● 07.25.10

● Links 25/7/2010: Catch-up With Last Week’s News

Posted in News Roundup at 10:22 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/Linux

Instructionals

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The Starling NetBook has a starting price of $389. It’s available for pre-order now, and should start shipping the first week of August.

• The Australian Taxation Office is preparing to release a Linux port of its AUSkey authentication software with Ubuntu being the reference distribution for testing and development.

• AUSkey is the federal government’s security key that can be used for single sign-on across a number of online services and is required to use the Department of Treasury’s new Standard Business Reporting (SBR) service.

• Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu project, today announced its support for the Ubuntu Free Culture showcase. The showcase will offer artists, photographers, and musicians of every background the opportunity to have their work ship with Ubuntu 10.10, the popular Linux-based operating system available in October 2010.

• Each time a new Android phone is released, groups of power users will try to improve it by digging into Android source code and by cooking ROMs. The path they choose is not easy: They have to do guesswork or reverse engineering and often they are stopped in their attempts by hardware limitations, closed systems and in some cases by legal matters.

• If you’d rather be coding than reading about coding, this book is for you.

• Raleigh, NC – infoZine – Google’s Android lets you write Java programs that run on any compatible cell phone in the world. The power of Open Source meets the ubiquity of mobile computing—it’s a combination you can’t afford to ignore.

• Prices could drop to an absurd $10-$20 when these hit scale.

Devices/Embedded

• Innovators, engineers, developers and hobbyists can now effortlessly create state-of-the-art products with the flexible, user-friendly HawkBoard, an open source embedded processor development board.

Android

• Mediatek is sewing up the smartphone chipset market with several ‘strategic partnership’ deals. Back in February the company announced an alliance with the Vole to provide smartphone components for Windows based mobiles. Now Mediatek wants a piece of open source action and has buttered up Google by joining the OHA.

• iOS game developer OpenFeint has pronounced of offering an open-source gaming platform to Google’s Android OS.

Tablets

• All of a sudden, tablet computers are all the rage, with Apple’s iPad stoking the fire. But Apple is hardly going to compete unchallenged in the tablet space. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer claims that his company is “hardcore” about tablets, and is working with Asus, Dell, Samsung, Toshiba and Sony before the end of the year. Ballmer demonstrated an HP slate at the Consumer Electronics Show in January as well. One has to wonder if the real opportunity in tablets lies on the open source front, though.

Free Software/Open Source

• Businesses everywhere clearly want to achieve maximum visibility and control over key management information. Whether open source tools can play a special part in building more cost effective IT infrastructures for the acutely ‘cost-aware’ charity sector is open to question.

• Looking to realise efficiencies via this route, Virgin Money Giving will be using the open source Talend Integration Suite with the Jaspersoft reporting tool to restructure and optimise its data for reporting.

• ByWater Solutions, an open source community supporter and official Koha support company, announced today that the Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary, of Allen Park, MI. has partnered with them for the installation and support of the official Koha integrated library system.

• Asterisk is the open source telephony software created by Mark Spencer in the late 90s as an alternative to more expensive proprietary PBX systems. At the time, Spencer needed a telephone system to distribute customer service calls to his Linux engineers and decided to “build” his own PBX rather than pay for a new system.

• Spencer also opted to make Asterisk available as open source software to minimize ongoing development costs (this business model was also consistent with the anti-proprietary software movement of the time). A beautiful example of necessity (+ limited capital funds) being the mother of invention.

• Facebook supports its social network of 500 million users with LAMP software infrastructure. This open source approach, also used by Google, Twitter, Yahoo and others, is a departure from the proprietary products offered by Microsoft, Oracle and IBM.

Reports

• Several major IT vendors, including Dell, HP, Citrix and Rackspace Hosting gathered at OSCON this week to deliver a host of open source-related announcements to the ever growing open-source market.

• More than two-thirds of organizations anticipate increasing their investment in open source technology, according to a recent survey by Accenture. With such an open source expansion, there is a need for effective training solutions that will show organizations how to harness open source technology properly. LevelTen has released a schedule that will offer a fast-paced Acquia training overview for Drupal users.

• Of those surveyed, 40% said they plan on migrating mission-critical software to open source platforms within the next 12 months.

• Open Source Software (OSS) has been a part of the IT market for over two decades. Recently, the commoditization of IT markets, changing attitudes to the production and distribution of intellectual property, and the recession have put the OSS firmly in focus, particularly in the application infrastructure part of the stack.

• Open Source as a concept is solely devoted to finding out the best methods to spread a product in an open manner, where open is to be understood purely within the logic of the market. The hacker attitude, based on play and sharing amongst peers, has been co-opted therein by an approach that is based on the logic of exploitation of time and labor with profit as the driving motive, and not individual and/ or collective welfare.

Events

• At the OSCON 2010 open source convention taking place in Portland, Oregon, O’Reilly Media’s Edd Dumbill has announced the winners of this years O’Reilly Open Source Awards. The awards have been presented each year since 2005 to individuals for their “dedication, innovation, leadership and outstanding contribution to open source”.

• The concept of open source hardware has interested me for some time. There are a number of wildly popular (at least with the geeks) products available for “free”. This particular type of free is akin to freedom and not cost. If you have the materials and tools on hand you could build a Makerbot from scratch or mill a circuit board and solder up your own Arduino compatible board, but even then it isn’t completely free. The freedom comes from sharing the design, making incremental improvements, and combining the community effort with a product to make it better.

Mozilla

• In the days after Microsoft’s Internet Explorer had ground its browser rival Netscape into the digital dust, Baker, who had been working on the open-source Mozilla project within Netscape, was laid off in 2001. She stayed on at the nonprofit Mozilla organization as an unpaid volunteer because she believed its mission was crucial to the Internet’s future.

• Nearly a decade later, Mozilla’s Firefox browser is the window to the Web for nearly a third of the planet’s Internet users. Firefox is even more popular in most of the rest of the world than in the U.S., and in some countries, including Germany, has become the most popular browser. Microsoft Internet Explorer, meanwhile, has slid from a dominating 95 percent of the market to a bare majority of users.

Databases

• credativ, a global open source consulting, service, and support company, announced today introductory and advanced training on PostgreSQL database development and administration which will jump-start cost saving projects.

Oracle

• Jaspersoft, the world’s most widely used business intelligence platform, today released the findings of a global survey of open source community members about the future of Java and MySQL under Oracle (ORCL). Contrary to dark predictions by many in the open source community prior to its acquisition of Sun, Oracle was viewed by most respondents as a better steward of Java and MySQL than Sun. Indeed, most large organizations planned to use more Java than before and most expected to see MySQL innovate and improve faster under Oracle than under Sun.

• There is a generally accepted edict in the technology publicity business that when you run out of news and product announcements, the best idea is to commission a survey for the hell of it. Despite this reality of ‘lies, damn lies and statistics’ – on the face of it, the poll carried out by open source BI player Jaspersoft may have some validity.

• The company polled 130,000 customers and community members and found ‘people’ are planning to do more with MySQL and Java under Oracle than Sun. I’m slightly worried by the fact that the company used the term people rather than programmers (or IT professionals at least), but let’s continue.

• Some 43 percent of respondents said they believed MySQL development would improve under Oracle. Another 35 percent expect it to remain the same, while 22 percent are anticipating the database will suffer under the giant vendor’s wing.

CMS

• WordPress is now seven years old and, with millions of active users, is widely recognised as the world’s most popular blogging platform. The latest release is the open source platform’s 13th major update and is crucial to WordPress’ ambitions to move on from its blog-based origins.

Healthcare

Semi-Open Source

• On the former, OpenGeo offers a whole stack of geospatial data. Those sophisticated enough to be able to plow through the databases and apps and extract the data they need or desire can do so. For others, OpenGeo sells its services in building software based on that data or in supporting that software.

• Though the “open core” business model has come under attack lately, this doesn’t seem to fall under that category.

Government

• The number of schools in Austria that are considering to use or are using open source is increasing, according to school IT administrators and open source developers involved in education.

• For instance, the number of schools using LinuxAdvanced, based on Debian Linux, is ‘continuing to increase slowly’, says Rene Schwarzinger, one of the developers of the Linux distribution tailored for use by schools.

Openness/Sharing

• OpenPlans believes that open source software can provide a business model that will make new digital media companies of the future profitable – and, crucially, provide relevant, quality information directly to the reader, online and in real time.

Open Data

• The basis of reporting an experiment is in part to allow other scientists to falsify the experiment. A scientist should expect others to try to disprove their work – they may not like it when it happens, but it’s a fundamental rule. Therefore a scientist should agree that when reporting an experiment they should make available all data necessary to repeat the experiment.

• Additionally, AOL announced a $1 million fund to support the growth of open-source mapping in the United States.

• It is an open-source platform that aims to provide reliable, real-time information about a crisis as it unfolds, to help people on the ground stay informed and be safe.

Programming

• 2) NetBeans If you’re a Java developer, you’ve at least heard of NetBeans, a free, open-sourced IDE originally created for Java development. With this Java focus, NetBeans — with its just-released 6.9 version — supports the full Java EE 6 specification as well as a basket of Java standards including Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) 3.1, JAX-RS 1.1, JAX-WS 2.2, JAXB 2.2, and Java Persistence JPA 2.0. Aside from Java, NetBeans also supports JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Groovy, C/C++, Scala and Clojure. The IDE includes direct integration of Project Kenai for hosting open-source projects.

Leftovers

Security/Aggression

• Perhaps it was only a matter of time. But wireless security researchers say they have uncovered a vulnerability in the WPA2 security protocol, which is the strongest form of Wi-Fi encryption and authentication currently standardized and available.

• Hundreds of thousands of us have now seen the footage of the newspaper-seller shambling peacefully home from work. We’ve seen how, without warning or provocation, PC Simon Harwood attacked him from behind, hitting him with a baton then shoving him to the ground. We know that the officer had unlawfully removed his badge, and that his face was obscured by a balaclava. We know that, a few minutes afterwards, Ian Tomlinson collapsed and died. We also know that the Metropolitan police lied about his death to the media and to Tomlinson’s family.

Digital Economy (UK)

• This is the second in a series of posts explaining what the Digital Economy Act will do, how it works and how it will affect individuals. It is aimed at providing an objective and descriptive overview of the legislation, rather than opinion or comment on the content. Some parts may be legally technical.

• The FSF is calling on opponents of the law to use the government’s online feedback service to call for it to be repealed

• [...]

• In a statement this week, the FSF called on UK citizens to use the government’s newly created “Your Freedom” site to call for the repeal of the Digital act. The “Your Freedom” site was created by the coalition government as a forum for citizens to nominate laws and regulation which should be scrapped.

Clip of the DayOSCON 2010: Paul Fenwick, “The World’s Worst Inventions” 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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