Its full gear for Google Summer of Code 2007 [here] in the upcomming month of March when Google begins accepting applications. According to the Google website [here], the program offers student developers stipends to write code for various FOSS projects. Google works with a several FOSS and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month-period.
SpamAssassin is a computer program released freely under the Apache License 2.0 used for e-mail spam filtering based on content-matching rules, which also supports DNS-based, checksum-based and statistical filtering, supported by external programs and online databases.
Postfix is a free software / open source mail transfer agent (MTA), a computer program for the routing and delivery of email. It is intended as a fast, easy-to-administer, and secure alternative to the widely-used Sendmail MTA.
The Courier Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) is an integrated mail/groupware server based on open commodityT protocols, such as ESMTP, IMAP, POP3, LDAP, SSL, and HTTP. Courier provides ESMTP, IMAP, POP3, webmail, and mailing list services within a single, consistent, framework. Individual components can be enabled or disabled at will. Courier now implements basic web-based calendaring and scheduling services integrated in the webmail module. Advanced groupware calendaring services will follow soon. It works together with Evolution and Kmail.
KMail is the e-mail client of the KDE desktop environment. It supports folders, filtering, viewing HTML mail, and international character sets. It can handle IMAP, POP3 and local mailboxes for incoming mail. It can send mail via SMTP or sendmail. It has features such as support for powerful filters, PGP/GnuPG privacy, inline attachments, drag and drop support of messages and attachments, support for multiple POP3 and IMAP accounts, and integration into the Kontact personal information management suite.
Thanks to our friends from the UNDP-APDIP-IOSN International Open Source Network’s ASEAN+3 Node in the Philippines [here] who only recently organized the Asia Source 2 FOSS Camp in Indonesia [here] have produced a CD Package, filled with useful FOSS based free business applications titled SME-in-a-Box. I was lucky enough to be there and recieve a copy of the CD the content of which I will now be sharing through TuxWatch.org exclusively for our readers.
“SME-in-a-Box� is a toolkit designed to meet the specialized needs of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) based on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). The aim is to provide a selection of peer-reviewed software and material, which help businesses to grow. SME-in-a-Box leverages the power of FOSS for social and economic development. The collection comprises of software and manuals for general use of SMEs in their daily operations and management. Online links for each application will be conveniently included on this website directing the end-user to relevant websites and thus, gaining quick access to both downloades and advanced technical documentations and case studies.
The Vancouver PHP conference is wrapping up with a free event open to the public. The event’s panelists will be discussing, amongst other things, choosing a license, GPL3, common misconceptions about the GPL, growth in GPL, winning over new converts to FOSS, reasons why businesses choose FOSS, the current state of FOSS in North America, and encouraging the growth of FOSS in Vancouver and across North America.
According to the Red Hat Website [here], the Swedish Armed Forces have made the decision to migrate their servers from Windows NT to Red Hat Enterprise Linux thus replacing Windows NT with Red Hat Enterprise Linux across its core IT infrastructure. The decision by Swedish authorities is driven by security considerations.
Asterisk [here] is a complete IP PBX in software created by Mark Spencer of Digium, Inc in 1999. Asterisk runs on a wide variety of operating systems including Linux, Mac OS X, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and Sun Solaris providing all the features of a PBX advanced features of high end/cost proprietary PBXs. It supports Voice over IP and is interoperable with almost all standards-based telephony equipment and the best part of it, it uses relatively inexpensive hardware.
According to NetCraft [here], in the February 2007 survey, NetCraft received responses from 108,810,358 sites, an increase of 1.93 million from last month. Apache has a decline of 442K sites this month, and sees its share of the web server market slip by 1.47 percent to 58.7 percent. This is the first time Apache’s market share has been below 60 percent since September 2002.
Alright guys, the Linux 2.6.20 Kernel has been released after two months of development and includes two different virtualization implementations. KVM gives full-virtualization capabilities using Intel/AMD virtualization extensions and a paravirtualization implementation usable by different hypervisors. Additionally, 2.6.20 includes PS3 support, a fault injection debugging feature, UDP-lite support, better per-process IO accounting, relative atime, relocatable x86 kernel, some x86 micro optimizations, lockless radix-tree readside, shared page tables for hugetbl, and many other things. For more information on the list of changes, visit [here].
Jim Finkle reports [here] from Boston (Reuters) that the Free Software Foundation is reviewing Novell Inc.’s right to sell new versions of Linux operating system software after the open-source community criticized Novell for teaming up with Microsoft Corp. According to Eben Moglen, FSF’s General Counsel, “The community of people wants to do anything they can to interfere with this deal and all deals like it. They have every reason to be deeply concerned that this is the beginning of a significant patent aggression by Microsoft”. The foundation controls intellectual property rights to key parts of the open-source Linux operating system.
I would also definitely agree with the FSF since on one side, Novell took the contributions of the FOSS community to build its Operating System offerings and on the other side opted to bring on Microsoft that in originality has always taken Linux as a threat, to protect those contributions which in its own is a pretty silly way to manage IPR.
How can you make money off of FOSS?
The easiest is selling FOSS. Be sure to explain to customers that it’s a matter of freedom, not price. Distributing this book with the software might be a good idea. Remember that if the software’s under the GGPL and you distribute binaries, you must include the source with the binaries and/or offer the source separate. You could also write free documentation and sell that. The same things in the above paragraph apply here.
An interesting article from the IBM Website [here] that a lack of physical memory can severely hamper Linux performance. In this article, learn how to accurately measure the amount of memory your Linux system uses. You also get practical advice on reducing your memory requirements using an Ubuntu system as an example. A much-touted benefit of Linux is that it is more efficient than Microsoft® Windows®, and will therefore perform better on less than cutting-edge hardware. This performance makes Linux a very attractive upgrade for the many people who have old Windows 98-era boxes still sitting around that are no longer being treated to the latest and greatest software (particularly security patches).
The article walks readers through the basics of memory, choosing the right desktop environment with appropriate applications, removing unwanted services and settings, appropriate planning and then how to optimize your system.
The news of the month is that the Linux kernel community is offering end users and in particular companies free Linux driver development services says Greg on the Linux Kernel Monkey Blog [here]. The objective is to reduce the issues and sufferings of searching for a suitable device driver for Linux thus no need to search Linux Device Driver Kits and browse through tens of example drivers in the Linux kernel source tree.
According to the Guardian Digital-EnGarde Secure Linux website [here], the EnGarde Secure Community is a secure distribution of Linux engineered from the ground-up to provide organizations with security required for creating a corporate Web presence and conducting e-business online. EnGarde can be used as a Web, DNS, E-mail, Database, E-commerce and general Internet Server platform with security as a primary concern. I call it “Linux Truly Secure By Design” since it complies to SELinux security audit measures as well as follows the principle of Linux application design, that is, “Secure By Design” though many may disagree.
Are you tired of Windows crashing , removing spyware, viruses, and proprietary lock-in? Are you frustrated with licensing fees and software activation demands? Are you dreading the arrival of Windows Vista, with its increased hardware requirements? Are you willing to try something different?
Tux Watch will search the web for the best resources of software, top articles and tips and even have tutorials to get you started. Linux is a free and open-source operating system that has seen tremendous growth in the past several years. Linux is stable, secure, and very powerful. It is also has tremendous capabilities, far beyond those available with other operating systems. .
Tux Watch Author(s)
» Jeff-Christman
