This month’s cover story for VAR Business touts the Attack of the Alternatives. The premise is certain companies are gaining or having success in the shadows of the market leaders because they are offering a greater value then the market giants:
When Matthew Szulik left Red Hat abruptly for family health reasons in December, many people were scratching their heads over the company’s new choice of CEO - a young executive from Delta Airlines, Jim Whitehurst. But Whitehurst’s chief operating officer title at Delta and position outside of the technology industry are misleading; a peek into his past reveals a computer science degree and a passion for open-source technology, not to mention a smooth operator who helped bring a struggling airline out of bankruptcy.
One thing that Ubuntu has left half finished is power management. It goes a long way supporting standby, hibernation, laptop buttons and switches out of the box, but leaves many important features hard to configure.
Currently at least two different systems coexist in a Ubuntu installation: laptop-mode-tools and acpi-support. Out of both we have powernowd and gnome-power-manager which only take care of a particular aspect.
Laptop-mode-tools are an old hack used to instruct the kernel to let hard drives spin down by caching writes. This little script has grown big and now can manage most of a system power management, including starting and stopping services, and cpu frequency. You may think it’s good, but it’s not: the configuration is ugly and it just tries to do too much. Have a look under /etc/laptop-mode/ and /etc/power/ to get an idea of this.
The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) and Monsoon Multimedia announced yesterday that an agreement was reached to dismiss the GNU General Public License (GPL) enforcement lawsuit filed by SFLC on behalf of two principal developers of BusyBox.
As this settlement prevents the case from going to court, the SFLC’s defence of the GPL remains untested in a US courtroom.
The case was filed on September 19 on behalf of the developers at BusyBox, which provides a lightweight set of standard Unix utilities commonly used in embedded systems under the open source GPL version 2. Their complaint was that Monsoon Multimedia used BusyBox in its HAVA TV place-shifting devices, but did not comply to the GPL requirement of supplying access to the source code.
Hi
No new news in FreeSoftNews until next Monday (27.08.2007)
Have nice day
FreeSoftNews
Linux developers will find a little extra in their Easter basket this weekend. The Linux Foundation has released an update to the Linux Standard Base (LSB) with a testing toolkit that developers and ISVs can use to validate applications against the…
PostgreSQL hacker Bruce Momjian has posted an article on how companies can better work with the free software community. “Employees usually circulate their proposal inside their companies first before sharing it with the community. Unfortunately, many employees never take the additional step of sharing the proposal with the community. This means the employee is not benefiting from community oversight and suggestions, often leading to a major rewrite when a patch is submitted to the community.”
GAlbum is currently a small photo album application for Gtk+ and
GNOME. It aims to be a system for media data management.
Release 0.1 is available as
http://www.atai.org/GAlbum/galbum-0.1.tar.gz
This is a very early prototype so the current functionalities are limited. More functions of media management will be added in following versions.
The GAlbum contains an internal scripting language called
Squirrel and the high level logic is implemented as a script in
that language. The source also contains libffi and
squirrel-gtk, Gtk+ binding to Squirrel.
GAlbum is developed using the GNU Arch revision control system.
The latest source can be checked out from the Arch repository at
this location:
http://www.atai.org/archarchives/atai@atai.org–public/
atai@atai.org–public/album–atai–1.0
Comments and bug reports can be sent to atai@atai.org
–
Andy Tai, atai@atai.org