FOSS Week in Review Obama disarms Samsung An already unlevel playing field just became more tilted as far as patents are concerned. We are shaking…
Posts published by “FOSS Force”
FOSS Week in Review
USPTO shoots down Apple patent
There seems to be more than enough tit-for-tat to go around in the ongoing patent battle between Apple and Samsung. If we wanted to be snarky, we’d say we haven’t seen this much legal maneuvering since the last days of the Beatles and the “sue me, sue you blues.”
Back on June 23, when we asked you to name the first Linux distro you ever used, we pretty much knew that the choice “Other” would take the day.
That’s because we wanted to be completely neutral, so the ten choices we offered besides “Other” were just the top ten distros from the Distrowatch “Page Hit Ranking,” which meant that those who started their Linux life with something other than Debian or SUSE in the pre-Ubuntu era were not represented.
Let’s spend a few paragraphs celebrating the small bloggers who write about FOSS and GNU/Linux. If you’re like us, you probably have a favorite blogger or three you like to read.
Let’s be clear; we’re talking blogs and not every website is a blog.
FOSS Week in Review
Ubuntu Edge–computing on the go-go
Probably the biggest news in all of tech this week, not just the FOSS world, came with Canonical’s announcement on Monday of the Ubuntu Edge. In case you’ve been away camping somewhere all week, the Edge is a hybrid device that can function both as a high end smartphone, running either Android or Ubuntu Touch, or it can be hooked up to a monitor, keyboard and mouse to work as a conventional PC running Ubuntu Linux.
That news alone would be dumbfounding enough, but as the pitchman on TV always says, “Wait! There’s more…”
FOSS Week in Review
Here we go with yet another “better late then never” edition of our Week in Review…
Jolla smartphones to utilize Wayland
You might remember Jolla, the Finnish company started by a group of laid-off Nokia employees. Back in May, we reported on their plans to release a new phone to be sold online that would run their own MeeGo fork called Sailfish OS.
The results have been tallied and Debian got the most votes in our Community Distro Poll. We would call them the “winner,” but this wasn’t about winners and losers. It was about trying to reach a consensus on what we mean by the term “community distro.” We asked, “Which GNU/Linux distros do you consider to be legitimate community distros?” Choices weren’t limited to one; voters could choose as many as they wanted and even add more through a text box supplied by choosing “Other.”
FOSS Week in Review–Part 2
Now that we got last week out of the way, let’s look at what happened this week–or at least news that came to our attention this week…
You can now actually own digital comics
Digital rights and anti-DRM activists should be a little happy to learn that a major player in the comics’ world has decided to make actual ownership of its comics possible.
FOSS Week in Review–Part 1
We’re making up for lost time. We took last week off to celebrate the Fourth (any excuse for a party), so this week you get more bang for your buck. To paraphrase the Doublemint Twins, you get two, two, two weeks in one!
Windows 8 now used by more people than Vista
Something tells us this is a milestone Steve Ballmer wishes we’d keep quiet about, but last week we learned from CNET that Windows 8 is now on more computers than Vista. It took eight months, but as of June, the installed base of Redmond’s latest has now passed that of Vista, probably the least popular operating system in Microsoft’s history.
The polls are closed. The votes have been counted. CentOS hands down wins our Web Server OS poll.
About six weeks ago we offered-up a list of six GNU/Linux distros and asked which you’d choose for your web server if you were limited to the distros on that list. The list was composed of what we’ve found to be the most frequently offered Linux OS choices by web hosting companies for their virtual private server (VPS) or dedicated server customers. We offered each of the six in both their 32 bit and 64 bit implementations, which is also usually the case with web hosting companies.
Missing from the list were two distros that are almost exclusively associated with server environments, Red Hat and SUSE Linux Enterprise. They were not included in our list because they’re rarely offered without additional cost by hosting companies because they’re not freely available to download and install.