Open Source

In the week ending 25 May ? Continuous database migration, Google chat drops Jabber compatibility, possible VP8/WebM patent licensing problems, development plans for Ubuntu 13.10 and Debian GNU/Hurd 2013

IBM has filed its response [PDF] to SCO's motion asking for reconsideration of the Court's order denying SCO's motion to reopen the SCO v. IBM case. I have it as text for you. IBM tells Judge David Nuffer that it doesn't oppose reopening the case at all -- in fact it says it should happen. IBM has an proposed outline on how to proceed thereafter. Its plan differs from SCO's. Rather than deciding all the still pending summary judgment motions filed five years ago immediately, IBM suggests a process that goes like this: First, toss out all the claims that the SCO v. Novell final judgment made moot, the ones SCO concedes are foreclosed. That would be almost all of them. I believe all that's left, if it is still viable, which I doubt, is SCO's unfair competition claim regarding Project Monterey and its tortious interference claim alleging that IBM interfered with SCO's market and business relationships. At least that's what SCO listed the first time it tried to reopen this case. After that, IBM suggests it file a motion for summary judgment regarding its position on the impact of the Novell judgment, and if the court agrees, "it will be unnecessary for the Court to decide a number of the pending summary judgment motions to resolve these claims." If not, the parties will need to come up with a scheduling order, because there will likely be a need for further briefing, in that the pending summary judgment motions were filed years ago, and "the body of relevant case law has grown." The Novell judgment, IBM further points out -- and this is the part that reveals why IBM doesn't mind a bit if the case is reopened -- did not resolve all of IBM's counterclaims: For example, while the Novell Judgment strengthens IBM's counterclaims concerning SCO's campaign to create fear, uncertainty and doubt about IBM's products and services, it does not completely resolve all of those claims. Thus, the Court will need to address certain of the pending motions, which may also require supplemental briefing and argument. IBM doesn't mention it here, but I recall that there is a counterclaim of copyright infringement related to the GPL. So a scheduling order is going to have to happen in any case. And finally, if SCO elects to pursue other matters it has mentioned before, the Court may need to decide those issues. IBM attaches as Exhibit A its 2011 filing, "IBM's Memorandum Responding to SCO's Request to Reopen", filed in response to an earlier attempt by SCO to reopen the case, and it suggests that the court proceed as described in that filing. That's also where SCO's other matters it may or may not elect to pursue are found, in paragraph 12, essentially some pending motions for reconsiderations of earlier judges' decisions that went against SCO.

For those that still hold some nostalgia for Mandriva/Mandrake, there's good news. The OpenMandriva project was able to obtain a lot of the files before their server was scrapped. An archive has been set up by the OpenMandriva gang for all to share. On the OpenMandriva.org Website today, Anurag Bhandari posted that Mandriva's and Mandrake's old wikis, forums, mailing lists, and such have been saved. The records seem to go back to Mandrake Linux 9.1 and Corporate Server 4.0. The note said more was to come, but that may have been in reference to languages. Right now OpenMandriva have relocated English and French. I'd hoped to see it go all the way back to the beginning which I think was somewhere around 5.1 or so (echoing Red Hat's version at the time because Mandrake was based closely on them back then). So, we'll be sure to check back from time to time to see the progress. The data is being kept at archive.openmandriva.org. One of my earliest Linux screenshots, Mandrake Linux 7.2, from 2000. Related Activities Comments (0) Post a Comment Ask a Question Related Software Mandriva (3 alternatives, post review) Related Blog Posts Meet Pidora: A Custom Version of Fedora for Raspberry Pi (post comment) It's Easier Than Ever to Slap Your Favorite Linux Distro Onto a Chromebook (post comment) OpenMandriva Picks Name, Releases Alpha (1 comment)

Microsoft has released a new version of Skype, its popular VoIP program, for Linux.

Fresh on the heels of his talk on achieving total data center victory at Collaboration Summit in April, John Mark Walker, Gluster community leader at Red Hat will show us how to get there at the Gluster Workshop at LinuxCon Japan on Friday, May 31 in Tokyo.    The full day of talks will focus entirely on the open source GlusterFS distributed file system and will include: - Creating a Shared Storage Service with GlusterFS  - Converged Infrastructure: Leveraging oVirt and Gluster for Fully Virtualized Environments  - Hands on Development: Getting Started with GlusterFS translators, GluPy and libgfapi.    Here, Walker discusses the upcoming workshop, the rapid adoption of GlusterFS in Japan, version 3.4 and QEMU integration, new Gluster community initiatives and the state of enterprise storage.   What is the Gluster Community Workshop taking place at LinuxCon Japan? Why is this an important activity that you host with The Linux Foundation? John Mark Walker: We have an amazing community of users and developers in Japan, and they responded very positively to last year's workshop. We wanted to create an event that provided this community with access to information and tools that help to make them more successful. The Linux Foundation has proved to be a great partner for the Gluster community in general and for this event in particular. Not only do they provide all of the logistical support, they also act as a gateway to open source communities in Japan.    Why do the event in Japan?   We do many workshops globally, including some that we host on our own, as well as other Linux Foundation events. We were really surprised by the turnout to last year's workshop in Japan - the Linux Foundation helped us access a burgeoning community that we didn't know the scope of. We knew there were some people using GlusterFS in Japan, but we had no idea it was so pervasive. Now that we know, we're investing more resources into the region because there's so much demand for more and better information.   We understand you'll kick off the workshop with an overview of the project and a look at the roadmap. That's pretty enticing, especially considering most open source projects don't have much in the way of a roadmap. Can you give us an early look at a couple milestones to keep our eyes out for?   Well, there are roadmaps and then there are "roadmaps" :)  What we have are a list of desirable features that we would like to put into each release cycle. In that sense, we're very similar to many open source projects. We'll have a broad list of features, some discussion, and then a planning session where we identify the most likely features to make it into a release.   As for things to watch for, there are a couple. For one, GlusterFS 3.4 is currently in beta, and this is a transformative release for a couple of reasons. For one, this marks the first release where the most prominent feature was contributed by a non-core member of the engineering team: QEMU integration. For another, this particular feature greatly increases the number of recommended use cases for GlusterFS. The new block device support for QEMU/KVM bypasses the FUSE module that our GlusterFS client uses. Now you can provision virtual machines on a GlusterFS volume without the context switching overhead that comes with FUSE, and it makes a big difference performance wise. The FUSE module with the GlusterFS client is still the recommended method for scale-out NAS use cases, but the FUSE bypass using a new library, called libgfapi, will be a starting point for many non-NAS use cases, including the QEMU integration mentioned above.    Another thing to watch for is that we are in the process of greatly expanding the community charter for gluster.org to be the center of development activity for open software-defined storage. You saw the first manifestation of that with the announcement of the Gluster Community Forge. My magic 8 ball tells m

San Francisco-based company Cloudscaling is the latest small company focused on the open source OpenStack cloud computing platform to score some meaningful venture capital. The company has raised $10 million in Series B funding from partners including Trinity Ventures, Juniper Networks and Seagate. That's some pretty solid backing, and Cloudscaling--which provides infrastructure-as-a-service support--is just the latest Northern California company to get solid funding. Cloudscaling was founded in 2006 and is one of a handful of small companies competing with Amazon Web Services and Rackspace to be “the leader in elastic cloud infrastructure.” Its platform is the Open Cloud System, an OpenStack-centric software framework. According to the company's documentation for Open Cloud System: "Open Cloud System 2.5 is a complete Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution powered by OpenStack technology. OCS is designed to meet the requirements of next-generation dynamic applications such as web/mobile apps, SaaS/PaaS deployments and Big Data implementations. OCS delivers the agility, performance and economic benefits of leading public cloud providers, but deployable on your infrastructure and under your control." Other Northern California companies are getting solid venture backing with their OpenStack strategies as well.  Mirantis, which is well-known to numerous technology titans as a consulting firm that knows its way around OpenStack, has  received steady funding from Dell, Intel and WestSummit. The small firm has an impressive list of customers working with it on OpenStack projects, including AT&T, PayPal and The Gap. “This financing round caps a tremendous year of momentum for the company,” Cloudscaling CEO Michael Grant said in a statement, following the company's funding announcement. “That momentum affirms the voice of the market, clearly stating that customers want more than OpenStack. They want an on-premise, OpenStack-based private or public cloud turnkey system solution that delivers architectural and behavioral fidelity with major public clouds like Amazon Web Services. Our Open Cloud System product delivers on that need to enable hybrid cloud application deployments that span private and public cloud services.” Related Activities Comments (0) Post a Comment Ask a Question Related Blog Posts Dell Changes Up OpenStack Cloud Plans (post comment) Rackspace Creates Bridges Between .NET and OpenStack Platforms (post comment) Project Savanna, Bridging Hadoop and OpenStack, Moves Forward (post comment)

LTSI Kernel Maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the latest version of LTSI Kernel (3.0.79-LTSI and 3.4.46-LTSI) on May 21. The followings are the changes that have been merged for each release. 3.0.79-LTSI: • Update to 3.0.79 kernel release • New kzm9g board-specific patches • Updated documentation 3.4.46-LTSI: • Update to 3.4.46 • Updated documentation • af_bus Kconfig dependancy fixed • armadillo800 patches added • Clock bugfix • USB gadget fixes • lttng bugfixes • shmobile fixes • marzen i2c and sata support added • arm smp updates • irqchip patches added With these releases, a large amount of upstream bug/security fixes have been applied (1,368 with 3.0,79-LTSI; 944 with 3.4.46-LTSI). This should result in a dramatic reduction of in-house maintenance costs for the companies who use LTSI Kernel. In addition to the back port of bug/security fixes, LTSI has many patch collections now that are not merged and can be very useful and easy to apply to products. A couple resources that can be helpful when applying these patches to your products: LTSI Patch Collection How to adopt LTSI Kernel to your products: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/images/stories/slides/elc2013_munakata.pdf The new version of LTS (hence LTSI) kernel version is expected to be selected within a few months, followed shortly after by the the opening of the merge window of the new LTSI Kernel. If any of your organizations would like your patches to be merged into the latest LTS (and LTSI) Kernel, please look for the new announcement in a few months or so. Also, the 3.4 series will be maintained for another year. If you wish to merge your patches to 3.4, we always welcome you codes. If there is anything we can help you, please contact us!

There are lots of people in the U.S. gearing up for a long Memorial Day weekend, and if you happen to have extra time on your hands this weekend you may want to consider entering Mozilla's Firefox Flicks contest. It's a global video contest designed to give budding filmmakers the opportunity to create and submit short videos about letting people discover "the power of the web on mobile devices." (We covered it when it launched.) If you submit a short video by May 29, you qualify for Mozilla's Early Entry status and you'll be automatically entered to compete for the Grand Prize. Here is more on the prizes and rules.  Mozilla has a number of example videos from the contest online and you can view them here.  The contest runs through July 31, and winners will be chosen from four regions around the world: North America, Latin America, Asia Pacific and Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The Grand Prize winner will fly to Los Angeles to work with producers (and Flicks judges) Franklin Leonard and Couper Samuelson, and representatives from Panavision to professionally produce their winning entry using professional equipment. If you submit a flick by May 29, it may earn an Early Entry award of $1,000. There are also regional prizes and people's choice awards as described here.  The contest is part of Mozilla's ramp-up for promoting its Firefox OS mobile operating system, which we've covered extensively.  The company is reorganizing its executives and its whole strategy around mobile technology, and Firefox Flicks is designed to promote the advantages of mobile tech. You can find out much more about Firefox Flicks on the contest blog. Related Activities Comments (0) Post a Comment Ask a Question Related Software Firefox (25 alternatives, 24 reviews) Mozilla (34 alternatives, post review) Related Blog Posts Chromium May Become Default Ubuntu Browser in Version 13.10 (2 comments) Mozilla Needs More Time Before Blocking Third-Party Cookies By Default (post comment) Firefox 21 Arrives, Featuring Health Reports, More Social Features (post comment)

The H Community Calendar presents the coming month's events in various open source, development, Linux, Unix and other communities, from multi-day conferences to user group get-togethers

Google has release Chrome 28 to the beta release channel. The new version brings faster page rendering and a number of new developer features like fullscreen mode and WebGL in the Android version