The Taiwanese newspaper Taipei Times reports government officials in Taipei are considering the advantages of Linux. “Weeks of debate over what the government considers exorbitant fees bureaucrats will have to pay Microsoft Corp for use of the Windows operating system culminated yesterday at Computex Taipei 2002 in an call by lawmakers for the development of an open-source operating system.”
Russell Pavlicek takes a look at VMware Workstation 3.1.1, a popular tool similar to Win4Lin, over at NewsForge.net. “In the thunderous noise of this growing herd of desktop alternatives, it is easy to forget that other options have existed for some time. Such is the plight of (the non-free) VMware Workstation, a virtual machine architecture that has been serving Linux users since 1999.”
Time and again, one of the most common excuses about moving to Linux is that it does not have Microsoft Office. Never mind that OpenOffice.org provides most everything one needs, people are use to Office, and are not interested in changing, thank-you very much.
In an unprecedented move today, Caldera, Conectiva, SuSE, and Turbolinux announced a joint development program known as UnitedLinux. As was expected based on leaks from the companies earlier this week, the foursome will merge their R&D efforts to create one core Linux distribution.
Leading Linux distributor RedHat, Inc. announced today a policy on its much publicized patent registrations. According to the company, “we are forced to live in the world as it is, and that world currently permits software patents. A relatively small number of very large companies have amassed large numbers of software patents. We believe such massive software patent portfolios are ripe for misuse because of the questionable nature of many software patents generally and because of the high cost of patent litigation.”
Linux news site LinuxandMain.com broke the news today that Caldera, Conectiva, SuSE, and TurboLinux are planning a joint announcement on Thursday morning. The ground breaking communique from the distributions is quoted as saying “On May 30, join the CEOs of Caldera, Conectiva, SuSE, Turbolinux and several major industry partners for an announcement that will shape Linux in the enterprise and around the globe. Please book 8 am Pacific time in your calendar for this global announcement … followed by media-only teleconference information.”.
LinuxToday has a copy of the press release
from popular Linux desktop developer Ximian noting that they will be
including StarOffice with their Ximian Desktop Professional product.
“Customers buying the boxed version of Ximian Desktop
Professional Edition or subscribing to the premium Red Carpet
Express software updating service will receive StarOffice 6.0 with
their purchases. Workgroups and organizations purchasing the Red
Carpet CorporateConnect service for centralized software management
can also install StarOffice 6.0 on each of their supported
systems.”
Linux journalist Joe Barr looks at Mandrake Linux 8.2 in a review over at LinuxWorld. In the review, he reports “
The second installation went just as smoothly as the first. The only difference being that I had the laptop connected to the cable modem. When I got to the same point the second time, I selected a site to download the updated apps from and clicked OK. After connecting to the site, I was presented a list of applications to choose from, with 20 or so “preselected” updates already checked. I accepted the default list and clicked OK again. About 20 minutes later (this could be much longer if you have a 56Kb dialup line instead of broadband Internet access) I had the latest security or bug enhanced versions of those applications.”
ComputerWorld has an interesting commentary from Nicholas Petreley. He looks at the development library that runs KDE, and also happens to be a dandy tool to develop software for nearly every popular platform. But with all this fuss being made about C# vs. Java and the competing frameworks, it's easy to forget that there are many other options for application development. My favorite is Qt, from Trolltech AS. The latest version of Qt, Version 3.0, is the foundation for the phenomenal K Desktop Environment (KDE). I'm crazy about KDE 3.0, so it should come as no surprise that I'm equally enamored with Qt.
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.