Monthly Archive:: December 2004

Japan's biggest mobile phone carrier, expects to complete on Wednesday a $3 million investment in Linux software development company MontaVista Software, a DoCoMo spokeswoman said.

A new version of Openoffice.org has been released. Release notes. There is also a preview of 2.0.

Aaron Siego, one of the KDE developers, recently posted a very public rant against porting OSS applications to proprietary platforms like win32. I, a self professed zealot for all things FOSS, strongly disagree with Mr. Siego. The linked article is my rebuttal to his statements.

Driver guru Rudolf Cornelissen has started a project to try and make 3D hardware acceleration a reality in BeOS/Zeta. He's working to integrate the Nvidia driver and MESA, using as an example the utahGLX driver. For more details read the article over to IsComputerOn.

Following the opening up of CVS access to contributors, the Fedora project has announced pre-extras, a preview release of the Fedora extras repository. The distributed "global filesystem," or GFS, acquired by Redhat and later open sourced, has been integrated into the Fedora development tree recently as well.

Mandrakesoft, the makers of Mandrake Linux, appear to be firmly out of the red. According to their site, "Mandrakesoft closed a 3.05 million euros increase of capital via subscription for 508,333 new shares at 6 euros per share, an increase in shares of 10.58%. Shares outstanding are now 5,312,889. The strengthened balance sheet reinforces Mandrakesoft's capacity to grow both organically and externally toward the corporate market."

Sun Microsystems is focusing on Opterons and Solaris x86 for a good reason. Sun has figured out a way to make x86 hardware cheaper than anyone else. Sun is hoping that by leveraging its cost advantages the company will be able to ensure the success of its x86 hardware and Solaris.

The Free Software Foundation Europe has responded to Microsoft's failed appeal previously discussed here.

This story is almost too cool to be true. A contractor working for Apple in the early 90s developed a graphing calculator application that took full advantage of the new PowerPC processor, but his project was cancelled while the software was in its early stages. He was out of a job, but his ID badge still worked. So he kept coming back to work, at no pay, for months, hiding from management, to finish the job, and dozens of Apple employees pitched in to help. In 1994, his app, "Graphing Calculator," shipped with the OS.

Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird have both been successfully ported to SkyOS. Additionally, a WindUI Firefox theme has been created, ensuring that Firefox will have a graphical style that matches the rest of the operating system. Screenshots of both applications are available at the website.

Trolltech has released the first Beta version of the upcoming Qt 4.0. The final version is expected to be released in late first quarter of 2005. An updated online Qt Reference Documentation is also available.

Microsoft is to start shipping a cut-down version of Windows in Europe from January, following the failure of its appeal to the European Court of First Instance over penalties imposed by the Commission earlier this year. Microsoft hasn't run out of appeal routes, but the Court ordered the company to begin carrying out the Commission's decision immediately. Also see eWeek coverage.

The law that governs nonprofit foundations requires that during its probationary period, at least 1/3 of its donations must be in the form of smaller donations from individuals, or it risks losing its tax-exempt status. Ironically, because of some very-generous donations, it now must make up for that with $30,400 in smaller donations by 12/31/2004. More info on their predicament an info on making donations are available on their web site.

There's been an important development in the EU software patents story we've been covering.Poland refused to go along with the software patent rubber stamp: "The Software Patent Directive has been withdrawn from the Agenda of the Agricultural Council. Poland's minister Marcinski requested it firmly at the beginning of the meeting. The Commissioner expressed regret, but the A-item has been deleted and will not be decided this year."