Posts Tagged ‘open source/news’

Microsoft’s pseudo sudo patent doesn’t really cover sudo

// November 16th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

Righteous indignation erupted on the Internet last week following reports that Microsoft had patented sudo, a traditional command-line tool that is widely used on Linux and some UNIX platforms for selective privilege escalation. Some enthusiastic patent reform advocates predictably held up the patent as an example of the problems that afflict the patent system. The inherent broadness and ambiguity of software patents is arguably a debilitating problem for the software industry and a matter that calls for evaluation of potential reforms, but we’re not so sure that the Microsoft patent in question is as egregious as the critics claim. Granting a patent on the underlying concept of sudo to Microsoft over two decades after the tool was invented by open source developers would indeed be foolish, but that is not at all what happened. A look beyond the short summary of the patent filing and into the body of the patent’s actual claims reveals that Microsoft’s “invention” is really quite different from the sudo command-line tool. It might, however, cover some technologies that have more recently arrived on the Linux desktop.

Test, package .NET apps for Linux with Visual Studio add-in

// November 11th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

Linux vendor Novell is offering a new commercial add-in for Visual Studio that will allow software developers to test and package .NET applications for Linux without having to leave their Windows development environment. The new tools could potentially help boost the availability of third-party software for Linux. Novell’s Mono project, an open source implementation of the .NET runtime, makes it possible to run quite a bit of .NET software on the Linux platform. It opens up the door for .NET shops to expand their audience by making their programs available for deployment on Linux, but the additional effort involved in testing and packaging is an impediment in some cases. Novell’s new Mono Tools for Visual Studio (MonoVS) add-in will help to lower the barriers and simplify the process.

Yes Men punk US Chamber of Commerce on climate change, sued

// November 11th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

In late October, a troupe of comedic pranksters called the Yes Men took on the United States Chamber of Commerce over its stance on climate change via a parody that was hard to distinguish from the real deal: a fake press conference, press releases, and a modified version of the Chamber’s own website, hosted at a similar address. The Chamber responded by getting the Yes Men’s ISP to pull the site, which drew the Electronic Frontier Foundation into the fight. Now, it looks like all these parties may be meeting in court, as the Chamber has filed a suit alleging that the parody crossed the line into fraud. We say “may” because the Chamber appears to be having a difficult time serving the pranksters. The events started in April, when the Chamber triggered a series of events that could easily be considered self-parody. Its leadership filed a petition with the EPA, asking that the evidence for climate change be subjected to public hearings. After that petition was widely ignored, they upped the ante, calling for a modern equivalent of the Scopes Monkey Trial, which questioned the science behind evolution.

Go: new open source programming language from Google

// November 10th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

Every computer programmer has a copious pile of opinions about how their programming language of choice could be improved. Who doesn’t want more syntactic sugar, better runtime performance, and faster compilation? That’s one of the reasons why there are so many programming languages. Creating a compiler is practically a rite of passage for computer science students, and half of the top vendors in the software industry eventually make their own programming language or extend an existing one to the point where it’s marginally recognizable. Despite the large amount of enthusiasm for language design, modern mainstream programming languages don’t fall far from the C tree. The best that Microsoft, Sun, and Apple have to offer are just variations on that theme, with the addition of predictable object models and conveniences like garbage collection. The slim minority of language geeks who have rebelled against bracist tyranny and stumbled over to innovative languages like Haskell and Erlang are doomed to toil in relative obscurity.

GNOME roadmap updated, version 3 pushed back to late 2010

// November 10th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

The GNOME desktop environment is undergoing a significant transformation. The developers behind the open source project are working on version 3.0, the first major overhaul since 2002. The GNOME release team has updated the roadmap and has set September 2010 as the target for the launch of GNOME 3.0. The release team has also announced the new module decisions for the upcoming 2.30 release, which is scheduled for April. The future of GNOME is a matter that has been discussed extensively within the Linux community. Some of the most important factors that have contributed to GNOME’s popularity among commercial Linux distributors are its incremental development model and consistent release cycle. A major overhaul, and the potential disruption that it could bring, are not entirely consistent with the GNOME philosophy. This made the prospect of a 3.0 release somewhat contentious among GNOME users and developers.

Bot herders turn to the cloud for command-and-control

// November 10th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

On Monday, the security blog at Arbor Networks reported finding a bit of malware that checked in with a remote account to download some URLs. On its own, this is hardly a newsworthy event; botnets have used all sorts of communications protocols to receive updated code and information. What makes this discovery distinct is that the code that was feeding URLs to the botnet was running on Google’s AppEngine platform. These days, malware itself tends to act a bit like a grid computing service. The actual software that compromises a user’s system tends to be fairly generic, hiding its presence and spreading where possible, but not actually doing much until activated. Once activated, the compromised machines use whatever resources are at their disposal to complete whatever task they’re ordered to do. Those orders, which are spread through just about every Internet protocol imaginable—from HTTP to IRC—provide things like the body of a message to spam or a series of addresses to target with a denial of service attack.

SFLC tech director finds one new GPL violator every day

// November 9th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

Bradley Kuhn, the technical director of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), has published a helpful set of guidelines about the most productive way to respond to a suspected violation of GNU’s General Public License (GPL). The guidelines caution against jumping to conclusions and encourages free software enthusiasts to give violators the benefit of the doubt. GPL violations are extremely common, he says, but most of them are accidental. The SFLC, which was founded in 2005 with the aim of providing legal support for the free and open source software development community, has played a key role in resolving numerous GPL enforcement conflicts. Its approach to GPL enforcement is typically instructive and non-confrontational. Lawsuits are used as a last resort and have consistently resulted in out-of-court settlements . The organization is perhaps best known for litigating a series of high-profile GPL violation cases on behalf of the developers of the open source BusyBox embedded tools.

Firefox turns five: half a decade of Web liberation

// November 9th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

Five years ago today, Mozilla announced the official release of Firefox 1.0. The open source Web browser has come a very long way since then and has achieved a level of popularity that few would have imagined possible. The success of Firefox and Mozilla’s unwavering commitment to open Web standards has helped to usher in a new era of vibrance and diversity in the browser market. To commemorate Firefox’s fifth anniversary, we are going to take you back in time for a look at some of our classic coverage of the popular browser. Firefox emerged as an effort to replace the Mozilla Suite’s browser with a lighter alternative based on the same underlying technology. The developers originally called their creation Phoenix, an allusion to their mission of bringing about a Mozilla rebirth. The earliest Phoenix binaries were released to the public in 2002 and began to attract serious attention over the course of the following year.

Google opens up its JavaScript development toolbox to all

// November 6th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

Google is providing the web development community with an intriguing glimpse under the hood at some of the fundamental building blocks of the company’s most popular web applications. The search giant has opened the source code of its comprehensive JavaScript library collection and is making it available to third-party developers for widespread adoption. Google also opened the source code of its own JavaScript compression tools. The library, called Closure, includes an extraordinarily diverse assortment of capabilities with functionality ranging from JSON serialization to standard user interface widgets. All of the features are cross-browser compatible and can be readily adopted without marginalizing any users. The library consists primarily of helper functions and user interface widgets, many of which are recognizable from popular Google applications.

Red Hat takes on VMware with server virtualization solution

// November 4th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

Red Hat expanded its virtualization product portfolio this week with the launch of its Enterprise Virtualization for Servers platform. The company touts it as an end-to-end solution which includes management tools and a bare-metal standalone hypervisor that can run both Windows and Linux guest operating systems. Red Hat aimed to become a major player in the virtualization market last year when it acquired Qumranet , the company behind the Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM). Following the acquisition, Red Hat began transitioning its virtualization strategy towards KVM and away from Citrix’s Xen. KVM has strong backing from the upstream Linux kernel development community, making it a natural choice for Red Hat. The company has invested considerable resources to boost KVM’s capabilities and has built robust management tools around the technology. KVM was practically the centerpiece in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.4, which was officially released in September.

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