August
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Aug 30, 2007
China's Open Source Software Contest announces winners
It started when a friend organized a meeting in her Beijing offices the last days of January with the conference hosts for the upcoming 2007 Software Innovation Summit. She had invited the appropriate people from both CoSoft (a government funded organization) and CIO Insight (a Ziff-Davis publication). After a long discussion in Chinese, she turned to me, "So here's the deal ...." If I could find a small amount of external sponsorship, they would allow me to organize the speaking agenda for the Open Source Software Forum part of the Summit — a one day affair. read more...
SimpleCenter hopes open source community will give back
Universal Electronics Inc. (UEI), best known for its line of universal remote controls, also sells SimpleCenter, an all-in-one application for Windows PCs that ties together in a single interface all of a user's multimedia devices and software. It streamlines the management of photos, music, and movies, and even acts as a Universal Plug and Play server so you can stream your files to any device on your home network, while the software converts files to the proper format for the device. Recently, UEI released the basic version of SimpleCenter under the terms of the GNU General Public License in order to take advantage of the community's ability to make the software better faster than the company can do it alone. read more...
Microsoft adds open-source twist to Silverlight
San Francisco (IDGNS) - Microsoft on Monday broadened the developer base and programming capabilities for Silverlight by adding dynamic language support to an alpha version of the browser plug-in technology. The support includes a new runtime for the .Net framework, the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR), and an implementation of the popular Python programming language, called IronPython. Microsoft also made the source code for these new technologies available through the company's most open source-code license, the Microsoft Permissive License. This allows developers and users to view, modify, and redistribute source code for either commercial or non-commercial purposes, and also to charge a license fee for any code they've added to the software. read more...
Microsoft Goes Open Source?
Microsoft is expected to show a new friendliness to the open-source community by unveiling plans to release the source code to a part of its Silverlight technology at MIX 07 next week, according to sources familiar with the company's plans. Sources said Microsoft will also release a beta of Silverlight, a recently unveiled browser plug-in that allows Web content providers to offer a rich video and interactive media experience from directly within Web sites. The technology leverages Vista's new graphics framework, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and Microsoft is promoting it as a direct competitor to Adobe Systems' Flash tool and delivery mechanism for rich multimedia content on the Web. Specifics on which aspect of Silverlight will be open-sourced were not available, and Microsoft's public relations firm declined to comment Friday. read more...
Adobe Releasing Flex as Open Source
With Moxie, Adobe is Flex-ing a key strategy against Microsoft's Silverlight -- going open source. On Thursday, the graphics and multimedia powerhouse announced that the source code for its Flex Web development framework would be released as open source in the second half of this year with the final release of Flex's new version, called Moxie. The move is widely seen as a counterstrike to Microsoft's release of Silverlight, a browser plug-in that is being positioned, at least in part, as a next-generation alternative to Adobe's ubiquitous Flash. Standards vs. Proprietary Jeffrey Hammond, an analyst with industry research firm Forrester, said he sees the strategy as a "good move" by Adobe because it takes its next-generation framework "one more step towards enlisting the support of the standards-based crowd." read more...
New PCLinuxOS magazine hits Web
Issue 9 of the community-driven PCLinuxOS Magazine has just hit the virtual news stands. The May 2007 edition of the magazine weighs in at a slim 1.9MB PDF download which is not bad for a 41-page publication. Issue 9 includes: KDE User Guide Part 2, Scroogle and Konqueror Integration, Top Ten Reasons for Using Linux, Linux in Education, Updating PCLinuxOS to 2007, Using Settings from a Previous Linux Install among others. The magazine is released under a Creative Commons Atribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 licence and can be downloaded from http://mag.mypclinuxos.com/. read more...
DE: Open Source companies protest Parliament's Exchange pilot
The IT department is manipulating a parliamentarian commission on IT strategy, alledges Linux Verband, representing more than 80 companies delivering Open Source IT services, including SAP, Hewlett Packard and Oracle. "We know there is pilot project, but there has not been a public tender", Elmar Geese, chairman of the Open Source association said in a statement. According to the German IT news service Heise, the pilot project is testing functionalities that can only be fully delivered by Microsoft's web browser Explorer. "This is interesting, since the German parliament so far recommends the Open Source Mozilla web browser, for security reasons", Heise quotes the Open Source businesses association. A Parliament's spokesperson quoted Tuesday by Heise, denied that the parliament was moving away from its earlier Open Source strategy. He confirmed the limited pilot project will be using Microsoft Exchange, and said the proper procedures had been followed. The licence for the software was available because of an existing license deal with the American software company. read more...
FR: Candidate Royal: Open Source vital for public IT
The use of Open Source software and open standards is vital for public IT, says Royal Ségolène, French presidential candidate of the Socialist Party. "Publicly financed IT should in general be free. That means these applications should use formats that are really open, without limitation for developers or users. This is essential to ensure the preservation of the data of public administrations, communities and services and to preserve free competition on the software market." Ségolène's position on Open Source, open standards and software patents was published yesterday by April, an association that wants to increase political interests in these issues. April posted a list of questions to the candidates on a special website, www.candidats.fr, in February. Ségolène is one of the main three French presidential candidates. Her competitors, François Bayrou of the Union for French Democracy and Nicolas Sarkozy, of the Union for a Popular Movement, have so far not responded to the call by April. read more...
ES: Congress commission forces public IT to accept Open Source
A commission in the Spanish parliament, dealing with issues of public administration, last Friday approved a law that grants Spanish citizens the right to use software of their own choice when they communicate electronically with the government. The law needs approval from the senate. A majority of political parties in the commission agreed with the proposed 'Law regulating Electronic Access by Citizens to the Public Administration', Ley para el Acceso Electrónico de los Ciudadanos a las Administraciones Públicas, or Laecap. In a news article on the website of Computing Spain, Lourdes Muñoz, socialist deputy for Barcelona, explained that Laecap helps to avoid monopolies by IT companies. "We are not telling users what applications to use." read more...
BE: federal public administrators start Open Source user group
Twenty five Belgian federal public administrators last month started an Open Source user group. The group, called 'FedLug' is meant to discuss and stimulate the use of this type of software. FedLug's next meeting will be held at noon this Friday in Brussels. The user group was formally started last month, during Fosdem (Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting). A website and mailing list have just been created. The group next want to organise regular meetings, install parties, seminars and trainings on Open Source software. FedLug is not supported or formally endorsed by the Belgian government. "We are all doing this on a strictly personal basis", explains one of the initiators, Oliver Schneider. read more...
Open source court ruling impacts debated
San Francisco (InfoWorld) - A recent federal court ruling pertaining to open-source software in model railroads could derail enforcement of open-source licenses altogether, according to Mark Radcliffe, general counsel for the Open Source Initiative. If allowed to stand, the decision could withhold an important and expected remedy from open-source licensors, that being the ability to get an injunction against license violations, Radcliffe said. But the case does not necessarily set a precedent for other judges to follow, countered Eben Moglen, founding director of the Software Freedom Law Center. read more...
