Arstechnica - Open Source

Canonical has revealed the style of the new default theme that will be used in Ubuntu 10.04. In a significant departure from tradition, Ubuntu is shedding its signature brown color scheme and is adopting a new look with a palette that includes orange and an aubergine shade of purple.

At the AAAS meeting, there's evidence that physicists are thinking seriously about the arrow of time, but biologists may be well ahead of them when it comes to understanding it.

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Canonical is updating Ubuntu's look and feel with a new style that departs from the popular Linux distribution's traditional brown theming. The new theme, which was announced yesterday as part of an initiative to overhaul Ubuntu's branding and visual identity, will be used in the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 release, codenamed Lucid Lynx.

The design documents that Canonical published Wednesday left a lot of questions unanswered. Fortunately, the new themes were rolled out to Ubuntu 10.04 alpha testers today in the latest set of package updates. We used the Ubuntu alpha to conduct some hands-on testing so that we could see how the new theme looks with a number of popular applications.

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Canonical has revealed the style of the new default theme that will be used in Ubuntu 10.04, the next major version of the popular Linux distribution. In a significant departure from tradition, Ubuntu is shedding its signature brown color scheme and is adopting a new look with a palette that includes orange and an aubergine shade of purple.

Ubuntu's distinctive brown look dates back to the very first version of the distribution, which was released in 2004. Although the style has evolved considerably since then and new colors like orange gradually gained a foothold in the desktop palette, brown has been the dominant color of Ubuntu's default themes for the past five years.

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Hedge fund Elliot Associates has made a bid to acquire software vendor Novell. In a public letter to the company's board of directors, the hedge fund offered $5.75 per share (a 49 percent premium), placing Novell's value at $2 billion dollars. Elliot Associates is already one of the largest institutional shareholders of Novell, with roughly 8.5 percent of the company's stock.

Novell's NetWare platform was once a widely-used server operating system, but its popularity swiftly declined with the emergence of Linux. Novell responded to that trend by entering the Linux market itself, acquiring Ximian and SuSE in 2003. Novell has made significant inroads in the Linux space, but has had difficulty competing with Red Hat on the server side. Although Novell is still an active contributor to Linux desktop and server technologies, the company is gradually shifting its focus towards development tools—particularly the Mono framework, which has been modestly successful and is attracting a growing audience of commercial software developers due its suitability for mobile uses and embedding.

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Oracle's assimilation of Sun is moving forward, but there are still some unanswered questions about what the database giant will do with Sun's diverse assortment of technologies. Some of Sun's more whimsical and esoteric offerings, such as the Java-based Project Wonderland virtual world platform, were swiftly sent to the chopping block.

Due to the absence of specific assurances from Oracle, Some members of the OpenSolaris community became concerned about the fate of the open source variant of Sun's UNIX platform. Some of the concerns were voiced in an open letter to Oracle that was published in February by OpenSolaris developer and evangelist Ben Rockwood. Oracle responded to those concerns last week during an OpenSolaris community IRC meeting. The company plans to continue moving OpenSolaris forward but might make some adjustments to the development model.

According to a report at Datamation that describes what transpired during the meeting, Solaris product manager Dan Roberts told the OpenSolaris community that Oracle intends to continue supporting the project. The upcoming OpenSolaris 2010.03 release is still on track for delivery. Although this is good news for OpenSolaris users and developers, there is still some uncertainty about the manner in which Oracle will manage the project. Roberts suggested that some new features might not be released as open source as Oracle begins investing heavily in Solaris development.

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SCO is still drowning in its own fail sauce but hasn't completely suffocated yet. The company's Chapter 11 Trustee has proposed selling off SCO's mobile technology business for some quick cash. The prospective buyer is said to be none other than Darl McBride, the company's much-despised former CEO, according to a report by Groklaw.

SCO, a former vendor of proprietary UNIX systems, launched an unsuccessful litigation assault on Linux in 2003. The company claimed that Linux was developed with proprietary technologies that were misappropriated from UNIX. Although SCO publicly claimed to have incontrovertible proof to back up its accusations, internal memos later revealed that the company's own audits had found no evidence of infringement. SCO's case completely fell apart in 2007 when a judge ruled that SCO never even owned the rights to UNIX. SCO was ordered to pay millions of dollars to Novell, the rightful owner.

SCO has been struggling for survival and has used every trick in the book to avoid liquidation. The company still hopes that it can win on appeal, despite the fact that it no longer has the necessary resources to continue the fight. SCO's latest survival tactic is a scheme to sell off its mobile business for $35,000. Groklaw says that the buyer, Mobility Inc. Holdings, is affiliated with Darl McBride, the former CEO of the SCO Group. McBride is generally viewed as the architect of SCO's demise and the front man of the litigation strategy.

SCO's mobility business includes a suite of FranklinCovey-branded iPhone applications. When Judge Kevin Gross issued a scathing rebuke against SCO's stalling tactics last year, he commented that the company's mobile technology had little value. The Chapter 11 Trustee acknowledges that SCO no longer has the capital to continuing developing its mobile technology by itself.

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Firefox is on a decline. It may not be as steady as Internet Explorer's death spiral, and it certainly has not been going on for as long, but if the last three months are any indication, Firefox will never hit that 25 percent market share mark that looked all but certain just a few short months ago. Meanwhile, Chrome is still pushing steadily forward; in fact, it was the only browser to show positive growth last month.

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KDE SC 4.4 is now available for Windows.

Read More: Ostatic

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Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, is planning to overhaul the desktop panel and integrate social networking features in Ubuntu 10.04, codenamed Lucid Lynx. One of the key components of this effort is the Me Menu, which shipped in the Lucid alpha 3 last week.

The Me Menu, which Canonical unveiled in December, provides a unified interface for managing your presence on instant messaging and social networking services. A text box that is embedded in the menu allows users to publish status messages to all of their accounts. The menu also provides easy access to the standard account and identity configuration tools.

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The BBC has enabled SWF Verification for its iPlayer streaming video service. This content protection mechanism has locked out users who consume the iPlayer video content with open source software.

Adobe has publicly documented the Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) that is used by Flash for streaming video, but the company has fiercely guarded RTMP content protection measures, making it impossible to create a fully compatible open source RTMP client. SWF Verification is one such security measure.

An RTMP streaming video server that has SWF Verification enabled will terminate connections from clients that fail to supply an authorization key. The purpose of this restriction is to ensure that the content is only accessible to specific SWF files, thus preventing third-party software from downloading the video.

Although SWF Verification is principally intended to serve as a barrier to piracy, it also blocks regular users from legitimately viewing content with open source video players. Fans of the popular XBMC media center application have discovered that the application can no longer be used to watch iPlayer content. The Totem BBC plugin, which was developed by the BBC itself in collaboration with Canonical and Collabora, is also apparently blocked.

Although it's technically possible to circumvent the blocks, Adobe has previously used DMCA takedown notices to stifle open source software projects that attempt to do so. Because SWF Verification makes it impossible to view iPlayer with DMCA-compliant open source software, users will now have to rely exclusively on Adobe's proprietary Flash plugin in order to view iPlayer content.

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The GNOME community's design and usability experts gathered for a week-long hackfest hosted by Canonical in the UK to shape the next major iteration of the GNOME desktop environment. GNOME 3, which is tentatively scheduled for release in September, will introduce new user interface paradigms and include an upgraded desktop shell environment.

The participants at the hackfest are aiming to improve the usability of existing applications, enhance the look and feel of the desktop with new theming concepts, and brainstorm ideas for extending the functionality of the new shell. They are actively publishing mockups, design documentation, usability notes, and other materials that provide insight into their vision for the future of GNOME. By reading all of this material, I was able to get an understanding of their goals and plans.

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Streaming video websites like YouTube face growing pressure from consumers to provide support for native standards-based Web video playback. The HTML5 video element provides the necessary functionality to build robust Web media players without having to depend on proprietary plugins, but the browser vendors have not been able to build a consensus around a video codec.

Although the h264 codec has gained dominance due to its excellent compression and broad support in the consumer electronics ecosystem, it is covered by patents that preclude broad royalty-free usage. Several browser vendors, including Opera and Mozilla, favor the Ogg Theora media codec, which is believed to be unencumbered by patents. Ogg may offer advantages from a licensing standpoint, but there are still many unanswered questions about its quality and suitability for Internet video streaming services.

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In accordance with US trade law, the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) is required to conduct an annual review of the status of foreign intellectual property laws. This review, which is referred to as Special 301, is typically used to denounce countries that have less restrictive copyright policies than the United States.

The review process is increasingly dominated by content industry lobbyists who want to subvert US trade policy and make it more favorable to their own interests. We have already noted the targeting of Canada for its supposedly lax copyright laws, but that is not the only nation drawing the ire of Big Content. One of the organizations that plays a key role in influencing the Special 301 review is the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), a powerful coalition that includes the RIAA, the MPAA, and the Business Software Alliance (BSA). The IIPA, which recently published its official recommendations to the USTR for the 2010 edition of the 301 review, has managed to achieve a whole new level of absurdity.

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Microsoft and Amazon.com have signed a wide-ranging patent cross-licensing agreement that provides each company with access to the other's patent portfolio. Specific terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but it was made clear that Amazon will be paying Microsoft an undisclosed amount of money as part of the arrangement. While Microsoft wouldn't say which of its products and technologies Amazon is interested in, Microsoft did mention that Amazon's Kindle, which employs open source and proprietary software components, as well as Amazon's use of Linux-based servers are covered.

Neither company would officially disclose why the deal was struck today. "We are pleased to have entered into this patent license agreement with Amazon.com," Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft's corporate vice president and deputy general counsel for Intellectual Property and Licensing, said in a statement. "Microsoft's patent portfolio is the largest and strongest in the software industry, and this agreement demonstrates our mutual respect for intellectual property as well as our ability to reach pragmatic solutions to IP issues regardless of whether proprietary or open source software is involved."

It's possible that Amazon agreed to signing the deal to avoid patent-infringement lawsuits from Microsoft. The mention of Kindle and Linux is not likely to be coincidental: the software giant has put extensive work into tablets and e-readers of various form factors and has previously claimed that Linux infringes on its patented technologies, although it has never specified which patents it believes the Linux stack and kernel violate (the software giant did sue GPS maker TomTom over the FAT file format). The companies may have decided to shake hands in these areas but their biggest competitive space will likely remain the cloud: Windows Azure versus Amazon EC2.

Microsoft says it has reached more than 600 licensing agreements since launching its intellectual-property licensing program in December 2003.

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Google has announced that it plans to discontinue active development of Gears, a browser plug-in that enables Web features like local storage and geolocation services. The search giant says that emerging Web standards offer increasingly viable alternatives to the specific capabilities that are provided by Gears.

Rather than implementing experimental new Web functionality in a cross-browser plug-in, the Gears team intends to focus on advancing new and existing Web standards that can be included directly in Chrome and adopted by other browser vendors. This approach to enhancing the Web is more in line with how the other major browser vendors operate. It makes sense for Google to move in this direction now that the company has a browser of its own.

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Robert Jacobson, the developer behind the open source Java Model Railroad Interface (JMRI) project, finally prevailed in a long-running open source software license enforcement lawsuit against Matthew Katzer, the owner of a company that sells commercial model train software.

Katzer initially threatened Jacobson and JMRI with a patent infringement lawsuit in 2005, and demanded hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing fees. Upon investigating Katzer's claims, Jacobson was surprised to discover that Katzer had misappropriated significant amounts of JMRI code, using it without attribution in a commercial software package. Jacobson retaliated against Katzer's patent suit by filing a copyright infringement suit.

The case has attracted considerable attention within the open source software community because it has broad ramifications for open source license legality. A federal appeals court that heard the case in 2008 ruled that violating the terms of an open source software license constitutes copyright infringement, not just breach of contract. The distinction is important because the legal remedies for copyright infringement are generally stronger.

After the 2008 ruling, the case was passed back to the district court so that the appropriate remedy could be determined. In a summary judgement issued in December, the district court ruled that Jacobson is entitled to collect monetary damages from Katzer. The judgment also declared that Katzer's removal of attribution and copyright information from the JMRI code constituted a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Although the ruling won't set a broad precedent due to the fact that it emerged from a district court, it's still a significant victory for open source software licensing enforcement. The threat of having to pay monetary damages will give software companies a big incentive to refrain from abusing or misappropriating open source software code. In response to the ruling, Katzer finally agreed to settle with Jacobson last week. The conflict, which originally started five years ago, has reached an end.

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Mozilla's mobile Firefox browser is coming to Google's Linux-based Android operating system. Although the porting effort is still at an early stage of development, it is moving forward swiftly. Mozilla's developers achieved an important milestone this week by demonstrating that the browser can run on the Nexus One smartphone.

Due to the highly experimental status of the project, Mozilla has not yet published packages for testing, but that didn't deter us from getting our grubby mitts on the goods. As our readers know, we just can't resist the doughy flavor of half-baked software, and we will gladly brave the bugs for a chance to taste test the new hotness before it really heats up. In order to get our own hands-on look at Firefox on Android, we had to compile it from source code.

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At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the Symbian Foundation has lifted the curtain on Symbian^3, the next iteration of its mobile software platform. It brings a number of noteworthy improvements that will help make the operating system more competitive as its dominance is challenged by increasingly powerful rivals.

The new version will boost performance and deliver a fresh user experience with enhanced usability and a more modern interface design. Under the hood, it has better memory management and a more robust network stack that is said to make the operating system better-suited for Internet-centric devices than previous versions. Another significant addition is support for SMP, which will make it possible for the software to take advantage of the next-generation multicore ARM processors.

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Critics of government-mandated filtering schemes contend that such programs first focus on "child pornography" because it's such an unobjectionable target for censorship—but once the program is in place, it's much easier to extend it to more controversial areas, such as copyright protection. At least the French have the decency to admit that this is what's happening.

The French lower house, the National Assembly, has just passed a security bill known as LOPPSI2, and it's expected that the Senate will follow suit in the next few weeks. As we've previously reported, LOPPSI2 is a grab bag of security items that includes state-sanctioned computer Trojans, a massive new database of citizen data (dubbed "Pericles"), and a requirement that ISPs start censoring sites on a government blacklist.

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A hobbyist has experimentally ported Ubuntu 8.04 to make it run on the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 smartphone.

Read More: Engadget, XDA Developers Forum

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