Tag archive: open source

CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently described Facebook as embracing “the hacker way,” which is to say that the company has a sort of freedom and interest in constantly innovating, breaking, and creating without boundaries that limit other enterprise businesses. How much that applies to Facebook in practice has long been up for debate, but the company may be edging closer in that direction in the near future. Facebook research engineer Andrei… Read More

Some months ago, Nokia backed out of supporting MeeGo, its big partnership with Intel to create an open source smartphone operating system (based on Intel processing architecture, of course). Things looked bleak for MeeGo, even after Nokia released its lone MeeGo device, the N9. Today, the MeeGo project has been canceled, according to its blog. From its ashes, however, a new smartphone OS is rising: Tizen, a new collaboration between Intel and… Read More

The Attachmate Group has finalized its acquisition of Novell, completing a $2.2 billion deal announced last November that puts Novell into private hands. Attachmate intends to operate Novell as two separate business units under the Novell and SUSE brand names, alongside Attachmate's own brand and NetIQ. “Novell has had many chapters in its 28-year history and today marks the start of a new, exciting chapter,” said… Read More

Nokia may have left MeeGo out in the rain, but LG could be the one to bring it an umbrella. LG is said to be in talks to adopt MeeGo, an open source platform, on some or all of its smartphones, reports Reuters. ZTE and China Mobile may also be developing handsets based on the fledgling, still unfinished operating system. Though Nokia and Intel began the MeeGo project together, the Finnish phone maker's departure may actually benefit the… Read More

Finland's Nokia is betting the farm on Microsoft's Windows Phone platform, but the company still needs to support its Symbian ecosystem until that transition is complete. Although argument in favor of developing for Symbian largely vanished with Nokia's platform commitment to Microsoft, another shoe dropped today: Symbian is no longer available to developers on open licensing terms. Instead, Nokia is restricting Symbian… Read More

In an attempt to tamp-down fears that Google was closing the open doors of Android to the development community, Google's vice president of engineering Andy Rubin took to the Android Developers blog with a single message: Android will remain an open platform. Rubin's assurances that Android will remain the open-source mobile platform it's been since the beginning follow a Bloomberg Businessweek report from last week that… Read More

Barring the discovery of any major bugs, Mozilla will make available the final version of its Firefox 4 Web browser on March 22, according to a message posted in Mozilla's developer forum. “Firefox 4 RC1 has received a very warm welcome; it's time to make a decision to ship,” Mozilla's Damon Sicore wrote. “As of now, there are no known issues that would stop us from shipping RC1 as final … March 22nd… Read More

At this week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the LiMo Foundation officially took the wraps off LiMo 4, the latest edition of its open source Linux platform for mobile devices. The idea behind LiMo is to create an open source operating system that can support a wide variety of device and be complete customized by operators and device developers to meet their needs: there are no gotchas, and device makers are free to take the… Read More

We already know that Windows Phone 7 hasn’t quite lived up to expectations, but there’s still hope in the shape of its imminent upgrade. LiveSide got wind that French enthusiasts sites predict the update may be here as soon as February 7. It’s codenamed “NoDo” (taking a swipe at Android’s own OS upgrade scheduling, the alias means “no donuts,” although this was refuted by a Microsoft employee) and thanks to CEO Steve Ballmer’s CES keynote, we… Read More

Joomla 1.6 is designed to offer better site control and a more polished user experience. There are a variety of improvements to the software, enhancing website management and access, a more robust organizational structure for content control, and various other user-experience improvements throughout the software. “With new features and capabilities such as the hierarchical design of the access control system, semantic XHTML layouts, one-click… Read More

Shortly after igniting the fury of Delicious users everywhere, Yahoo tried to calm everyone by claiming it would be selling the popular bookmarking site instead of shutting it down. Unfortunately, interested buyers seem to be scarce. TechCrunch claims that parties considering buying Delicious reported that Yahoo has been unresponsive. The site also says that, according to one of the “five companies and venture firms that have reached out to… Read More

OpenBSD development lead Theo de Raadt says that he believes a government contracting firm was hired to write back doors into communications and encryption technology, but that those back doors, if written, did not make it into the OpenBSD code base. However, he is still encouraging contributors and users of the open source project to audit the code to look for any problems—and a few other issues have been uncovered. The controversy… Read More

Apache-extras.org provides a home for projects that are unable to, or do not wish to, conform to the ASF's requirements relating to intellectual property, license use and community management, but still want to have a relationship with Apache. As projects on the new Google-hosted service will not be managed by The Apache Software Foundation, one of the key difference is that participants may use whatever license and project management… Read More

From the moment Kinect hit shelves, people starting tearing it apart (literally, not figuratively). While the idea of a controller-free, motion-detection gaming device is an exciting one, hacking that device to pieces and exploring its full capabilities is what really seems to have gotten hold of the tech community. No sooner had it been announced that a developer had hacked Kinect to run on a PC, than Microsoft voiced it was very disappointed… Read More

Adafruit Industries, the MIT-backed, open-source-loving, DIY electronics company, has found a winner for its hack the Kinect competition. Formally called the Open Kinect (or OK) project, it was launched shortly before the release of Microsoft’s new motion-detection game console, and offered up $2,000 to the first person who could hack the Kinect (under an open source license) and run it on Windows. Why you ask? As Adafruit writes, “Imagine being… Read More