The UK Government has made it clear that Open Source and Open Standards, with a focus on re-use of software development and deployment, is to clearly and unequivocably be part of the decision-making for UK Government I.T. procurement and contracting. Also part of the policy is a clear committment to engage with the Free Software community and to actively encourage the development of "Government-Class" Free Software products.
(tag keyword: #ukgovOSS at the cabinet office's request)
At FOSDEM 2009, Gary Benson of Red Hat presented Shark. (Slides at http://gbenson.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/fosdem-2009.pdf) Shark is a port of OpenJDK that uses LLVM to do JIT code generation. While Shark is pretty fast when compared with OpenJDK's C++ interpreter, it's still quite a lot slower than gcj. gcj is a fairly straightforward bytecode->native compiler and doesn't use many of the Java-specific optimizations in HotSpot, so I was of the opinion that Shark and gcj ought to be similar in speed. So, I wanted to find out why Shark was slower than gcj.
I thought I would make use of the 1000th advogato article to write to emphasise my pride in your accomplishments at the Samba "Franky" architecture, and also to emphasise to you that I am fully aware of its strategic significance.
The 10th anniversary of "Welcome to the SAMBA Domain" quietly passed on Thursday 28th of August, 2007, without acknowledgement. When Paul Ashton and Luke Leighton initially reverse-engineered and published the NT Domains protocol, the floodgates were opened to both Free Software and Proprietary CIFS vendors to interoperate with Microsoft's flagship product, Windows NT, at an unprecedented level.
The anticipated reprisals from Microsoft did not happen: incredibly, instead, quiet mutual respect and cooperation crystallised the CIFS protocols into formal specifications (some of which were quietly handed out, whilst others had to wait until they were prised from Microsoft's fingers by the U.S. Dept of Justice and the E.U Commission).
In the intervening eleven years, an enormous amount has been achieved, yet, frustratingly, an enormous amount has not. This article outlines the accomplishments to date, and highlights the incredible things that could be achieved if some specific strategic inter-project free software cooperation took place. Also outlined are some hints as to how that can be accomplished, citing examples of prior proven work in which it has already been achieved, but not yet adopted.
Joe Wein covers Windows 7 versus Linux on netbooks. "Does it really matter to Microsoft shareholders and employees if the 21 million or so netbooks expected to be sold this year (and the even bigger numbers in 2010) will be running some version of Windows or a version of Linux (which is free), if previously those buyers would have picked up a more powerful machine that netted Microsoft $40-$100 per license?"
Don Marti offers his insights into the Netbook and the Linux combination.
Issue 11, December/January 2009
Welcome to the Free Software Supporter, the Free Software Foundation's monthly news digest and action update -- being read by you and 15,508 other activists.
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***************************************************DON'T MISS... the first ever...
/ /(_) |__ _ __ ___ / _ \ | __ _ _ __ ___| |_ / / | | '_ \| '__/ _ \/ /_)/ |/ _` | '_ \ / _ \ __| / /__| | |_) | | | __/ ___/| | (_| | | | | __/ |_ \____/_|_.__/|_| \___\/ |_|\__,_|_| |_|\___|\__|
...LibrePlanet
CONFERENCE. MARCH 21/22nd 2009. CAMBRIDGE, MA. 02138
<http://www.fsf.org/associate/meetings/2009/>
autonomo.us | FSF | High-Priority-Projects | GNU
****************************************************
The much-anticipated next CodeCon has now been announced, and the Call For Presentations is out - http://www.codecon.org/2009/
Humptie dumptie sat on a wall Humptie dumptie had a great fall Harry said it's NOT his fault, and it's not your job to mend the wall.Some people create fire Other people built firewall I can hear the screams who's playing -- a Chinese fire drill!
GitTorrent makes Git truly distributed. The initial plans are for reducing mirror loading, however the full plans include totally distributed development: no central mirrors whatsoever. PGP signing and other web-of-trust-based mechanisms will take over from protocols on ports (e.g. ssh) as the access control "clearing house".
The implications of a truly distributed revision control system are truly staggering: unrestricted software freedom; the playing field is levelled in so many ways, as "the web site" no longer becomes the central choke-point of control. This article will explain more fully some of these implications, not only from a technical perspective but also including the political implications for Software Freedom.
When HTML first came out, browsers could have been called "Application Thin Clients", if the buzzword had been in use at the time. The introduction of javascript made it possible to execute code on the client, and this turned browsers into something much more than just a "display" mechanism.
Before Javascript, Web application development was simple: everything was done server-side. The concept of MVC - Model View Controller - was easy: the HTML was generated, and that was the view. With Javascript being a full-blown programming language, the lines are being blurred between which code is responsible for the View, the Controller and even the Model. The resultant split of responsibility across client and server in wildly diverse programming languages is driving many developers to alternative technologies such as Flash, and causing headaches for those Web developers who remain.
The key components of the solution - to allow the developer to create MVC applications in a single programming language, where at least the "View" source is extracted and compiled to Javascript and HTML - actually exist and are used in production environments, thanks to Google Web Toolkit and Pyjamas. RubyJS is well on the way, too.
Abstract: Many programmers of Open-Source software would like to dabble or specialize in artificial intelligence but are concerned about how to obtain AI Funding. The author of http://code.google.com/p/mind forth/ offers a few ideas.
If you think a polemic about a symbol
devised to represent people
who mockingly declare themselves
unworthy of displaying some other symbol
designed to represent them
[*breathe*
]
is much ado about nothing,
we have something in common.
It may be one
of a very few things we have in common.
Indeed,
we are probably quite different,
and I am sure I have not done enough
to earn the privilege
of being counted as one of you
—
regardless of who you
are.
That's because,
as it turns out,
one cannot earn
membership in hackerdom.
Dear Mr. Stallman,
I am writing to express my disappointment with the Free Software Foundation regarding the recent release of the GNU Free Documentation License version 1.3.
The new version 1.3 adds a new clause, section 11, which, according to the FAQ, allows wiki sites to relicense specific content from GFDL 1.3 to CC-BY-SA 3.0, for content added before November 1, 2008. They have this relicensing option until August 1, 2009.
This, in my view, is a serious moral mistake and breach of trust. Even if this new clause does no harm, it is still the wrong thing to do.
People have embraced the internet so much that even in a country like ours, Honorable Finance Minister (Dr. Baburam Bhattarai of CPN-Maoist) has a Facebook profile (looks genuine so far). He (or whoever maintains the profile on his behalf) regularly updates his status. Sometime back, while I was busy with work and couldn't catch up with news, his status updates served as a good substitute. He also posts pictures from events he attends. The most followed part, in my opinion, are the notes he posts to his profile- interviews, articles published in newspapers, political notes, and other pieces. The problem, as stated by many of his "friends" (well, facebook friends) is that he never replies (or interacts with) their queries and comments. There is a feature called "Facebook Page" that he could have used to update his "fans" (just another facebook word), without engendering expectations of interaction in them. There are other ways of avoiding interaction on the internet too. While I appreciate Dr. Bhattarai's efforts to make use of technology at a time when most Nepalese leaders struggle to use even the basic tools, I disagree with his mode of operation.
Once upon a time in the not-too-distant past,
a hacker I know blogged about
using object-oriented C
to implement
a lightweight imitation of some of C++'s features
for his latest project;
almost immediately,
somebody saw fit to reward this charming piece
of acceptably self-congratulatory writing
with a stern and quite public deconstruction.
Does this scene seem familiar?
Why does this keep happening?
And what, if anything, can we do about it?
We can hardly hope to appease
all of hackerdom's malcontent
—
but we can at least try to avoid
stepping on each other's toes.
Accordingly,
this article will waste no time
on a platitudinous condemnation
of the surf-by put-down;
rather,
I wish to take a moment to reflect
on what the hacker did to earn it,
and to consider what he might have done
(or, rather, not done)
instead.
I'm missing steven's little news posts, so I thought I'd make one up. Things happening recently: Bruce Perens on a landmark appeals decision which strengthens the legitimacy of Free Software Licenses; Venezuela orders 1 million Intel Classmate PCs; SGI relicenses OpenGL; The FSF launches a campaign to highlight the high-priority list, and KDE 4.1.2 codenamed "Codename" is released.
Also coming up: Pyworks will be held at the same time as PHPworks in Atlanta, Nov 12th-11th; FSCon, the Nordic Summit, will be on October 24th - 26th at the IT-University Gothenburg; UKUUG Developer Conference 2008 will be in Manchester, Nov 7th-9th.
pyv8 is an experimental project to combine two-way python bindings to v8 with the python-to-javascript compiler from pyjamas. a simple test has shown a ten times performance increase of python code converted and executed as javascript, when compared to running the same program as python. (to be fair, cython gives a 100 times performance increase).
Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Community of Nepal (FOSS-Nepal) observed the fifth international Software Freedom Day today. The day was celebrated by over 500 different volunteer groups in 120 countries. The theme for this year's celebration of FOSS-Nepal was "Create, Share, Collaborate." Honourable Minister of Science and Technology, Ganesh Shah started the proceedings at Yala Maya Kendra in Patan, Kathmandu by unveiling a compilation of Free/Open Source Softwares in a CD named "Nirvikalpa." Honourable Minister also announced the launch of a web-portal named "Prasfutan." "Prasfutan" which means "blossoming" in English aims to provide a collaborative environment to a vast number of local talents in Nepal whose creativity has a reach only up to a limited audience comprising of their acquaintances. This is in sync with the theme of "Create, Share, Collaborate."
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.
If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!