Organizations in Asia are not as ready to go open source for key business applications, experts in the region say. Over in the United Kingdom and United States, it is a different story with inclination growing, a survey has shown. An Accenture study of 300 large public- and private-sector organizations in Ireland, the U.K. and U.S. found that over one-third of respondents plan to migrate mission-critical software to open source within a year. The findings, released last month, also indicated that cost is no longer viewed as the key benefit of open source deployment. Instead, quality, reliability and better bug fixing are top drivers.

Netrecon 1.78 has been released. New in this version is experimental passive scanning, arpsniff and now a integrated front end to all of netrecons programs. A lot of the syntax has been changed up. This should be the last of the major changes as 1.80 (the hopefully gold) release is approached. I also dropped the second n on the name. Lets see how long it takes before the lawyers call....

Judged on its own merits, the Ubuntu 10.10 beta is a solid and consumer-friendly release. Looking at it in the light of the 10.04 Long Term Service (LTS) release from the Spring, it seems a very modest update…

While the accusations against Hurd sounded pretty bad, they boiled down to ethics. Ultimately, HP's sexual harassment probe found that he didn't violate the company's policy, but did violate its ethical standards. Oracle has responded to Hurd's poor judgment in areas other than management with a resounding -- so what? The company thinks Hurd's talent for business decision-making trumps his poor decision-making elsewhere.

[PJ: I'm not so sure it's that. It could mean that Ellison is loyal to his friend and doesn't believe that everything Gloria Allred claims to the media is necessarily so. We haven't heard the whole story, don't forget, but no doubt he has, at least Hurd's whole side of it. And just because someone sues you or threatens to do so, that doesn't mean by itself that you did anything worth being sued over. SCO taught us that, did it not? I don't know the whole story myself, so I'm not planting a flag anyplace, just pointing out that it's easy to draw conclusions, but if you don't have all the facts, those conclusions are just guesses. What comes through loud and clear to me though is that Ellison is inclined to stick by his friends, and that's ethics too, and it may not be a matter of not caring about the allegations but more of not believing them.] - The Atlantic

This tutorial describes how you can install Apache2 with mod_fcgid and PHP5 on Ubuntu 10.04. mod_fcgid is a compatible alternative to the older mod_fastcgi. It lets you execute PHP scripts with the permissions of their owners instead of the Apache user.

The Wine development release 1.3.2 is now available. The source is available now, Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations.

An Oracle was a person or agency considered to be a source of wise counsel or prophetic opinion. How can that particular definition be applied to Oracle the company? It can't. In fact I would claim that Oracle, the company, is quite the opposite of "wise" or "prophetic".

If a quick test of the beta by LinuxTrends is any indication, this new Ubuntu version could be the most user-friendly, full-featured desktop Linux distribution ever.

Of the 12 new changes to the standards, the best part of the new PCI DSS rules is a change to rule 2.2.1, which specifically allows for virtualization. Such as using a VPS running Linux with Xen.

Systemd, an alternative to Upstart or System V init, has made big strides since it was announced at the end of April. It has been packaged for Fedora and openSUSE, and for users of Fedora Rawhide, it gets installed as the default. There are still bugs to be shaken out, of course, and that work is proceeding, especially in the context of Rawhide. The big question is whether Fedora makes the leap to use systemd as the init system for Fedora 14.

This artcile provides insight on how and why our current Internet-2.0 and cloud based applications are a worse compting platform than even the worse tyrants of the closed source software vendors. The article then suggests a model that promotes open data access and cloud services co-operation instead of today's status where the biggest cloud vendors are in a "lockin competition"

Since the announcement that we will discontinue development of Google Wave as a standalone product, many people have asked us about the future of the open source code and Wave federation protocol. After spending some time on figuring out our next steps, we'd like to share the plan for our contributions over the coming months.

One of the inescapable facts of free software is that it involves a lot of law - far more than innocent hackers might expect when they settle down for a light bit of coding. That's in part because it is built on the foundation of licences like the GNU GPL, which depend upon copyright for their efficacy (although that doesn't mean that free software couldn't survive without copyright - see my earlier discussion of this point with Richard Stallman.) Unfortunately, it's also because software is impacted by the surreal world of patent law, which seems to spend most of its time considering how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and what exact rhythms they are tapping out with their angelic plates of meat.

Right now I'm facing what I'd consider the most outrageous case that I've been involved so far: A manufacturer of Linux-based embedded devices (no, I will not name the company) really has the guts to go in front of court and sue another company for modifying the firmware on those devices. More specifically, the only modifications to program code are on the GPL licensed parts of the software. None of the proprietary userspace programs are touched! None of the proprietary programs are ever distributed either.

In naming Mark V. Hurd, the former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, as Oracle's new co-president, Lawrence J. Ellison, Oracle's chief executive and largest shareholder, has put his money where his controversial mouth is.

Late on Monday, Oracle announced that Mr. Hurd had joined the company as a president and a director. - Ashlee Vance, NY Times

On top of the busiest time we've ever encountered, we need to move from our current digs. On September 18th, we are having a recycle day out at our shop in Lakeway. We tentatively have a Boy Scout troop coming out to help but that is not yet nailed down. If you have some time to come out and help us sort through the mountain of stuff to get recycled, I would appreciate your participation. So, as you all know, this is going to cost us some money. Instead of just posting our current needs, we've decided to open a store of sorts to raise the money we need. We have some cool and useful stuff and more will be added in the next two weeks.

Every Linux distribution has to strike a balance between being up to date and being stable, between including the latest versions of software packages and retaining better tested, more mature versions. Fedora, for example, is known for having the very latest software, whilst Debian GNU/Linux has a reputation for being a particularly stable distribution, with the software included in each new release already well cured.

It happened today... Bricsys released the official version of bricscad V10. No long in beta stage is now commercial with version 10.6.3-2 (windows version is 10.4.18-1). So now Linux users have a CAD software capable of handling DWG file format. Now there is no excuse to stay with windows just because you need Autocad. Bricscad is a very capable software and in many case can do better.

It's probably not true to say that everybody hates Facebook. But there are many millions (of the hundreds of millions that use the site) that claim to hate Facebook's cavalier approach to privacy and founder Mark Zuckerberg's equally vague approach to the future of our privacy. There are even groups dedicated to encouraging users to leave Facebook (some on Facebook itself, ironically).

In the first of a series of three exclusive interviews about Google’s latest and greatest developer tools, Linux User & Developer talks App Engine with Google’s Fred Sauer…