The Open Sourcerer - Slashdot User

Submission + - Mickos urges EU to approve Oracle's MySQL takeover (cnet.com) 1

Submitted by mjasay on Thursday October 08, 2009 @05:26PM

mjasay writes: Former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos has written to EU Commissioner of Competition Neelie Kroes to urge speedy approval of Oracle's proposed purchase of Sun, including the open-source MySQL database. The EU is has been worried that Oracle's acquisition of Sun could end up hurting competition by dampening or killing MySQL's momentum. But in his letter, Mickos separates MySQL, the community, from MySQL, the company, arguing that Oracle's takeover cannot hurt the MySQL community: "Those two meanings of the term 'MySQL' stand in a close mutually beneficial interaction with each other. But, most importantly, this interaction is voluntary and cannot be directly controlled by the vendor." In a follow-up interview with CNET, Mickos indicated that he has no financial interest in the matter, but instead argues he "couldn't live with the fact that [he's] not taking action," and is "motivated now by trying to help the employees still at MySQL and Sun, and by an urge to bring rational discussion to the matter."

Comment Re:Still not progress (Score 2, Informative) 284

by The Open Sourcerer on Friday July 31, 2009 @10:52AM (#28896215) Attached to: Amazon US Refunds Windows License Fee, Too

In the EU bundling like this and making the user have to agree to something else after purchasing the product is actually illegal AFAICT. This chap explains it quite well: http://www.3spoken.co.uk/2009/07/eula-and-cars-analogy.html

Amazon US Refunds Windows License Fee, Too 284

Posted by kdawson on Friday July 31, 2009 @09:29AM from the sound-of-a-crumbling-business-model dept.

rrohbeck writes "Today Amazon credited my card with $65.45. After ordering an Eee PC 1005 HA from amazon.com, I asked them for a refund for the cost of Windows XP via the 'Contact us' form. At first they told me to cancel any items on my order that I wanted a refund for, but after I explained that XP was pre-installed on the machine they got it. They asked what the cost of the OS was, and I answered that I had no idea but that Amazon UK refunded £40.00. Within a few hours I got a response saying 'I've requested a refund of $65.45 to your Visa card.' Somehow I doubt that Amazon will charge Asus or even Microsoft, but maybe they will one day if more people do this. Oh, and peeling off the 'Designed for Microsoft Windows XP' sticker is easy, too."

CentOS Project Administrator Goes AWOL 492

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday July 30, 2009 @09:29AM from the going-out-for-smokes dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Lance Davis, the main project administrator for CentOS, a popular free 'rebuild' of Red Hat's Enterprise Linux, appears to have gone AWOL. In an open letter from his fellow CentOS developers, they describe the precarious situation the project has been put in. There have been attempts to contact him for some time now, as he's the sole administrator for the centos.org domain, the IRC channels, and apparently, CentOS funds. One can only hope that Lance gets in contact with them and gets things sorted out."

Amazon UK Refunds Windows License Fee, With Little Hassle 194

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 23, 2009 @03:36PM from the obey-lord-good-idea dept.

christian.einfeldt writes "Alan Lord, a FOSS computer consultant based in the UK, has announced that Amazon UK honored his request for a refund of the Microsoft license fee portion of the cost of a new Asus netbook PC that came with Microsoft Windows XP. Lord details the steps that he took to obtain a refund of 40.00 GBP for the cost of the EULA, complete with links to click to request a refund. Lord's refund comes 10 years after the initial flurry of activity surrounding EULA discounts, started by a blog post by Australian computer consultant Geoffrey Bennett which appeared on Slashdot on 18 January 1999. That Slashdot story led to mainstream press coverage, such as stories in CNN, the New York Times Online, and the San Francisco Chronicle, to name just a few. The issue quieted down for a few years, but has started to gain some momentum again in recent years, with judges in France, Italy, and Israel awarding refunds. But if Lord's experience is any indication, getting a refund through Amazon might be as easy as filling out a few forms, at least in the UK, without any need to go to court."

Grokking SCO's Demise 242

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday August 18, 2008 @01:00PM from the remember-that-one dept.

An anonymous reader writes "You have already heard the news that the SCO Group's US$5 billion threat against Linux is effectively finished. It was the Web site Groklaw.net that broke the news and posted the complete 102-page ruling; after that, it was picked up by mainstream media and trade press. In fact, it's Groklaw that has covered every aspect of SCO's legal fights with Linux vendors IBM , Novell and Red Hat and Linux users Daimler Chrysler and AutoZone ever since paralegal Pamela Jones started the site as a hobby in 2003. This feature does a great job of chronicling Groklaws' hand in the demise of SCO's case."

Submission + - Linux based phonesystem phones home (trixbox.org) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 16, 2007 @07:45AM

An anonymous reader writes: Users of Trixbox, a PBX based on Asterisk, discovered that the software has been calling home with their usage and statistics.
From the article:
"I have just been made aware of a file '/var/adm/bin/registry.pl' that contain the following commented lines describing the program:

# This file is design to be executed regularly by an external controller such as cron.
# It retrieves a list of commands to be executed from the specified URI and executes them, saving the output
# and returning it to the webserver as an encrypted string."

Trixbox is owned by Fonality, which makes customised PBXs (again based on asterisk) for paying customers and this is not the first time that Fonality has been called out for their data collection.

See http://voxilla.com/component/option,...emid,107/p,27/

Submission + - Microsoft disses Windows to sell...more Windows (cnet.com) 1

Submitted by

mjasay

on Monday December 10, 2007 @05:51AM

mjasay writes: "I stumbled across this fascinating Microsoft tutorial entitled "How to Justify a Desktop Upgrade." It's an attempt to coach IT professionals on how to sell Windows desktop upgrades internally. Apparently the value of Vista is not readily apparent, requiring detailed instructions on how to connive and cajole into an upgrade from XP. The most intriguing thing about the tutorial is its implicit rejection of Microsoft's older technology. Just a few years ago Microsoft was pitching the world on how secure and cool XP was. Now it's telling us largely the opposite, implying that XP is a security threat, costs too much to run, and so on. With Microsoft marketing against itself, perhaps the Mac and Linux camps can simply wait for Microsoft to self-destruct?"

Comment A farce of monumental proportions (Score 1) 1

by The Open Sourcerer on Thursday December 06, 2007 @05:31PM (#21603707) Attached to: Microsoft Revokes an OOXML Promise

Once of the biggest and most scandalous aspects of this whole sorry saga, is that Microshaft have themselves have stated that they "may or may not" actually implement the ISO standard that might come out of this process. They (M$) should be taken apart and sold for scrap - The lot of them.

Submission + - Microsoft Revokes an OOXML Promise (groklaw.net) 1

Submitted by

640 Comments Are Enough for Anyone

on Thursday December 06, 2007 @04:17PM

640 Comments Are Enough for Anyone writes: "Microsoft is going back on one of their promises concerning OOXML. While they originally promised, and got some to vote for OOXML, based on the premise that the ISO would take control of the standard if it were approved, Microsoft is now reversing that position and keeping near-full control over OOXML with the EMCA. This is significant because the EMCA is the group that originally rubber-stamped OOXML, and it seems unlikely that they will correct the problems when they were the ones who hid the 662 comments in individual PDFs on a password-protected website earlier this week, and the ECMA group working on OOXML is Microsoft controlled. In Microsoft's new plan, the ISO would only be allowed to publish lists of errata and would be unable to make OOXML compatible with existing ISO standards, while the EMCA would be the one to control any new versions of the standard."

YouTube Breeding Harmful Scientific Misinformation 816

Posted by kdawson on Thursday December 06, 2007 @02:17PM from the playing-to-the-emotions dept.

Invisible Pink Unicorn writes "University of Toronto researchers have uncovered widespread misinformation in videos on YouTube related to vaccination and immunization. In the first-ever study of its kind, they found that over half of the 153 videos analyzed portrayed childhood, HPV, flu and other vaccinations negatively or ambiguously. They also found that videos highly skeptical of vaccinations received more views and better ratings by users than those videos that portray immunizations in a positive light. According to the lead researcher, 'YouTube is increasingly a resource people consult for health information, including vaccination. Our study shows that a significant amount of immunization content on YouTube contradicts the best scientific evidence at large. From a public health perspective, this is very concerning.' An extract from the Journal of the American Medical Association is available online."

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