TimburyDotOrg

When big companies release new software, they launch it with lots of hoopla: press tours, technical conferences, free T-shirts. Open-source projects, even the well-known ones, generally release their major new versions with a lot less fanfare. The FOSS (free and open-source software) community is often too busy coding and testing to bother with marketing, even when the new “point release” of the software is really remarkable. And there are plenty of remarkable open-source applications on the way this year. Quite a few projects are quietly (or not so quietly) working on major releases or significant upgrades that they aim to make available sometime during 2009. I’ve rounded up 25 of the most notable here.

RealTech News: “What do you get when you cover an old Volvo with singing fish and lobsters and combine the whole thing with a Linux server? This is what you get:”

TuxArena: “In this guide I will show how to create CD/DVD ISO images in Ubuntu using four easy methods.”

InternetNews: “Novell is making it easier for a Microsoft .NET developer to deploy their applications on Linux, whether they develop their applications on Windows or on Linux, with the release of Mono 2.4.”

California Quantum: “…I do want to point out that the open source world is as close as you can get to a pure free market. The reason is because if you make a product in the open source world, anybody is able to study it, modify it, redistribute it and even sell it without many restrictions.”

I personally hope that the Conficker/Downup/Downadup/Kido computer worm — that surfaced in October 2008 and targets the Microsoft Windows operating system, that activates on April 1st — shows Windows users just how insecure the Windows operating system is, and how slow Microsoft is to react to it, and “patch” it. … businesses stop production because of this worm … become spam websites, displaying advertisements and sending out thousands of spam and denial of service emails. … GNU/Linux might actually become mainstream, maybe even over night.

IBM last week filed a patent application for an offshore outsourcing methodology that is intended to help companies minimize the financial risks associated with sending work overseas. The patent application describes a computer-driven approach for putting values on both the quantitative and qualitative attributes of a “global resource sourcing strategy.” For instance, the methodology takes into account the language skills and morale of offshore workers, as well as a list of the hard numbers involved in setting up an offshore operation, including labor rates and currency valuations. In short, IBM is attempting to reduce offshoring considerations to a mathematic model — or, in the words of the application, “a robust and reusable sourcing template” for identifying and analyzing “global resource pools.”

The popular Linux distribution Ubuntu has it latest Beta version released, version 9.04. This Beta is running fine on several Netbooks, as both Liliputing.com & the Ubuntu Mini Blog are reporting.

This article is a guide on how to solve problems with your FreeNAS server. It covers where to look for information about the problem as well as how to hunt down problems by being methodical. It also looks at the common problems people have with their FreeNAS servers including networking problems and possible solutions along with how to handle RAID failures.

Jim Zemlin’s blog: “When it counts, it appears that Microsoft still actively seeks to undermine those technologies or standards that are truly open, especially when those technologies pose a significant threat to their business.”