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GNU is Not Unix

Free Software Foundation Turns 25 183

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i-dig-the-crazy dept.
An anonymous reader writes "On this day, 25 years ago, Richard Stallman created the Free Software Foundation. He had been the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Lab. Tired of seeing software that he and others had written appropriated (without acknowledgment or compensation) by disreputable software companies and then told to pay for software they had written, Stallman took action, creating the foundation. The original license was written by Stallman. Stallman had subsequently written a large number of GNU tools, but the license was his most important contribution."
Linux Business

Submission + - Should Enterprise IT Give Back To Open Source? (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "InfoWorld reports on the fight over open source 'leeches' — companies that use open source technology but don't give back to the open source community. While some view such organizations as a tragedy of the commons, others view the notion of 'freeloaders' as a relic of open source's Wild West era, when coding was a higher calling and free software a religion. To be sure, increased adoption by mainstream enterprises has played a hand in changing the terms of this debate. Yet, as the biggest consumer of open source software, enterprise IT still gives almost nothing back to the community, critics contend, calling into question the long-term effect corporate culture will have on the evolution of open source — and the long-term effect open source will have on rewiring companies toward collaboration."
Red Hat Software

Red Hat to Coax Code Contributions From Companies 205

Posted by CmdrTaco from the awesome-alliteration dept.
Stony Stevenson writes "New Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has hit out at enterprises, bemoaning that billions of dollars are wasted each year because 95% of companies won't share code. Speaking at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco, he said his company must take a larger role in urging enterprises to participate in open source projects and, in some cases, coax code contributions out of companies that have made in-house improvements. He now feels Red Hat should lead the way 'It should be part of Red Hat's job to define development in a new way, and get companies to work together' on shared projects, he said. The joint development projects would be designed to cover non-competitive parts of an industry, with individual companies still focused on their own competitive business applications."
IBM

Submission + - IBM Challenges Microsoft with Free Office Suite

Submitted by BBCWatcher
BBCWatcher writes: The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and several other news outlets report that IBM will announce a free, downloadable office suite today in a direct challenge to Microsoft. The news comes only a week after IBM announced it is joining OpenOffice.org and dedicating 35 developers to the project.

IBM is resurrecting an old name for this brand new software: Lotus Symphony. The new Symphony, based on Open Office, is yet another product to support Open Document Format (ODF), the ISO standard for universal document interchange. There are about 135 million Lotus Notes users, and they will also receive Symphony free. IBM support will be available for a fee. There are no details yet about platform support, but IBM is supporting Lotus Notes 8 on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, so at least those three are likely.

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Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother. - Kahlil Gibran

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