OStatic

Pardus Future Uncertain, Fork Probable

by Susan Linton on Feb 07, 2012

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Pardus, a TUBITAK sponsored Turkish distribution, has long been respected in Linux circles for its stability, simplicity, and polish. But news coming from a former developer has led a group of community developers and volunteers to speak of a fork.

The Top Licenses on Github

by Jon Buys on Feb 07, 2012

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Apparently, Apple has been slowly reducing the number of GPL licensed applications that are bundled with OS X. I’m not surprised by this news, especially considering that FreeBSD is doing the same thing. However, buried in the conversation on Hacker News was an interesting comment, that most, if not all, of the top projects on Github are either BSD or MIT licensed. My curiosity was piqued, and this was too good to pass up.

In the Wake of SOPA, a New Open Letter Urges Changes from the U.S. Congress

by Sam Dean on Feb 07, 2012

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Rarely has the technology community gathered a bigger backlash against the government than it gathered during the U.S. debates over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). "The Internet and Free Speech will never be the same," if the legislation goes to law, pronounced Mozilla, and The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) vehemently opposed it as well. Now, those two organizations are just two of the more than 70 technology-focused organizations to pen an open letter to the U.S. Congress asking that government officials completely reassess the legislative process pertaining to Intellectual Property (IP).

Low-Cost Raspberry Pi Linux Devices to Arrive This Month

by Sam Dean on Feb 07, 2012

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If you're a fan of Linux and you're also interested in how low the price point can go for a reasonably high-powered computer, you've got to be watching the Raspberry Pi story. As we noted here, the low-cost device--to be available in $25 and $35 versions--runs Linux via an ARM processor and appears to be surprisingly powerful. (That's the motherboard for it, to the left.)

Among other uses for it, Raspberry Pi may fill the gap that One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) couldn't quite fill, bringing computing to parts of the world where it has traditionally been unaffordable. Now, the Raspberry Pi team has confirmed that the initial run of $35 devices will happen February 20th. That's coming right up.

Is Virtualization Really Ushering In the Multiple-OS Future?

by Sam Dean on Feb 06, 2012

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Without a doubt, virtualization has been one of the biggest trends in computing in recent years, and open source has been a huge part of the virtualization story. Not only are there lots of top-notch open source hypervisors that let users dabble in more than one operating system at a time, but virtualization has let many users combine open source operating systems with proprietary ones. Through virtualization, it's easy to run Linux and other operating systems concurrently, but do IT departments want business users doing so? That has become a cause for much debate.