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GNOME

GNOME 3.8 Released Featuring New "Classic" Mode 267

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the extend-freely dept.
Hot on the heels of the Gtk+ 3.8 release comes GNOME 3.8. There are a few general UI improvements, but the highlight for many is the new Classic mode that replaces fallback. Instead of using code based on the old GNOME panel, Classic emulates the feel of GNOME 2 through Shell extensions (just like Linux Mint's Cinnamon interface). From the release notes: "Classic mode is a new feature for those people who prefer a more traditional desktop experience. Built entirely from GNOME 3 technologies, it adds a number of features such as an application menu, a places menu and a window switcher along the bottom of the screen. Each of these features can be used individually or in combination with other GNOME extensions."
Google

Google Pledges Not To Sue Any Open Source Projects Using Their Patents 153

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the now-and-forever dept.
sfcrazy writes "Google has announced the Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge. In the pledge Google says that they will not sue any user, distributor, or developer of Open Source software on specified patents, unless first attacked. Under this pledge, Google is starting off with 10 patents relating to MapReduce, a computing model for processing large data sets first developed at Google. Google says that over time they intend to expand the set of Google's patents covered by the pledge to other technologies." This is in addition to the Open Invention Network, and their general work toward reforming the patent system. The patents covered in the OPN will be free to use in Free/Open Source software for the life of the patent, even if Google should transfer ownership to another party. Read the text of the pledge. It appears that interaction with non-copyleft licenses (MIT/BSD/Apache) is a bit weird: if you create a non-free fork it appears you are no longer covered under the pledge.
Databases

MySQL's Creator On Why the Future Belongs To MariaDB 208

Posted by samzenpus from the new-big-thing dept.
angry tapir writes "When Oracle purchased Sun, many in the open source community were bleak about the future of MySQL. According to MySQL co-creator Michael "Monty" Widenius, these fears have been proven by Oracle's attitude to MySQL and its community. In the wake of the Sun takeover, Monty forked MySQL to create MariaDB, which has picked up momentum (being included by default in Fedora, Open SUSE and, most recently, Slackware). I recently interviewed Monty about what he learned from the MySQL experience and the current state of MariaDB."
Oracle

Oracle Releases SPARC T5 Servers; Too Late? 175

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the sparc-of-life dept.
First time accepted submitter bobthesungeek76036 writes "On March 26th, Larry Ellison and always with fashionable haircut John Fowler announced the new line of SPARC servers from Oracle. Touted as the fastest microprocessor in the world, they put up some impressive SPEC numbers against much more expensive (and older) IBM hardware. Is the industry still interested in SPARC or is it too late for Larry to regain the server market that Sun Microsystems had many moons ago?" El Reg has a pretty good overview of the new hardware; the T5 certainly looks interesting for highly threaded work loads (there's some massive SMT going on with 16 threads per core), but with Intel dominating for single-threaded performance and ARM-based servers becoming available squeezing them for massive multi-threading, is there really any hope in Oracle's efforts to stay in the hardware game?

Comment Proprietary binary software (Score 4, Insightful) 605

by leandrod (#43083815) Attached to: Why Can't Intel Kill x86?

There are loads of proprietary, binary software around. Some people even run OS/2 because they won’t port their software to something newer. FreeDOS is around and used in production. Alpha emulated x86 quite competently, and current x86 processors are actually Risc chips with an x86 translation unit.

Until most software is based on open standards and free components that can be trivially recompiled, all platforms will live much longer than people would like them to.

Comment Re:The problem with FOSS office suites (Score 1) 266

by leandrod (#41703531) Attached to: OpenOffice Is Now, Officially, Apache OpenOffice

I used templates supplied by Create Space that were intended for MS Word. The documents were both several hundred pages and included illustrations. I used The Gimp to create front and back cover images and free fonts from Font Squirrel for the title fonts. OO worked
perfectly.

Sanity happens. Now, if the templates are badly done with complex direct formatting, and if you have to go back and forth with
the proprietary word processor several times, or if it is ‘Open’XML, then bad things happen.

Comment Re:The problem with FOSS office suites (Score 1) 266

by leandrod (#41695787) Attached to: OpenOffice Is Now, Officially, Apache OpenOffice

Strangely enough, I've had better lucking importing huge documents ( > 400 pages ) into OO and formatting for print than in Word itself.

Not strange at all, if the original document used styles sanely instead of going for complex direct formatting.

When things really break is when one has to collaborate with people who resist to LibreOffice on some badly formatted document, and then you have to convert to
and back again several times.

Comment Re:The problem with FOSS office suites (Score 1) 266

by leandrod (#41693231) Attached to: OpenOffice Is Now, Officially, Apache OpenOffice

The only fundamental way where LibreOffice falls short is when dealing with unnecessary complexity in the proprietary suite
files.

I think it's pretty clear that this is a fundamental shortfall of those files and formats, not of LO. The latter would have no problem opening and saving them if they were not obfuscated and undocumented. Just as with the nouveau driver, it's Jesus- worthy miracle that it works at all.

That was my point.

But I actually think it is not only the proprietary file formats being bad. It is also that the proprietary suite falls short
in organising documents with styles and templates, so people use very complex direct formatting.

Comment Re:The problem with FOSS office suites (Score 5, Informative) 266

by leandrod (#41692385) Attached to: OpenOffice Is Now, Officially, Apache OpenOffice

I remember at least three incidents where I was instructed to evaluate Open Office, Libre Office or other F/OSS word processing or layout packages. In each instance, the F/OSS products fell short in fundamental ways, and were a total disaster for larger documents.

Quite to the contrary, LibreOffice deals better with long documents than the proprietary alternative, and also it never
corrupts complex documents like the proprietary alternative.

The only fundamental way where LibreOffice falls short is when dealing with unnecessary complexity in the proprietary suite
files. Complexity which is fairly common, given the proprietary suite deficiencies in structuring documents.

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