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NewsVac: News from around the Web
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Countdown for IBM Project Zero
9 months ago
"Giver turns taker: Over the years, Microsoft's taken a lot of flack for attempting to undermine open source. ... This year, though, will see IBM release the fruits of a project using a pseudo open source development method that has garnered criticism and could generate further ill will in 2008." -
Is commercial open source really open?
9 months, 3 weeks ago
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Microsoft's quest for shared-source approval
1 year ago
If Microsoft, or any other company, wants to become a member of the free and open source software community it should be asked to adopt an existing licence, or to help in the long term process of rationalising the existing licences, and play with the community rather than against it. Tiemann has already hinted that Microsoft's primary offering, the Microsoft Permissive Licence (MPL), will fail the procedure because it is not "permissive" as the term is understood by the open source community, and because "the specific innovation of maximum incompatibility of the MPL is not what we were looking for, so I think what we have is a submission that has two fairly major strikes against it." -
Why Microsoft vs Mankind still matters
1 year ago
The Penguin is missing, while Apple's gone to Hollywood."Comment: For all but three of the past 17 years, Microsoft has been involved in antitrust litigation with government agencies. That's enough to wear anyone down. But as Europe's highest appeals court delivered its judgement on Monday, I did notice some ennui -- not from dogged old hacks, but from a new generation of pundits .... "
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Vista a dud, says Acer's Lanci
1 year, 2 months ago
THE head of PC maker Acer, Gianfranco Lanci, has hit out at Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system, saying that the "entire industry" was disappointed by it. -
Microsoft Office Open XML gets US knockback
1 year, 2 months ago
An open office document format developed by Microsoft has received a major setback in achieving a certification which would make it more widely accepted as a true technology standard. -
How Microsoft helps open source
1 year, 3 months ago
One of our newest C|Net bloggers, Matt Asay, is a player. That is, he makes his living as vice president for business development at Alfresco Software, an open source content management company. -
After ten years: what is open source?
1 year, 3 months ago
"In our earlier article, 'Facts and Friction on Open Source and Free Software' we have explained where 'Open Source' is coming from and what is its relation to Free Software and the Free Software Foundation that represents it..."
Linux.com : Closed Source
Picasa 3 for Linux: A video tour
Google's Picasa is all about photos -- it helps you instantly find, edit, and share all the pictures on your computer. Although it isn't released as open source it is free to download and use from Google's Web site. The new version 3, which is currently in beta, is available for Windows as well as Linux.
IBM Lotus Symphony turns old OOo code into enterprise Judas goat
Oracle and now IBM seem to have strange ideas about creating a business around open source software for the enterprise. First it was Oracle's Unbreakable Linux program, derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux sans its proprietary bits and supported for peanuts to beat RHEL and similar community projects such as CentOS. Now it's IBM, which has taken old OpenOffice.org code under the now-retired Sun Industry Standards Source License and released it as a proprietary closed source freeware office suite. The first stable release of IBM Lotus Symphony, released last week, has no obvious advantages over OpenOffice.org. The suite is targeted at enterprise customers, at the expense of free and open source alternatives.
Software patents underlie a novel open source business model (video)
"Software patents are evil." Ask almost any free or open source software advocate, and they'll tell you that software patents kill creativity and keep computer science from advancing as rapidly as it would if everyone shared their basic work with everyone else, unencumbered by patents or other restrictions. But computer science professor Fred Popowich of Simon Fraser University says this is not necessarily true. So does attorney Larry Rosen, who spent many years as legal counsel for the Open Source Initiative starting (literally) before it had a name.
LinMin announces proprietary provisioning for FOSS networks
Developing a business model around free and open source software (FOSS) can be a delicate balancing game. Many companies in this space opt for models in which revenue comes from sources such as services, rather than the software itself. However, the recently announced LinMin is taking a different approach with a new appliance and imaging appliance: Although it runs and works on FOSS, LinMin's software is proprietary. The company's reasons for this practice raise several core issues about the relationship between FOSS and proprietary software on one hand and business priorities on the other.
