Open source software has many benefits, but one of the greatest is the ability to not reinvent the wheel. By sharing solutions, the open source community is able to develop great software quickly and effectively. Although open source software usually stands alone, on ideological grounds, you can easily find examples of open source software in a great number of successful proprietary applications, too. Some open source licenses permit use in proprietary software, and some does not. Navigating the plethora of open source and free software licenses can be confusing to developers. Some open source code gets inappropriately bundled into proprietary software intentionally, as a short-cut to success, and some gets bundled in violation of the open source licenses by accident or negligence. It can be expensive and embarrassing to companies when this sort of misappropriation of open source software occurs. Today the Linux Foundation is launching the Open Compliance Program to help avoid just these sorts of problems. → Read More
GitHub, the source code hosting and collaboration service, has hit a major milestone tonight: the site is now hosting one million projects, confirmed Scott Chacon, VP of Research and Development at GitHub. Approximately 60 percent of these projects are full repositories – that is, shared folders with code spread across multiple files – while the remaining 40 percent are “gists”, or short code snippets contained in a single file, like this one, for example.
GitHub has seen rapid growth since it launched in February 2008, all despite the fact that the company has eschewed the traditional venture capital funding route. In an exchange that took place, appropriately enough, via the messaging system built into GitHub, Chacon stated that the company is still “funding free and very profitable” and that they are seeing “incredible growth for GitHub and Git usage in general.” In January 2009 they won a Crunchie for best bootstrapped startup. → Read More
The Linux Foundation ran a t-shirt design contest back in March to kick off the grand opening of the new Linux.com store. More than 100 designs were submitted, and of these six were selected as finalists. Almost eight thousand votes were tallied, and the community-selected winner, with 57% of the votes, is Mr. Said Hassan from the Gaza Strip, who designed “The People’s Product.” Shirts with this winning design are being produced now, and will be available for purchase at the Linux.com store soon-ish. → Read More
Have you launched VLC today? If so then you’ll already know that it has been updated to version 1.1.0. The biggest feature in this version is the addition of GPU decoding for Windows (Vista and 7 only) and Linux users. That is, you can use that fancy GPU of yours to help decode that 1080p MKV you’ve got there, leaving your CPU with enough room to breathe, or whatever. Fair warning: if you’re on Windows, hope you’ve got an nVidia GPU… → Read More
Joilcloud, is a Linux-based operating system for small devices (e.g. netbooks and touchscreens). The new version 1.0 now supports a long list of touchscreen devices right out of the box. Check out the video of it in action showing off the new HTML 5 interface. Looks pretty cool. → Read More
Pixel Qi. If you haven’t heard of them, you will. Everyone will want one of their screens. They offer both a full color LCD screen and an E-Ink screen in one. From what I have seen so far, the technology appears to be very promising. Other companies seem to think so as well, and are lining up to use Pixel Qi screens in their devices → Read More
I’m not sure Google has ever come out and said that they hope the future of computing doesn’t involve Windows. But we all know they’re thinking it. However, while they may think that way, it’s been hard to take that too seriously since most of the computers they do their work on likely run Windows. In the near future though, that may not be the case.
A new report tonight in the Financial Times suggests that Google is steering its employees away from using Microsoft’s dominant operating system in the workplace. In fact, the reports says that, “New hires are now given the option of using Apple’s Mac computers or PCs running the Linux operating system.” And it states that getting a computer running Windows may require permission as high up as Google’s CIO. → Read More
Potentially big news in the world of open source software, friends. Apparently Ubuntu, the most popular Linux distribution, is considering dropping Firefox for Chrome. Well, maybe for Chrome, or maybe for Chromium, the open source project that Chrome is based upon. Therein lies the rub, I do believe. What’s going on is that Ubergizmo, a fine site, hears that Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) is considering adding Chrome (or Chromium—more on that in a second) to Ubuntu Linux Netbook Remix, the next big release of which is due this autumn. What a terribly constructed sentence. Exactly why they’d replace Firefox with Chrome or Chromium isn’t known, but presumably they feel that the new browser on the block performs better on the average netbook than Firefox. No one would be inaccurate in calling Firefox a bit of a memory hog at times. I wouldn’t touch a netbook with a 10-foot pole—netbooks may also be dying, so this may all be moot sooner rather than later—so I have no idea if that’s true or not, that Chrome or Chromium out-performs Firefox on netbooks. I have no horse in that race, as it were. → Read More
So you bought the EasyBloom to take precise soil moisture readings. You have a spreadsheet plotting plant growth over time. But you’re still schelpping out to water the lawn like all your Luddite neighbors. Where’s your sense of pride? You’re a geek! You should be using technology to make your life better. Here, we’ll help get you started with this Instructable on using Linux to water your lawn! → Read More
Remember that 2,300 unit PS3 order that the Air Force put together to build a supercomputing cluster? Well, file this one under “unintended consequences” because when Sony killed the “other OS” option on the PS3 they definitely made things difficult. → Read More
Everyone and their brother can make an Android device, which means that Android is outselling the iPhone. But as some of the comments on John’s post point out, device proliferation leads to consumer angst in trying to find the right device to purchase. The same phenomenon has been happening in the Linux market for ages, with consumers trying to figure out whether they need or want Fedora or Ubuntu or OpenSUSE. Fragmentation is a problem, when you look at things in this context; but is the Linux market really that fragmented? Jim Zemlin, Executive Director at the Linux Foundation doesn’t think so. → Read More
LinuxCon, the big Linux conference put on by the Linux Foundation, is heading to Sao Paulo, Brazil this year. This makes the third location for regional LinuxCon events after Boston, Mass in the U.S.A. an Tokyo, Japan in Asia. Why Brazil? “Brazil leads many other countries in its adoption of Linux and is a growing base of development. The time is right to take the industry’s premier Linux conference to Brazil,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. Full press release inside. → Read More
The Linux Foundation has announced the first round of keynote speakers for LinuxCon, their annual Linux conference. The line up this year includes some interesting folks, including Stormy Peters, executive director of the GNOME Foundation, and Ravi Simhambhatla, CIO for Virgin America. In addition to a “Linux Kernel Roundtable” with notable kernel maintainers there will also be a number of mini-summits with focused discussion on specific aspects of Linux development: file systems, KVM, Xen, power management, and more. → Read More
I get the feeling that there’s a whole team of people at Valve whose job is to just do “like, what if” stuff, or “you know, while we’re at it” stuff. Like, “what if” we just made an awesome comic book to send out gratis to users? Or “what if” we made a Mac version just because, and “while we’re at it” just keep on working and bring that sucker over to Linux as well? → Read More
Looks like Sony now finds itself on the business end of a class-action lawsuit. You’ll recall that a recent PS3 firmware update removed the “Other OS” option from the console, preventing owners from installing Linux (which was one of the selling points when the PS3 first came out in 2006). The removal upset one California gentleman, who filed suit with the note “Sony’s decision to force users to disable the Other OS function was based on its own interest and was made at the expense of its customers.” → Read More
Today marks the start of the fourth annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, which is “an exclusive, invitation-only summit gathering core kernel developers, distribution maintainers, ISVs, end users, system vendors and other community organizations for plenary sessions and workgroup meetings to meet face-to-face to tackle and solve the most pressing issues facing Linux today.” All the names you’d normally expect at a Linux event are going to be there — IBM, Google, Hewlett Packard — along with companies jumping on the MeeGo bandwagon — Nokia, Intel, and more. The agenda lists some interesting topics, but the Summit itself raised a number of questions for me. I exchanged emails with Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, about the Summit, and the state of Linux in general. → Read More
Y’all know that Sony killed Linux support on the PS3 with the latest firmware update (and had previously killed it with the introduction of the PS3 Slim), yes? Yes. A European PS3 owner has received a £84.00 (around $130) rebate from Amazon for removing support for the free and open source operating system. Win~! → Read More
It’s no secret that I’m a big Free Software fan. It’s no secret that IBM is a giant company with more money than I can possibly imagine. So I was pretty happy in 2005 when IBM, in an obvious PR stunt to get buddy-buddy with the open source community, made its Statement of Non-Assertion of Named Patents Against OSS, ostensibly saying that it would permit open source projects to use any of the items covered by those patents without risk of penalty or lawsuit. Yay! Finally, a BigCo getting it and doing the right thing! But five years is a long time, people come and go, and promises can be forgotten. IBM has lately threatened to sue someone for infringement of a lot of IBM patents, including at least two that were included in the Non-Assertion statement. → Read More
It was only last week, on the 1st, when Sony announced it’d be removing the Install Other OS option from the PS3 — an option already missing on the PS3 Slim. Predictably, there was outrage, and now, a hack.
Renowned hackster Geohot has shown that by a simple restore trick, you can get 3.21 to let you install another OS — but if you’ve already updated and lost the ability, there’s nothing you can do at the moment. → Read More
