The Volcker plan has not been fully sketched out, and it would on the surface appear to hit Goldman Sachs less than other banks that are more commercial-investment bank hybrids. Goldman Sachs doesn’t have a lot of FDIC-insured accounts, and it could always give up its bank holding company charter.

Censorship/Civil Rights

• The transfer of financial data from Europe to the US ‘to fight terrorism’ may be unjustified, according to EU Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding.

• In a speech marking Data Protection Day, she said that the amount of financial data being transferred to the US had ‘considerable privacy-invading potential’.

• Let me contribute some open source intelligence on the SWIFT case. One of the leading SWIFT related software solutions providers is the German company Tonbeller AG. As we can see the company is specialised on business intelligence, risk analysis and financial profiling solutions. SWIFT itself seems to be their client or certification agency, here is the Partner profile from SWIFT.

• Reding also urged greater privacy controls on behavioral advertising because “[u]sers are not always aware that they are being tracked whenever browsing the Internet.” In her view, data gathered without the users’ informed prior consent should not be used.

• Think that turning off cookies and turning on private browsing makes you invisible on the web? Think again.

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has launched a new web app dubbed Panopticlick that reveals just how scarily easy it is to identify you out of millions of web users.

• [...]

• The purpose of Panopticlick is to show you how much you have in common with other browsers. The more your configuration mirrors everyone else’s, the harder it would be to identify you. The irony is, the nerdier you are — using a unique OS, a less common browser, customizing your browser with plug-ins and other power-user habits — the more identifiable you are.

• The House Democrat heading up the push for legislation that would set new online privacy safeguards that could dramatically reshape Internet marketing said he plans to introduce the bill shortly, with several Republicans likely signed on as co-sponsors.

Internet/Web Abuse/DRM

• MBC, a major Korean broadcasting company, announced (link in Korean) it will make nearly all of its content available to anyone for sharing. This means any individual or company can freely grab MBC’s original content and put it up on their server without any restrictions.

• BitTorrent is popular because it lets anyone distribute large files at low cost. Which kinds of files are available on BitTorrent? Sauhard Sahi, a Princeton senior, decided to find out. Sauhard’s independent work last semester, under my supervision, set out to measure what was available on BitTorrent. This post, summarizing his results, was co-written by Sauhard and me.

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation can’t believe it: the FCC’s network neutrality draft rules, if adopted in their current form, might give Comcast permission to flat-out block BitTorrent—precisely the scenario that led to the rules being drafted.

• What seems clear is that Virgin may have a lengthy legal dispute in its hands if it insists on using DPI. While they have not stated it, Virgin might be taking this decision in order to pre-empt any potential legal threats as content owners insist more and more on making ISPs liable for illegal content shared in their networks. It will be interesting to see if other ISPs follow Virgin’s lead.

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• Charles Dickens was angry at those American publishers in 1842 when he arrived in Montreal following a trip to the United States. Stephen Leacock notes in his book Charles Dickens, His Life and Work, that Dickens wrote home:

• In 1880, the copyright issue was still around. In November, the Literary and Debating Society at the Mechanics’ Institute of Montreal had this item as a subject of debate: “Is the action of the American Publishers respecting copyright likely to advance literature?”

• 3. It seems like a gift economy would be a whole lot easier to operate than a barter economy. Would that advantage be the reason gift economies, rather than barter economies, were so widely adopted historically?

• It would be absurd if the amazing possibilities of digitising museum and art collection holdings were squandered because of a short-sighted and misguided obsession with copyright. We need to nip this in the bud, and get some leading institutions to come out in favour of disseminating their holdings in this way. If we don’t we’ve decades of lock-down in front of us, just when things should be available to all.

• I’ve noted several times an increasingly popular trope of the intellectual monopolists: since counterfeiting is often linked with organised crime, and because counterfeiting and copyright infringement are vaguely similar, it follows as surely as night follows day that copyright infringement is linked with organised crime.

• Perhaps the folks at the IFPI don’t quite understand how the internet works (or perhaps that’s a given) but generally speaking, when you have internet access at your house, you don’t set up separate access accounts for every family member… And if others in the family have access, what’s to stop the “cut off” one from using the other’s access?

• Apparently times are hard over at ECN Magazine. Rather than come up with compelling content to draw people in, its Technical Editor decided to pen the mother of all troll-baiting editorials. NSILMike points us to Jason Lomberg’s recent rant on The Internet Entitlement Mentality, which I think may set a record for repeating pretty much every long-debunked fallacy about online content and business models, as well as how it describes those folks who actually understand basic economics, and how free works as part of an economic ecosystem.

• This week the condemnation of file-sharing “legal blackmail” lawyers ACS:Law has been widespread, with extremely harsh words coming from the country’s House of Lords. Despite this the law firm are unrepentant and say they will persist with their campaign. It is, however, possible to immunize your family from this growing threat.

• Is it reasonable to question how data, as an unproven but potential revenue source for the New York Times, would compare to the direct monetization scheme currently proposed? Of course. But given that one negatively impacts users, and one does not, I know which one I would try first. Not that they need be mutually exclusive, of course, but I would exhaust all of my options before embarking upon a course of action that might materially and permanently impact my relationship with my customer.

• I’ve marked some names in blue, and the reason I’ve marked them in blue is that Sound Exchange is supposed to be responsible to musicians, and the names in blue are remoras. For those who don’t know what a remora is, it’s a fish which attaches itself to larger marine animals, like sharks or whales to get a free ride. It offers nothing back to the animal is rides, nothing at all, and it couldn’t exist without it’s ride.

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