Mar 24 2009

Towards the Open Company

Arto Stimms writes “The author of the e text editor is using the principles of open source to transform his company into an Open Company. Not only is he releasing the source, the company itself becomes totally open: no concept of bosses or employees. Anyone can join in at any time, doing whatever task they find interesting, for whatever time they find appropriate. This is in service of the idea of ‘the real freedom zero’: the freedom to decide for yourself what you want to work on.”

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Mar 24 2009

Sun’s CEO On FOSS and the Cloud

ruphus13 writes “Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz continues to promote the use of Open Source, and says the downturn in the economy will only boost the momentum behind FOSS. From his post, ‘Free and open source software is sweeping across the vast majority of the Fortune 500. When you see the world’s most conservative companies starting to deploy open source, you know momentum is on your side. That’s creating massive opportunity for those of us who have pioneered the market, to drive commercial opportunities… We announced just last week that we’re building the Sun Cloud, atop open source platforms — from ZFS and Crossbow, to MySQL and Glassfish. By building on open source, we’re able to avoid proprietary storage and networking products, alongside proprietary software.'” In related news, the Sun-IBM deal proposed last week has been called “anti-competitive” by a tech industry group, while others are speculating on how it could affect Linux and Java.

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Mar 23 2009

Microsoft Launches Free Web Software Eco-System

An anonymous reader writes “Microsoft, inspired perhaps by the ease of selecting and installing iPhone apps, has taken a similar approach to gather back market share of its IIS web server in a predominantly Apache/PHP market. 10 open source CMS, gallery, wiki, and blog tools were chosen to populate the eco-system, dubbed Web App Gallery. Developers must agree to principles and can now submit their PHP or .NET application for inclusion. Once an application is in the gallery, Windows users use Microsoft Web Platform Installer, released in a keynote at MIX this week, which inspects the the local system, and installs and configures dependencies like the IIS webserver, PHP, URL re-writers, and file permissions. Screenshots show this to be quite easy for the typical computer user. This could provide some real competition for WAMP and Linux shell install processes.”

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Mar 23 2009

Social Security Administration Launches E-Health Info Exchange

Lucas123 writes “In what could be the start of a national health information exchange system, the Social Security Administration became the first federal agency to go live with a public-private electronic health records information exchange that will cut wait time for 2.6 million Americans who apply for benefits each year by weeks or months. The electronic exchange runs on a database operated by a non-profit organization in Virginia and open-source software deployed at the Social Security Administration. ‘The goal of the NHIN effort is to enable secure access to health care data and real-time information sharing among physicians, patients, hospitals, laboratories, pharmacies and federal agencies … regardless of location or the applications that are being used.'”

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Mar 22 2009

Microsoft Unveils Open Source Exploit Finder

Houston 2600 sends this excerpt from the Register about an open-source security assessment tool Microsoft presented at CanSecWest: “Microsoft on Friday released an open-source program designed to streamline the labor-intensive process of identifying security vulnerabilities in software while it’s still under development. As its name suggests, !exploitable Crash Analyzer (pronounced ‘bang exploitable crash analyzer’) combs through bugs that cause a program to seize up, and assesses the likelihood of them being exploited by attackers. Dan Kaminsky, a well-known security expert who also provides consulting services to Microsoft, hailed the release a ‘game changer’ because it provides a reliable way for developers to sort through thousands of bugs to identify the several dozen that pose the greatest risk.”

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Mar 18 2009

10 Linux and open source developer tools you should not over

Linux is a great development environment. But without sound development tools, that environment won’t do you any good. Fortunately, plenty of Linux and/or open source development tools are available. If you’re a new user you might not know which tools are there, but worry not. Here are 10 outstanding tools that will help you take your development t

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Mar 17 2009

2.0 Beta Chrome On Windows, Chromium On Linux

AlienRancher writes “Google launched this morning a new beta version of Chrome 2.0: ‘The best thing about this new beta is speed — it’s 25% faster on our V8 benchmark and 35% faster on the Sunspider benchmark than the current stable channel version and almost twice as fast when compared to our original beta version.’ Other enhancements include user script support (greasemonkey-like) and form auto-fill.” And reader Lee Mathews adds news of the open source version, Chromium, on Linux: “Not only has Chromium gotten easier to take for a test drive thanks to the personal package archive for Ubuntu Chrome daily build team, but development on the browser is also progressing nicely. Despite being a very early build, Chromium on Linux feels solid and boasts the same blazing speed the Windows users have been enjoying for months.”

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Mar 16 2009

Get it done with GNOME Do 0.8.1

GNOME Do is an open source launcher utility for the Linux desktop. Its new dock interface combines Mac-like polish and usability with highly efficient keyboard control, and we put it through its paces.

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Mar 16 2009

Interactive Map of The Linux Kernel

The Linux Kernel is one of the most complex open source projects. There are a lot of books, however it is still a difficult subject to comprehend. The Interactive map of Linux Kernel gives you a top-down view of the Kernel.

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Mar 16 2009

Five Best Linux Distributions

There are many, many Linux distributions, and a lot of unique reasons to like them. Read on to see which open-source operating systems inspired our readers to provide our biggest Hive Five response to date.

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