What is Open Source? It is a simple enough question, yet the answer has become so obscure that it is anything but simple. The phrase is undisputedly at the core of what drives the Linux community even while it eludes nearly everyone as to what its exact definition is.
Those of you who regularly visit Open for Business, perhaps since its founding days at the LX-Talk mailing list last September, may have noticed some changes lately. While many of these changes are slight, we hope the end result will be to help you not only keep informed on the latest open source news, but to do so more efficiently.
RedHat, Inc., the leading Linux vendor, announced the
availability of RedHat Linux 7.3 earlier this week. The new
package looks very much like the latest Mandrake and SuSE Linux
releases in respect to the software included, save a few
surprises mentioned below. Interestingly enough, it seems that the most intriguing part
of the new release is not the distribution at all.
OpenOffice.org, the open source foundation of Sun's StarOffice 6 office suite, announced the availability of its 1.0 release today. While the suite has been stable for a few months, this release no doubt symbolizes its readiness to move from the developer to the consumer.
NeTraverse announced today the release of Win4Lin 4.0 Workstation Edition, the fourth generation of the SCO Merge-based Windows-on-Linux software. Win4Lin is similar in concept to VMware, except that it focuses purely on running Windows 9x, and as such has been known to run Windows applications at close to native speeds.
Earlier today I was sitting at a restaurant with my fiancé (who I refer to as Wife 2.0 Release Candidate 1 to my technically inclined friends) and she asked me what was in the bag that I had brought home with me from work today. I told her that it is the latest distribution of SuSE Linux that I had purchased at CompUSA.
The KOffice team announced the availability of KOffice 1.2 Beta 1
late this afternoon. The long anticipated beta, the first major
release of the open source office suite this year, brings many
improvements that greatly increase KOffice's usefulness.
The two Linux distributions best known for Desktop-computing focus both started shipping new releases of their respective packages today. With large strides in usability being made in the last few months, these distributions promise to continue the drive toward the open source desktop.
Many companies have attempted to make computing easier - the latest releases of most Linux distributions, Apple Mac OS, and Windows all showcase different companies' varying visions on how to reach that goal. However, on closer inspection, one realizes that in fact all these different approaches really are not that different at all.
The KDE Project announced today the availability of KDE 3.0. The project's next generation desktop offers numerous enhancements and upgrades built on top of the excellent foundation that was launched a year and a half ago with KDE 2.0.