Technology News: Open Source

Is Software Installation on Linux 'Broken'?

Thursday - July 2, 2009

You know a controversy is a big one when none other than RMS weighs in with his opinion, and sure enough, that's what happened in the Mono debate late last week. "Debian's decision to include Mono in the default installation, for the sake of Tomboy which is an application written in C#, leads the community in a risky direction," RMS wrote on the Free Software Foundation's site. Of course, rather than settling the debate, Stallman's proclamation only fanned the flames higher, resulting in a raging inferno. [More...]

Firefox 3.5 Streaks Onto the Web

Tuesday - June 30, 2009

Mozilla has released Firefox 3.5, the latest edition of its open source browser, one year after its release of Firefox 3. The update went through four betas, incorporating JavaScript fine-tuning and other improvements, resulting in the fastest version yet, according to Mozilla. [More...]

ERP Should Pay for Itself in a Year: Q&A With xTuple CEO Ned Lilly

Monday - June 29, 2009

xTuple is an open source ERP provider, and CEO Ned Lilly says there are few fellow travelers on his company's path. In this tanking economy, the company has been leveraging both its open source bona fides and the fundamental functionality that is inherent in an ERP system to gain market share. [More...]

Nvidia to Android: We're Just Not That Into You

Thursday - June 25, 2009

Well, the proverbial ink hadn't even dried on our recent column about smartbooks and ARM when Nvidia came around and doused the excitement with a bucket of ice water. The prospect of Linux in general or Android in particular running on an ARM smartbook has had many in the blogosphere salivating, but Nvidia's Mike Rayfield recently said his company prefers Microsoft's Windows CE over Android. [More...]

Flash to Brighten Most Smartphones - iPhone, BlackBerry to Stay Dim

Tuesday - June 23, 2009

With the news that its omnipresent-on-the-desktop Flash player will be available in more mobile forms before the end of the year, Adobe is finally following through on its goal of joining the smartphone party -- but the two biggest names in that market are still missing from the invitation list. [More...]

Iran, Technology and Truth: Do You Care If Your Information Is False?

Monday - June 22, 2009

If you look at how people flock to Web sites that are obviously on the extreme right or left of an issue, or if you watch debates on abortion or gay marriage -- or even whether the sitting president has a clue -- don't you often get the sense that for many, believing they are right and putting down those who disagree is more important than actually being right? [More...]

Is Linux Suffering From Mono?

Monday - June 22, 2009

In the general population, "Mono" may be best known for infecting teenagers with the "kissing disease." On the Linux blogs, it's recently caused a different kind of anguish as geeks far and wide have debated whether it's infected Linux too. It's a different Mono, of course, but its effects -- or, at least, the discussion of them -- have been no less agonizing. [More...]

Smartbooks: Embracing Linux With Open ARMs

Thursday - June 18, 2009

Asus notwithstanding, netbooks have received a great deal of attention in the Linux community for their role in gaining wider acceptance for our favorite operating system. So, when Freescale and Qualcomm recently debuted a line of what they call "smartbooks" at Computex -- featuring ARM processors and a low price point -- the blogosphere had no choice but to sit up and take notice. [More...]

EnterpriseDB Smooths Way for Oracle App Migration

Tuesday - June 16, 2009

EnterpriseDB, which has commercialized the PostgreSQL open source database, announced on Tuesday the fifth version of its Postgres Plus Advanced Server. This latest version of EnterpriseDB's relational database management system is designed to let users easily migrate more Oracle applications in order to cut costs. [More...]

Trolls and Astroturfers and Shills, Oh My!

Monday - June 15, 2009

There has been plenty of news and excitement on the Linux blogs in recent days, including the release of Linux kernel 2.6.30 and word that Linux will be the first OS to support USB 3.0. Woohoo! In an ordinary week, such news would be sure to put a smile on any geek's face. [More...]

Yahoo's Hadoop to Run Free in the Wild

Friday - June 12, 2009

Although it's struggling against both giant rivals like Google and smaller ones like Microsoft's new search venture Bing, Yahoo is handing over the source code for its version of Hadoop to the community. Hadoop, a top-level Apache project, is an open source distributed file system and parallel execution environment that lets its users process massive amounts of data. [More...]

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