● 07.24.10

● Links 24/7/2010: More Free Software News, Misc. Topics

Posted in Free/Libre Software, News Roundup at 12:01 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsFree Software/Open Source

• Although GIMP is often compared to Adobe Photoshop, the people in charge of the project do not consider their graphic manipulation tool to be a replacement for Photoshop. There is a great deal of controversy about whether or not the GIMP is a truly professional-quality image manipulation tool, at or exceeding the quality level of Photoshop. It is generally held that it is not, although it is usually recognized as the best free alternative to Photoshop, which is usually considered to be the ultimate professional tool of the trade.

• Available immediately for download under the Open Source GPL (GNU General Public License) version 2, Suricata includes new features that will enable it to identify and prevent more of the pressing security concerns faced by organizations.

• Conclusions: MZmine 2 is freely available under a GNU GPL license and can be obtained from the project website at: http://mzmine.sourceforge.net/. The current version of MZmine 2 is suitable for processing large batches of data and has been applied to both targeted and non-targeted metabolomic analyses.

Events

• OSCON is worth attending, or at least watching from a distance, if for no other reason than it gives a pretty clear picture of what the developer community and industry around open source is thinking about. To sum up OSCON 2010 in three words, it’s community, cash, and clouds.

Mozilla

• Firefox Tab Candy is a new tab management feature for Firefox that organizes tabs into groups to help you keep your tabs grouped by task. Not only does it offer incredibly handy features, but it looks beautiful.

SaaS

• The new OpenStack project will power NASA’s own Nebula cloud and puts new pressure on Eucalyptus, as well as Amazon’s EC2 and the whole Hadoop ecosystem. The system is being released under an Apache 2 license.

• Red Hat has a big portfolio of cloud computing tools, as our Dan Kusnetzky is quick to note, but it lacks the enterprise credibility of an IBM or Microsoft.

• Global sales of software-as-a-service (SaaS) in the enterprise application segment will jump more than 14 percent to $8.5 billion this year when compared with the $7.5 billion generated in 2009, a spike attributed largely to the business community’s growing endorsement of cloud computing, according to data compiled by researcher Gartner Inc.

Oracle/Sun

• As Oracle continues to consolidate the assets of Sun Microsystems, questions about which technologies will go and which ones will stay are still being asked. One such technology that could be at risk is the open source NetBeans IDE , which competes against the Eclipse IDE and its ecosystem, which Oracle also supports.

• Discussing the announcement, ForgeRock chief strategy officer and former Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems Simon Phipps said, “This is an important milestone for the OpenAM community”, adding that, “This achievement marks the first fully community-sourced release of OpenAM. We’re very pleased that users of OpenSSO Enterprise 8 can easily and freely migrate to OpenAM 9.5 now that the updates have been made.”

CMS

• This leaves Drupal and Acquia, the company Buytaert founded to offer Drupal support, caught between the Moon and New York City. WordPress is hammering it in the mass market, among people who just want to build blog sites, and Acquia’s enterprise footprint remains minimal.

Project Releases

• The Blender Foundation and online developer community is proud to present Blender 2.53 Beta. This release is the first official beta release of the Blender 2.5 series, representing the culmination of many years of redesign and development work.

Licensing

• From the ‘Open Source Licensing” files:

• Google’s open source programs manager Chris DiBona (pic left) took the stage at OSCON today and he had some interesting things to say, about licensing.

• I’ve heard DiBona speak on open source licensing several times over the years. This time his talk wasn’t about licensing specifics, but rather about adoption.

• According to data presented by DiBona, the GPLv3 license now represents more than half of the GPL licensed code that Google hosts on its Google Code site.

Openness/Sharing

• It doesn’t matter if you’re new to open source or a long-time user, there is always more to learn about. We scoured the Web for the best open source books. All of these are free books that can be downloaded and shared.

• Online video service Vimeo started allowing its users to release videos under a Creative Commons licence. The company says that the feature was introduced because a number of users specifically asked for it. The settings dialogue of each video now contains an added “Licence” section in which users can choose from one of six Creative Commons licences. This allows users to determine the sharing conditions for their videos. While searching specifically for videos released under CC licences is not yet possible, Vimeo says it’s working to provide this functionality.

Programming

• I owe a whole lot to Perl. So does the practice of computing in general, and the construction of the Web in particular. Perl’s situation is not terribly happy; I wouldn’t go so far as to say “desperate”, but certainly these are not its glory days.

Standards/Consortia

• Did you know that nearly every video produced for Web viewing has been, at one point or another, in MPEG format no matter in what format the video is ultimately saved?

• According to Chris “Monty” Montgomery, nearly every consumer device outputs video in MPEG format. Which means that every software video decoder has to have MPEG-licensed technology in order to process/edit video.

• [...]

• Which circles us back to where Montgomery is today: preparing that army of mages. Looking forward to a landscape where MPEG-LA is not quite so powerful, Montgomery anticipates that video, now that it’s no longer as expensive, could become a real source of innovation in the FOSS community.

Leftovers

• It seems like every few days or so we’re seeing lawsuits attempting to stretch the hot news doctrine further and further. News organizations who support hot news as a concept really have no idea what sort of can of worms they’ve opened up. Since the infamous (and ongoing) theflyonthewall case, we’re seeing hot news pop up in all sorts of weird places. The latest, as sent over by Eric Goldman, is that Costco is being sued by “Banxcorp” for hot news violations (along with copyright violations and a bunch of other things) for republishing Banxcorp’s data showing national average money market and CD rates.

• One problem with positing that a high-end Unix system will be used for a single transaction-processing application is that it leads to some pretty silly results. Take the leading TPC-C result on the Transaction Processing Council’s Web site, for example. Consider what this 6 million transactions-per-minute figure means in the context of the TPC-C benchmark, a widely used metric for comparing system performance.

Science

• Somewhere in the Milky Way, astronomers have found a world that sports crucial ingredients for life. When they trained a high-resolution spectrograph on starlight reflected from the planet’s moon, they picked up traces of ozone, oxygen, sodium, and nitrogen. Alas, the planet is Earth. But the researchers say a similar technique could be used to find signatures of life on planets orbiting other stars.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Corporate web filters at organisations like Shell and the National Australia Bank (NAB) are blocking web access to the AEC-registered Australian Sex Party.

• The party is contesting the August 21 Federal Election with seven candidates in Victoria, including convenor Fiona Patten, who challenges Communications Minister Stephen Conroy.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• “The internet has not become the great leveller that it was once thought it could be,” according to Harvard academic Ethan Zuckerman.

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