News

When I read an article like this on CNet, I wonder how people retain their credibility as editors. Let's take a quote...

Quote

The proprietary world feels the need to rebuild everyone else's software in order to create walled-garden ecosystems. Unfortunately, the open-source world builds even more variants of the same products, though for different reasons.

Are we the world's least efficient market? Imagine what would happen if we could all pull behind a few credible alternatives, rather than inventing 585 of them?

The whole point of being free and open source is that you give the freedom to allow anyone to use the code in the best way for them. If a million companies use a program and each company modifies it slightly for their internal use, what's the problem? That the huge benefit of open source over proprietary software. Sticking to one branch only doesn't work for open source software... Remember XFree86? Where is that now that they changed their license? Forking is a matter of fact and is encourage when stuff like that happens.

I heard that Microsoft will be pushing their products toward interoperability in the marketplace. This is probably because they feel the pressure of open source projects that are gaining steam on Microsoft's core products. Most open source projects are also free software. Not only that, but they will pledge not to sue any open source project that hooks into Microsoft's products.

I would like to caution everyone. A pledge doesn't mean squat. Hopefully this will mean that projects such as NTFS-3G and Samba will be a large boost.

That's what is being said by one of Intel's open source guys at an open source conference. Linux alone will see huge increases in installs. This is really thanks to Ubuntu. Power users may be fighting it, but the easier the distro is to use (AND INSTALL SOFTWARE), the more pervasive Linux will get.

Quote

However, he also warned that the prospect of moving from being Windows-centric to supporting over 200 flavours of Linux could sound unnecessarily daunting. Therefore, educating vendors, particularly smaller manufacturers, about what’s actually involved in going open source is essential to combating misunderstandings. "They don’t understand that once you’re in the upstream kernel you’re ok," he said. Hohndel pointed out that companies were also often misinformed about the legal risks of going open source, or were afraid of damaging their reputation. Another concern cited by hardware companies was a fear that their products would be damaged.

I wonder who is spreading all the FUD...?

While talking about backups is one thing, doing it is another. BackupPC is a program that runs on a server to automatically backup your PCs. It is very useful and once setup, very powerful.Next Page »

So you want to dabble in Open Source but you don't know where to start. You have programs that you use daily and don't know what the equivalent ones are in Open Source. This article is your guide.Next Page »

Are you tired of the Windows products you use? If only there were a free, easy alternative, you say? There is! Join us as we touch the tip of free and open software.Next Page »

It seems that Microsoft will try to extort money (or FUD, at least) from Open Source companies and such by saying that many projects infringe on its patents. The funny thing is that Microsoft will not release which patents are being infringed on... This leads to a baseless argument since the Open Source community cannot defend itself.

Quote

When Novell and Microsoft announced their patent deal, the Free Software Foundation was quick to say it would move to prohibit such arrangements in a future version of the General Public License (GPL), the most widely used open-source license. The most recent draft seeks to prohibit all future deals of that nature and potentially past ones, too. The timing of Microsoft's pronouncement is telling, Radcliffe said, "particularly when you think that GPL version 3 is still in draft. I don't think that is a coincidence," he said.

Free as in beer or free as in speech? Why does everything need to be so hard!? Let ASE Labs explain the difference of the two terms in a segment from our very own free::zombie.Next Page »

The virtualization software is not up to par with Red Hat in regards to stability. Red Hat will be building Xen into a product in the coming months. Open source is great.

Quote

Taking the customer viewpoint, he said: "If the National Australia Bank wants to implement virtualization and it's not stable, you can imagine what they will tell us." Instead of trying to play catch-up with rival Novell and simply shipping Xen as included software with its operating system, Red Hat will attempt to build a full virtualization platform around the product in the next version of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux server software, due to be released in December.