In one of the biggest stories in the last few weeks, Linux and Main reported Friday that the KDE League - KDE's promotional (and press release issuing) organization - had ceased to exist. According to the report at the time, that publication's Dennis Powell said the situation consisted of missed payments on a franchise fee, but also suggested that the KDE League might be failing to release information as required by the Internal Revenue Service. Now, with new information obtained by Open for Business, it seems these concerns can be laid to rest.
Over at OSNews, they take a look at SuSE's new SuSE Linux 8.1 release. “The SuSE installation is not exactly what I would call 'self-explanatory'. Newbies would most certainly have a hard time at specific points throughout the installation. I am not sure I am very fond of the way SuSE expects you to click to different parts of the installation instead of going step by step. It looks like a web page and by clicking on different links it gets you in different parts of the installation. This has its ups and downs. It easily lets you go back and fix something that you might have done wrong, but on the other hand, it is not the most obvious way of doing things. At some points, it was not very obvious what one had to do. I also found it to have lots of micro-management to do. In other cases, I found this to be a good thing, but on others not. I feel that the 'micro-management' part should have been only visible after clicking an 'Advanced' button or something similar. “
Today marks our first anniversary here at Open for Business. For the occasion, Editor-in-Chief Timothy R. Butler considers one of the most prominent arguments against adopting a Free Software desktop: Apple's Mac OS X.
eWeek's Jason Brooks examines the ever controvercial Lindows GNU/Linux distribution. “These, however, are the first words I've written about Lindows. The Lindows Insider program, in which individuals pay a $99 subscription fee in order to beta test free software, rubbed me the wrong way, as did the company's insistence on delaying any product reviews of Lindows to some indeterminate spot in the future.”
MandrakeSoft announced the availablity of its new ninth generation distribution today. The distribution offers lots of great features over previous releases, including KDE 3.0.3, GNOME 2.0, and XFree86 4.2.1. Leaks about the impending release of RedHat's major upgrade surfaced today as well, amid major controversy.
Since its public release early this year, the Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 has been lauded as an extremely powerful PDA (Personal Digital Assistant). Even the general media, such as eWEEK and MSNBC, have noted how the Zaurus is almost like a laptop in a smaller form factor. Especially now with the advent of Sharp Mobile Services, the SL-5500, with its retractable keyboard, seems well suited to mobile communications.
Asunción, Paraguay - When I first saw the editorial by Timothy R. Butler,
“The Inconsequentiality of Open Source,” I read it slowly, and
pondered about the point so well made by him. Tim was, and still is,
dead on right. I congratulated him publicly, and I have no reasons to
withdraw my commendation to Tim for his excellent article. Yet,
somehow I felt uneasy about the ideas expressed, and not in the sense
of them being wrong, but there was the lingering feeling that
something else needed to be said in order to round out Tim's point.
Finally, and after much thinking about it, I came out with some
thoughts that maybe I can share and use them for complementing Tim's
ideas.
As many pundits have speculated - including Open for Business's Timothy R. Butler - UnitedLinux will be offered under a per-server licensing scheme. The news, reported by ITWorld, seems to be the opening salvo between the Free Software community and the growing group of “Proprietary Linux” offerings.
NewsForge has an interesting report on a small, but highly effective way to improve Apache performance. “Lingerd is a daemon process that sits in front of your Apache processes to handle socket IO. What it does is free up your webserver to handle your application layer instead of dealing with clients that tie up your Apache children. This is a huge gain for sites using PHP, mod_perl or one of the Java engines. Having expensive Apache processes waiting around for clients to close sockets is a waste of resources.”