Cody Taylor

linuxkrn writes “The State of Colorado’s Office of Technology (OIT) has set up a work skills website. The problem is that the site says ‘DO NOT use FIREFOX or other Browsers besides IE. It has been decided that Mozilla based, non-IE browsers pose a security risk.’ (Original emphasis from site.) If the leading IT agency for the State is making these uneducated claims, should the people worry about their other decisions?”

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“open source” – has been confined to software through such brilliant communal projects as Wikipedia, the Firefox browser (which now has 21.5% of the global market) or the Linux operating system. Interestingly, such products don’t appear in the figures for gross domestic product (GDP)…

Glyn Moody writes “We now know that Microsoft’s lawsuit isn’t just against TomTom, but against Linux too: but what exactly is Microsoft hoping to achieve? Samba’s Jeremy Allison has a fascinating theory: ‘What people are missing about this is the either/or choice that Microsoft is giving Tom Tom. It isn’t a case of cross-license and everything is ok. If Tom Tom or any other company cross licenses patents then by section 7 of GPLv2 (for the Linux kernel) they lose the rights to redistribute the kernel *at all*. Make no mistake, this is intended to force Tom Tom to violate the GPL, or change to Microsoft embedded software.’ Maybe embedded Linux is starting to get too popular.”

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Netbooks will pave way for Google to squash Microsoft’s OS dominance in two to three years, thanks to its Linux-based Android platform, according to analyst.

The official announcement comes out tomorrow, but SourceForge will be telling the world that it has sold Linux.com to the Linux Foundation

darthcamaro and several other readers have noted that the Linux Foundation has bought Linux.com from Sourceforge Inc. (Slashdot’s corporate parent). The Linux Foundation (employer of Linus Torvalds) will take over the editorial and community stewardship for the site; Sourceforge will continue to supply advertising on it. “[Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim] Zemlin says the Linux Foundation wants to build a collaborative forum where Linux users can share ideas and get information on the Linux operating system. A beta of the site will be released in the next few months. … Linux.com is being redesigned as a central source for Linux software, documentation and answers regardless of platforms, including server, desktop/netbook, mobile and embedded areas.” What do you think should be on Linux.com?

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“Free software helps prevent software monopolies, which destroy the free market and result in high prices and shoddy quality. It does this by fostering competition among products and companies based on quality, features and service”

An anonymous reader writes “PlayingWithWire profiles two open source tools for Web development, comparing Joomla! and WordPress through the lens of usability. The article has apparently upset a few people at the Joomla! forum, but it does bring up a good point. Many open source projects are developed by engineers for engineers — should they focus more on usability? PlayingWithWire makes a bold analogy: ‘If Joomla! is Linux, then WordPress is Mac OS X. WordPress might offer only 90% of the features of Joomla!, but in most cases WordPress is both easier to use and faster to get up and running.'” The article repeatedly stresses that blogging platform WordPress and CMS harness Joomla! occupy different levels of the content hierarchy. How fair is it to twit Joomla! on usability?

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An anonymous reader writes “You may remember Google’s NativeClient project, discussed here last December. Don’t be fooled into calling this ActiveX 2.0 — rather than a model of trust and authentication, NaCl is designed to make dangerous code impossible by enforcing a set of a rules at load time that guarantee hostile code simply cannot execute (PDF). NaCl is still in heavy development, but the developers want to encourage low-level security experts to take a look at their design and code. To this end Google has opened the NativeClient Security Contest, and will award prizes topping out at ^13 to top bug submitters. If you’re familiar with low level security, memory segmentation, accurate disassembly of hostile code, code alignment, and related topics, do take a look. Mac, Linux, and Windows are all supported.”

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Want a great Linux netbook for a great price? Then, give Dell’s Ubuntu-powered Mini 9 a try.