OpenTangent

Don't let Barnaby Jack 's death be in vain. We need a global recall of wireless life sustaining devices like insulin pumps, pacemakers and defibrillators. The software on these devices must be completely open source so that third parties are able to review and patch the inevitable vulnerabilities.

I tried to buy Bitcon in early 2012 for around R150 for 1 Bitcoin. I was prepared to buy around 20 Bitcoin at the time. Despite my best effort i was unable to get hold of them because Bitcoin exchanges don't accept credit cards and my bank refused to process the international transaction without a personalised invoice from the Bitcoin exchange. So i left it at that, hoping Bitcoin would become more accessible as time passed.

The rate of acceleration in the open source world is far beyond that of the proprietary world. Of course large pools of money keep the proprietary vendors afloat and will for many years to come. However, closed institutions will eventually be unable to keep up with the rate of change regardless of how many developers they hire .

Sometimes i want nothing more than to see the free market system burn but my impatience is unwarranted, the current system needs to run its course but it's end is inevitable. The financial industry, the legal industry, the arms industry, etcetera will all eventually disappear, not by force but through natural and predictable obsolescence.

I use a Media PC in my living room running Ubuntu, I'll put the official 'Ubuntu TV' on it once it's publicly available. Workspaces: Top left - TVTime displaying the DSTV guide Top right - Pictures folder Bottom left - Movie Player playing District 9 Bottom right - Chrome, YouTube

Certain former MySQL staff and contributers have banded together to create a company by the name of SkySQL . The company offers database services designed for MySQL technologies but they have not officially forked MySQL although their keen interest in MariaDB suggests that they are not confident in the future of MySQL.

The OpenOffice.org community has disassociated its self from Oracle by creating The Document Foundation . Oracle owns the OpenOffice.org brand so the  newly created foundation has rebranded the product as LibreOffice which will effectively replace OpenOffice.org as the standard office application bundled with most Linux distributions. The greater open source community has responded very positively with Novell , Red Hat and Canonical all expressing their intentions of including LibreOffice in future releases of their respective distributions. One down, two to go: OpenOffice.org Java MySQL

Oracle claimed that the EU didn’t get open source when they tried to prevent Oracle’s acquisition of Sun . It’s plain to see that the acquisition was purely to destroy the competition. Sun is dead and it’s software is slowly being buried with it. Well, not quite; Sun actively developed three of the worlds most important open source contributions; Java , MySQL and OpenOffice.org . Regardless of the loopholes that Oracle is trying to pursue with their current case against Google , once a copyleft license is applied, the product effectively becomes the property of the consumer. When the deal was announced, the open source community was up in arms however i believed that Oracle was simply waking up to the necessity for open source in the software industry. The world is not ready to drop the proprietary model just yet but a software company the size of Oracle must have realised that they were falling behind. I was wrong, Oracle have no clue about open source and apparently have no int...

The strength of any technology is modularisation and standardisation. The ability to swap out and redesign, giving anyone the opportunity to easily innovate on the original concept. It’s the very reason PCs overshadow Macs and it’s the reason the concept of open source is not just an ideal but an absolute necessity. Innovation, modularisation and open source, these are the concepts that define the California based startup; Always Innovating . They are known for the Touch Book which combines a tablet and netbook to create a remarkably adaptive mobile device. They have just released their latest product; the Smart Book , which sets a new level of versatility in mobile devices. Check the video: This is definitely not for Apple fans , it requires a bit of tech savvy to really appreciate it's features but this really is something special. It is a little expensive but considering it's diverse "swiss army knife" feature set i'd say it's justifiable. Hats off to ...

A successful corporate alliance inevitably results in a competitive split . This was first demonstrated to me back in the days of the Apple/Microsoft allience vs IBM . Once perception had changed and people realised that innovative startups could take on corporate giants, Gates then realised that he had to get the upper hand in silicon valley . Apple was backstabbed by Microsoft and the alliance was off in favour of competitive innovation ultimately benefiting us as the consumers. Many years down the line Apple had allied with Google since Microsoft was the new giant in town and Apple had a vendetta to fulfill. Apple's iPhone appeared and quickly took center stage since Microsoft overlooked the need for mobility. Once the smartphone market was mature Apple once again got the short end of the alliance stick when Google's Android became a major competitor to the iPhone and Eric Schmidt was forced to leave Apple's board . A...

Just another iteration in the web codec saga; Google's WebM project and the included  VP8 codec  has been released under the unadulterated open source BSD license . For me this is the turning point in the open vs proprietary battle as video is arguably a prominent aspect of computing. With previously dispersed standards and licensing, video support in computers and devices like smart phones and DVD players was difficult and expensive. We now have the ability to serve the best possible video to even the cheapest of devices and now that it's open, thanks to the BSD license there's a good chance that digital video as a whole will stay open. As can be expected; Google once again takes an active approach to open standards . Initially they amended the BSD license with patent clauses that would deter patent pirates like Microsoft from entering into lawsuits against Google. Those clauses would effectively disallow the use of WebM and the VP8 codec by the suing party if a lawsuit ...

I'd like to compare three devices in the medium form factor category (netbooks/tablet PCs/e-readers). Two of them fairly well known and the last one not known well enough. Admittedly i'm somewhat biased towards the Touch Book because it's open source however the Kindle also runs on Linux. By default the Touch Book runs a customised version of Ångström called AI OS (Always Innovating Operating System). What sets it apart is the fact that the hardware schematics are also open source and are based on the Beagleboard . Kindle DX iPad Touch Book (Tablet) Touch Book (Netbook) Manufacturer: Amazon Apple Always Innovating Always Innovating Category: e-Reader Tablet Tablet Netbook Screen Size: 24cm 24cm 22cm 22cm Screen Specs: Black and white, electronic paper display Colour LED Colour LCD Colour LCD Resolution: 824x1200 1024x768 1024x600 1024x600 Processor: ARM (532MHz ) x86 (1GHz) ARM (600MHz) ARM (600MHz) Storage: 4GiB 64GiB 8GiB 8GiB USB Ports: None None 7 7 Keyboar...