FreeSoftNews

We are thrilled to announce the availability of the production release of Magento 1.1 ( Download |Release Notes ).
For this major release we focused on expanding Magento’s product configuration options, streamlining integration between strategic Magento modules and external applications, increasing the flexibility of the core tax module to allow for Canadian and EU tax rules and boosting the overall performance of the Magento Platform.

Here are some of the highlights of Magento 1.1:
More product-types
With Magento 1.1 merchandisers can now create a few new product types:

* Bundles (most commonly used in kitting or in the built-to-order product model)
* Virtual Products - products that don’t require shipping information

• Read more: Magento 1.1 is here!!!

Is OpenID a panacea, a placebo, or something in between? Opposing viewpoints took turns on center stage Wednesday afternoon at OSCON 2008. The session entitled “A Critical View of OpenID” started off as anything but critical, but once the audience got its turn to raise questions, things got more interesting.

Read more at Linux.com

VIA Technologies today boosted its involvement in the open source community by appointing Harald Welte as its open source liason.

Welte was the 2007 recipient of the Free Software Foundation’s Award for the Advancement of Free Software. He also recently won the Defender of Rights award at the 2008 Open Source Awards.

Until 2007, Welte was chairman of the core team responsible for netfiler/iptables. He also founded gpl-violations.org, an organisation he set up to track down and prosecute violators of the GPL.

Read more at Tectonic

Andrew Leyden has some killer ideas about radio. Literally. For example, he correctly identifies the iPhone as a radio, and says it will kill off XM and Sirius:

I’ve downloaded all of the Internet radio applications from the iPhone application store. I have the version one iPhone which works on Edge, but pretty much any stream under 32k will come in just fine at that speed. Still, even with reduced speeds, the offerings are extensive.

Read more at LinuxJournal

OpenEMR HQ announced the official launch of their OpenEMR Live fully hosted EMR solution earlier today in a conference call with developers, employees, and clients. The service, according to their website, removes the headache associated with running an in-house application server and the cost of keeping a full-time IT person on staff. It also reduces compliance issues, eases administrative burden, and provides data monitoring, faster response times, and full disaster recovery service should something go wrong.

Read more at LinuxMedNews

VIA’s commitment to the open-source community has been everything but stellar. VIA Technologies has taken advantage of the open-source community before, and many are saying VIA is doing another open-source bluff…

Read more at Phoronix

The first two days of O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention (OSCON) are dominated by technical tutorials, but there are sessions that buck the trend. Monday’s most interesting event was Participate 08, a panel discussion sponsored by Microsoft. Panelists debated the meaning of the buzzword “openness” as it applies to source code, services, data, and business models.

Read more at Linux.com

Towards Speedy, Inexpensive, Transparent and Accountable Justice

Recently the Judicial Departments has taken steps towards the opensource softwares and they have started the operations for that they initially distributed around

10000 nos of laptops of hp along with the Redhat enterprise linux 5 along with the internet connection to their officers.

Supreme court of india started the E-committe which is taking all the initiation of this. Also started their centralization process by which all around the world the litigant public can access the information about their cases and necessary information. and to stop the deception by the others (like some bad advocates, mediators for now showing the case status).

Read more at LinuxQuestions.org

OpenSSH 5.1 is out. There’s a long list of new features in this release, including an experimental mechanism for displaying host keys as ASCII art. A new SSH usage survey has also been posted; interestingly, it shows OpenSSH usage dropping slightly over the last couple of years.

Read more at LWN.net

This week in DistroWatch Weekly: Feature: Guest Review: Sabayon Linux 3.5News: Mandriva’s netbook OS, Flaw in Package Management, Ubuntu’s Community QA, Linus InterviewReleased last week: CentOS 5.2 Live CD, BeleniX 0.7.1, BLAG Linux And GNU 90000Upcoming releases: openSUSE 11.1 Alpha1, Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 3, Fedora 10 Alpha Reviewed….

Read more at DistroWatch

South African online marketing firm Quirk eMarketing today released its e-marketing book under a Creative Commons licence.

The textbook, eMarketing - The Essential Guide, can be downloaded from the Quirk website or purchased in printed form online or through Exclusive Books.

Rob Stokes, CEO of Quirk eMarketing and author of the book says: “We have been working with various tertiary institutions, including the University of Cape Town (UCT), AAA School of Advertising and the Red and Yellow School for the past nine years. It became clear that there was not enough source material for lecturers and students who wanted to learn more about online marketing. And, what was available was based purely on American case studies which don’t always make sense in the other markets.”

Read more at Tectonic

Cherry Pal: Green Computer
Many people only use their computers to check email, browse the web, do word processing, spreadsheets, etc. For them, many of today’s PCs are overkill, but it’s not clear what a good alternative would be, especially if they want low energy consumption. Enter stage left: The CherryPal, a tiny PC based on a Freescale CPU and the Linux (Debian) operating system. It’s about the size of a paperback book and uses 80% fewer components than a regular PC. To make the trade-off acceptable, the CherryPal will use “cloud computing”, meaning that many applications will run on an online server (same basic concept as web-based email). Read on for more technical specifications.

Read more at http://www.treehugger.com/

The Packt Open Source Content Management System Award is designed to encourage, support, recognize and reward Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS) that have been selected by a panel of judges and visitors to www.PacktPub.com. Now entering its third year, the Award has established itself as an important measure for quality and the popularity of Open Source Content Management Systems.

The 2008 Award will continue to support a range of open source Content Management Systems with four main categories offering prize money of $5,000 for the overall winner and $2,000 for the winners of the remaining categories.

* Overall Winner
* Most Promising Open Source CMS
* Best Open Source PHP CMS
* Best Other Open Source CMS

Read more at PactPub

Even though SCO has suffered another legal defeat, the company looks like it has enough willpower, if not sense, to keep its legal losing streak going.

On July 16th, Judge Dale Kimball ruled in favor of Novell in SCO vs. Novell and said that the maverick Unix company owed Novell $2.5-million for its Unix deals, and, oh, by the way, Novell, not SCO, really owns Unix. With no IP rights to Unix, it would appear that SCO’s lawsuits against IBM, Novell, and Linux were done. Alas, the experts say “no.”

Eric S. Raymond, co-founder of the Open Source Initiative says, “Sad to say, it ain’t over. SCO is already saying it’s going to appeal on a theory that it was entitled to a jury trial. Clearly, they think trying to get Judge Kimball reversed is an option.”

Read more at Linux.com

The Blender Foundation’s second free-content movie, Big Buck Bunny, is the product of the foundation’s “Peach Open Movie” project, and the results are impressive. Like the previous Elephants Dream movie, this film pushes the technical envelope for the “Blender” free software 3D rendering and animation application; unlike it, it succeeds as pure entertainment.

Read more at FreeSoftwareMagazine

I’m always interested in the offbeat ways that the benefits of the open source model–lots of eyeballs, community efforts–can be applied to new types of ideas. We posted about several non-software focused efforts in this area recently. Now, as The Guardian is reporting, the band Radiohead has a new spin on this concept. Its new single “House of Cards” has a video that was created using advanced visualization techniques and various computer-rendered models. The band has teamed up with Google to release the data for the promo as open source using a Creative Commons license. Take a gander at how it looks here–better than a lot of music videos in my opinion.

Read more at OSTATIC

As Drupal 6 matures, we are entering an exciting time for its users and developers. Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views 2 both have release candidates, and most of your favorite modules have either already been upgraded, or are well on their way. This summer has seen a lot of activity, such as the nearly 20 projects of the Google Summer of Code, and there are great things planned, such as the highly anticipated Drupalcon Szeged. We have seen two Drupal books published by Packt, with a third on the way, and Lullabot released the first DVD of their new Lullabot Learning Series.

Read on for a quick overview of the Drupal News and upcoming events!

Read more at Drupal

Don’t Be Left Out. OSCON 2008 Is the Place To Be July 21-25–Five Days
that Will Open Your Mind about Open Source

Thought-provoking keynotes, two days of in-depth tutorials, and fourteen
tracks with hundreds of sessions are just the beginning. Add to that some
very special events, an evening extravaganza, and an extensive Expo Hall.

If you haven’t yet made plans to be in Portland, Oregon, for the 10th
Anniversary meeting of O’Reilly’s OSCON, what are you waiting for?

Register now at:
https://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/content/register

The decision is in, and SCO has gone down in defeat. The U.S. District Court in Utah has ruled in favor of Novell in SCO vs. Novell, the keystone case in SCO’s long, and ultimately unsuccessful war against Linux.

The foundation of Judge Dale Kimball’s decision, that Novell, and not SCO owns the IP (intellectual property) rights to Unix, remains as solid as ever. Instead of showing that Linux violated SCO IP rights to Unix, SCO’s actions has lead to the revelation that it never owned the IP rights to Unix in the first place.

Read more at Practical Technology

What does Linus Torvalds think about BSD? It’s not too pleasant.

Linus Torvalds - the creator of the Linux kernel and its current maintainer - is by all accounts a brilliant human being. He can also be incredibly crass and rude. Case in point is a post he made to the Linux Kernel mailing list (LKML) yesterday, where he offered his opinion on security research and specifically the OpenBSD operating system (which is security centric).

Read more at internetnews.com