We have already seen how Microsoft is ramming its 18,000 patents into all Android device manufactures and making them pay for technologies that Microsoft does not deal with even remotely. Microsoft is nowhere in the Android game and this is a questionable action from Microsoft. Owning a lobby of patents to raise hue and cry on every other Android related technology is not really an ethical business practice. If you want to know how exactly Microsoft is earning more from Android than its own Windows Phone 7 platform, read  this  coverage  by  Joel Fernandes.

The world of software patents is getting ugly and the competition is extremely high. In such a world, it is extremely important to have a fair understanding of the technologies you are dealing with and the patent infringement it can cause. Generally, Open Source projects are not claimed against patent infringements because they are community efforts mostly and because they do not have the funding to pay hefty sums. However, prevention is always better than cure.

The Debian project has created an FAQ with some heavy legal aid that can give people an idea of patent liabilities pertaining to Community Distribution of Free and Open Source Software. It starts with the very basics of patents and explains the difference between patents and copyrights. Then, it goes on to explain infringements and the risk of patents to FOSS community projects and limitations of geographical boundaries on patents. If you are a developer working on a community project, you should absolutely know the risks and liabilities involved and  this FAQ  can offer good help to get started.

This week, the main talking point in the world of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is Oracle giving OpenOffice.org to the Apache foundation. There has been interesting developments for Ubuntu as well. Let us take a look at some of the most the important FOSS news of the week.

Oracle Gives OpenOffice.org To Apache; The Document Foundation Not Happy About It

After alienating all the contributors in the OpenOffice.org community, Oracle has finally decided to call it a day and have ceded control of the OpenOffice.org codebase to the Apache Software Foundation. OpenOffice.org will now be developed as an Apache Incubator Project. You can read more about this story here.

Meanwhile, The Document Foundation is not happy with Oracle’s decision to ignore them and give control of OpenOffice.org to the Apache Foundation. Since the beginning, TDF has been asking Oracle to join them and donate OpenOffice.org to them. Read more about it here.

Ubuntu 11.10 Alpha 1 Released

The first alpha of Ubuntu 11.10 was released a few days back. Being the first development release, not much has changed from Ubuntu 11.04 which was released around a month back. The GNOME stack has been updated to GNOME 3, though. Find out more about it here.

Asus To Release Eee PC Netbooks with Ubuntu Pre-installed

Asus has announced that they are planning to release three Eee PC netbook models with Ubuntu installed. They also said that they plan to make more models available with Ubuntu by the end of the year. The Asus Eee PC will come with Ubuntu 10.10 and with Flash and other media codecs installed. More here.

Linus Torvalds Released Linux 3.0 RC

Ending the speculation as to whether the version number will be 2.8 or 3.0, Linus Torvalds has released the first release candidate of Linux 3.0. Despite the major bump in the version number, there are no big changes in Linux 3.0. Linus said that he does not want to break anything and that development will go ahead in the same manner they have been doing for Linux 2.6.x. Read more here.

Debian Wheezy, which is currently in development, has already decided to switch to Linux 3.0.

Often non-profit organizations or small scale businesses have to buy costly administrative software packages to run their organization. It is a heavy cost burden for such organizations with low budgets. Selected as the “Project of the Month” for the month of May by SourceForge, OpenPetra is an outcome of an effort keeping in mind such organizations.

OM International, a Christian mission agency, wrote a software called PETRA. Developed during the nineties, the package was used in 80 offices of the organization located worldwide. To take the advantage of the open source community and to use the tool for the benefit of others who needed it, OM decided to change it to Open Source development process, which motivated the existing developers and also increased the potential for the software. OpenPetra is the outcome of the newly adopted development process.

The OpenPetra project offers a free and easy to use administrative software package for non profit-organizations. It has multi-user, multi-site, multi-currency, multi-language support and much more. It has six modules integrated into it . The following is a brief description of the modules:

1. Partner Module: The main functions of this module are to manage subscriptions, contacts and bulk mailing as well.

2. Finance Module: This module maintains general ledger, payable accounts, double-entry book keeping, budgeting and donation processing . It has the support for almost all currencies.

3. Personnel Module: This module manages personnel information for both short-term and long-term employees as well as process new job applications.

4. Conference Management: This module manages group assignments, accommodation and allocation, arrangement of arrivals and departures as well as attendance tracking.

5. Financial Development: This module manages project funding.

6. System Manager: This module is used by system administrator(s) to manage user accounts.

From 2004 to 2009, the code was developed code on .NET platform. In June 2009 OpenPetra was published under the GPLv3. Now OpenPetra has standard tools and open source databases for better development and implementation. OpenPetraSetup requires Windows XP (or later) or Linux, and uses about 24 MB of disk space. The backend must be a Relational Database Management System. Currently supported are PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQLite.

An important fact is that the software is modeled after an application that has been in use for an extended period of time in a sizable, global non-profit organization.

Though this promising project has areas of improvement, it has great potential for easing the administration of various kinds of organizations.

[via SourceForge Blog]

This week, we saw a lot of releases ranging from the release of Fedora 15 “Lovelock” to Puppy Linux Wary 5.1.2. Here are the main events that took place this week in the world of Free and Open Source Software.

Fedora 15 “Lovelock”

Six months after the release of Fedora 14, Fedora 15 “Lovelock” was released earlier this week. This is a very significant release not only for Fedora but for GNOME as well because it is the first major Linux distribution with GNOME Shell as the default desktop. Although, GNOME Shell is the most obvious change in Fedora 15, there are also a number of improvements under the hood such as the adoption of systemd, consistent network naming scheme etc. Read our coverage of the release for more details.

MeeGo to get Wayland this year

This is big news for both MeeGo and Wayland. The chief developer and creator of Wayland has announced that MeeGo might switch over to Wayland by October this year. Wayland is a replacement for the X Display Server which is more efficient and does not have the baggage that comes with X’s legacy supports. Refer this article for more details.

KDE SC 4.7 Beta was released for testing

KDE continues to develop the KDE platform at a very rapid pace. This week, they have released the first beta of KDE SC 4.7. The release has three important new features – improved offline search in Marble, GRUB2 integration in KDM and OpenGL-ES 2.0 support for KWin. The final release of KDE SC 4.7 is expected in June this year. Read this article for more details.

Linux 2.6.x series to end

Linus Torvalds has expressed his desire to end the current Linux 2.6.x series. The Linux 2.6.x series has been in development for more than seven years and has seen 39 releases till date. Torvalds said that the number has become too big and he is considering changing it to either 2.8 or 3.0. The suggestion to bump the version number to 3.x has been gaining good support as it can also mean the third decade of Linux development. More here.

Linux Mint 11 “Katya” Released – No Unity or GNOME 3

Linux Mint 11, codenamed “Katya” was released earlier this week. One of the main talking points of the release was not a new feature – rather the lack of it. Although Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, Linux Mint 11 has been released with the classic GNOME desktop. Linux Mint 11 also comes with many improvements such as better software manager and update manager. Read more here.

Puppy Linux Wary 5.1.2 Released

Puppy Linux Wary is yet another Linux distribution that was released this week. Although it is not nearly as popular as Fedora or Linux Mint, Puppy Linux has its own dedicated followers. The release is based on Puppy Linux 5 and has better hardware detection and a new experimental non-root account. Read more here.

Real time strategy game, 0 A.D., reaches 5th Alpha

0 A.D. is a real-time cross-platform strategy game which has been in development for sometime. A fifth alpha of the game has been released and it has better lighting in the game, new map, new faction etc. You can read more about it here. You can also read our previous article on 0 A.D. here.

Linux is often considered as a geeky OS when compared to Windows and Mac OS X, however, over the past few years it has become much easier to use and almost emulates a desktop environment which is similar to Windows and Mac.

There are several popular Linux Distros like Ubuntu, Fedora,   JoliCloud, Linux Mint and more which are now widely used by people. If you want to try out Linux you can also dual-boot on your Windows machine (see Install Ubuntu in Windows). However, if you are someone who is afraid of installing additional software on your computer, you can now test out Linux from your web browser, albeit only the command prompt.

The Linux browser emulator was created thanks to a port of an emulator called QEMU to JavaScript.

QEMU is a generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer.

When used as a machine emulator, QEMU can run OSes and programs made for one machine (e.g. an ARM board) on a different machine (e.g. your own PC). By using dynamic translation, it achieves very good performance.

When used as a virtualizer, QEMU achieves near native performances by executing the guest code directly on the host CPU. QEMU supports virtualization when executing under the Xen hypervisor or using the KVM kernel module in Linux. When using KVM, QEMU can virtualize x86, server and embedded PowerPC, and S390 guests.

The emulator has been written by Fabrice Bellard, a famous open source developer who has also developed several other popular projects in the past. The Linux PC emulator is written completely in JavaScript and was compiled using 2.6.20 Linux Kernel. The emulated hardware consists of the following things:

• a 32 bit x86 compatible CPU
• a 8259 Programmble Interrupt Controller
• a 8254 Programmble Interrupt Timer
• a 16450 UART.

Most of the modern browsers sport faster and smarter JavaScript engines. The Linux emulator for browsers goes on to show how powerful JavaScript has become and what it could be used to do.

The developer has tested Linux in browser in Firefox 4 and Google Chrome 11. The beta version of Google Chrome is not yet supported. You can test out the Linux OS in the browser by visiting http://bellard.org/jslinux/. Also visit this technical notes page for more information on the Linux emulator for the browser.

TORONTO, Canada, 6th May 2011: Airtime, the free, open source radio software, increased its feature set significantly in April and May with three releases in thirty days. The Airtime server software runs on Ubuntu Linux, Debian, and Redhat and multiple users can use the software to schedule radio shows remotely through any web browser.

It is developed by Sourcefabric, a Czech non-profit organisation dedicated to supporting quality journalism through open source software and tools. The latest release was Airtime 1.8.1 on May 3rd.

Airtime now contains one of the most-requested features by our users: the ability to automatically record a live show and rebroadcast up to ten times at later datessaid Paul Baranowski, Chief Technical Officer. Stations can now also upload a recorded show automatically to Soundcloud, one of the fastest growing audio-sharing sites in the world.

Airtime’s calendar also now performs better than ever – loading a station schedule is five to eight times faster. In tests of Airtime 1.7, if the month calendar had shows scheduled for every hour of every day, it used to take 16 seconds to load. In Airtime 1.8 it takes two seconds.
Airtime comes packaged for the first time with a pair of standalone JQuery widgets allowing websites to display what’s currently playing and the upcoming schedule of a radio station using the software.

Other significant improvements include greater support for web-streaming, improvements for single-button Apple computers, native support of the open source OGG format, full support of Internet Explorer 8 and improved install scripts.

The increased feature set is getting the worldwide community attention it deserves,said Sava Tatić, Sourcefabric’s Managing Director. We’re seeing an increasing number of stations switching to Airtime and making use of the services we offer, including technical support and paid feature development.

More info at http://airtime.sourcefabric.org

I have always advocated the use of royalty free codecs (first Ogg-Theora and then WebM) for the HTML5 <video> tag. The WebM movement has been slowly but surely gaining momentum since its inception. We have already seen almost all the the major desktop browser vendors (Google, Opera Software, Mozilla and Microsoft^*) adopt Google’s open source and royalty free media format. Desktop media players like Winamp are beginning to embrace WebM. And, perhaps most crucially, chip makers like Intel are working to add WebM support at the hardware level.

One of the biggest challenges for WebM is the intellectual properties issue. It’s no secret that the patent system is seriously messed up. Some of the patents granted to the members of MPEG LA, the consortium that owns the patent pool for H.264, are so broad and ambiguous that it’s almost impossible to develop a media codec without violating them. Nevertheless, Google has maintained that WebM doesn’t infringe any existing patents, and is a clean and reliable royalty free alternative to H.264. A couple of months back, MPEG LA, the entity that stands to loose the most from the success of WebM, called upon its members to submit patents essential to the VP8 video codec specification, presumably in preparation of a patent infringement lawsuit..

With the threat of legal action looming, all the companies involved and interested in the growth of WebM have formed a cross-license initiative. It’s essentially a consortium that will freely share all patents related to WebM on a royalty free basis. Google was already working closely with Xiph (maintainers of the Ogg audio format) and Matroska (maintainers of the Matroska video container). Additionally, CCL includes the likes of AMD, LG, Mozilla, Opera Software, Samsung, and Texas instruments. The hope is that with the backing of these corporations, WebM will be able to tackle any legal challenge that it might have to face in the future.

*Internet Explorer 9 can play WebM videos provided that the required codecs have already been installed.

After a dozen betas, and two release candidates, Mozilla has finally released the public build of Firefox 4. It took nearly a year to come, but now that it’s here, expect it to break all records. With well over five thousand downloads per minute, at the moment, Firefox seems well poised to go past the ten million mark. You can tack Firefox 4 downloads in realtime from glow.mozilla.org.

Although, several planned features were dropped from Firefox 4, as it struggled to stay on schedule, Firefox 4 is a meaty update, which boasts of some pretty significant enhancements.

The user interface has been refined to give the website higher priority. Tabs are now on top (as they should be), and the menu bar has been replaced with a single “Firefox” button.

Firefox 4 is significantly faster than its predecessors, courtesy of the new JagerMonkey JavaScript engine, and should be able to hold its own against the likes of Opera 11, Chrome 10 and Internet Explorer 9. Also new to this build is hardware (GPU) acceleration and WebGL support. Unfortunately, hardware acceleration is currently not supported in Linux. WebGL compatibility means that Firefox is ready to meet the demands of the new age, graphics intensive web-applications and games.

Other new features in Firefox 4 include in-built synchronization option, “Panaroma” tab organization, app tabs, multi-touch support, DNT (Do Not Track) header support, WebM video playback, crash protection for popular plug-ins (Flash, QuickTime, Silverlight etc.), HTML 5 parser, and open type fonts support. The full changelog for Firefox 4 is available here.

Firefox 4 for Windows, Mac and Linux is available in more than seventy languages from firefox.com.

Google has announced that it will be dropping support for H.264 in future versions of Chrome, and instead focus on high quality open codecs. Although Google’s announcement is surprising, it’s not completely unexpected. Last year, Google spent a fair amount of cash to acquire On2, the startup behind VP8. Later, Google unveiled its own open source codec called WebM, based on On2′s VP8. Now that WebM has begun to witness increasing amounts of hardware support, as well as improvement in performance, Google obviously feels that the time is right to put its foot down.

The core issue with H.264 has been that it is proprietary. Last year, MPEG-LA made H.264 royalty free forever for free web broadcasts, in an attempt to counter WebM. However, even that move was deemed insufficient since it didn’t include applications that encode and decode video, as well as commercial broadcasts. It also didn’t alleviate the threat that some other patent holding body might come calling.

Chrome will now join Opera and Firefox as browsers supporting only open video codecs, i.e. Theora and WebM. Microsoft had earlier announced that it will be supporting both H.264 and WebM in Internet Explorer 9, provided that the codec for the latter is installed on the system. Apple, which has been pushing for HTML5 <video> as an alternative to Flash, has been a steadfast supporter of H.264. It will probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future as hardware decoding support (which is crucial for portable devices like the iPod and the iPhone) for WebM is still fairly limited.

Although Google’s decision to drop H.264 support from Chrome represents a major setback for H.264, don’t expect it to disappear immediately. Apple’s dominance over the mobile devices segment, and the lack of WebM support in tablets and phones is something Google will have to contend with.

How many Ubuntu fans also like Japanese Manga comics? My guess would be that it’s a pretty high percentage. The author of this comic series, Hiroshi Seo, is apparently a big fan of Ubuntu, the Linux operating system that many of us have come to love.

The love for a great free operating system plays the main role in this Ubuntu Romantic School Comedyseries. I leafed through the first two of the six episodes available. The graphics are well done and the plot is typically adolescent, as I had expected. There’s no need to worry about this series though, I’d rate it as safe for kids to read.

If you are a Linux fan, and you also like Manga, you may want to waste a little time reading Ubunchu.

Visit this site to read Ubunchu! in English and several other languages.

[Via HowToGeek]