Open Source – Page 3 – Digital-Lifestyles

Nokia S60 3rd Edition Challenge Winners Announced

Nokia has announced the winning entries in the Forum Nokia S60 3rd Edition Challenge global developer competition, dishing out a cool €100,000 in prizes to winning mobile applications developers.

Co-sponsored by Forum Nokia and software monoliths Adobe, the winners in four categories were selected from 117 entries after a 10-month selection process.

The categories were enterprise, music, Macromedia Flash Lite and location-aware applications, with each winner pocketing a €25,000 top prize and a one-year free membership in Forum Nokia PRO developer support program, which is apparently worth €4,000.

Selected by a jury made up of Macromedia and Nokia Business unit reps, the winners were selected from the 20 finalists announced in September this year.

Nokia S60 3rd Edition Challenge Winners Announced Quickoffice Premier 4 scooped up Best Enterprise Application, with the product allowing users to open, view and edit Microsoft Office documents on the move.
www.quickoffice.com

The best Macromedia Flash application was Foreca – Flash Weather, a natty program that can not only advise you whether that brolly is really necessary, but can offer comprehensive weather forecasts, weather radar, temperature and precipitation forecasts.
www.foreca.com.

Nokia S60 3rd Edition Challenge Winners Announced InfoTalk Corporation’s Music Finder grabbed the honours for Best Mobile Music Application. The program provides a speedy way to use search for music files using voice commands, with users able to speak a song title, artist’s name or playlist in response to an audio prompt instead of scrolling through zillions of MP3s.
www.infotalkcorp.com.

Finally, the Best Location-Aware Service/Application prize went to Augmentra, whose smarty-pants ViewRanger application offers a unique mapping, navigation and information tool for mobile phones, providing information about immediate surroundings through an intuitive display.
www.viewranger.com.

Forum Nokia S60 3rd Edition Challenge

One Laptop Per Child Programme Claims 4 Million Orders

One Laptop Per Child Program Claims 4 Million Orders Yesterday, a spokesperson for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) programme revealed that Nigeria, Brazil, Argentina, and Thailand have all tendered commitments to purchase one million Linux laptops through the ambitious US-based programme.

As we reported back in November last year, OLPC aims to distribute millions of Linux-based laptop computers to needy children in developing countries around the world, all for free.

The Linux-based laptops come with their own power sources (including wind-up) and offer a dual-mode display, which gives users a full-colour, transmissive DVD mode and a secondary black and white reflective and sunlight-readable display at 3× the resolution.

The hard-disk free machines – still in the ‘concept’ stage – will be powered by a 500MHz processor and 128MB of DRAM, and come with 500MB of Flash memory.

Sporting four USB ports, the laptops will be fitted with wireless broadband that allows them to work as a mesh network.

One Laptop Per Child Program Claims 4 Million Orders This means that each laptop will be able to talk to its nearest neighbour and create ad hoc, local area networks for sharing data and connections.

The OLPC has stated that it will begin production when it has paid-for orders for between five million and 10m laptops, and plans to have units ready for shipment by the end of 2006 or early 2007.

Nicholas Negroponte, head of the OLPC project and former director of MIT Media Labs also sees the project as a means to promote the mass adoption of Linux.

One Laptop Per Child Program Claims 4 Million Orders So far, AMD, eBay, Google, Nortel, Red Hat, and a number of other technology companies have all signed up to help support the project

Not everyone is so enthusiastic about the project though, with India’s Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee describing it as “pedagogically suspect,” adding that the country needed to put teachers in classrooms before worrying about buying laptops for students.

(To be honest, we had to look up what ‘pedagogically’ meant, and can tell you that it means “In a didactic manner”)

One Laptop Per Child

Mobile Linux: Powerhouse Foundation Formed

We all know the mobile handset is totally fragmented. Sure there’s a standard – it’s called Nokia – but everyone who isn’t Nokia isn’t very happy about that.

Vodafone, Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic Mobile Communications and Samsung Electronics have today announced that they hope to change that. They’re getting together to embrace mobile Linux to “create world’s first globally adopted open mobile Linux platform.”

They’re intending to form an independent foundation whose primary focus is the joint development and marketing of an API specification, architecture, supporting source code-based reference implementation components and tools. Pretty comprehensive sounding, but only time will reveal the level of independence afforded to the foundation.

While we understand that they ‘intend to leverage the benefits of community-based’, we’re not really sure where their aims of proprietary development fit in to this. It is after all supposed to be an Open project.

Mobile Linux: Powerhouse Foundation Formed Who’s in? Who’s out?
It’s not surprising to see that Nokia _aren’t_ part of it. Vodafone have for a long time been concerned that, when asked, their subscribers say they have, for example, a Nokia handset rather than a Vodafone service. Nokia also dominate with Symbian.

Also coming in the ‘Obviously’ category, is the lack of Microsoft. They’ve been desperate for years to try and become accepted as the mobile platform of choice, but despite a few successes haven’t managed it. Today’s announcement combined with the strength of Symbian will give them a bit of a kicking.

The other major who’s missing is Sony Ericsson.

Beyond the handset makers, it’s interesting to include NTT DoCoMo. Vodafone and NTT DoCoMo were competitors in the Japanese market – up to the point that they sold Vodafone Japan to Softback back in April. Now that barrier is removed, we’re sure that they’ll love to get closer to DoCoMo to learn the lessons of how they’ve made content such a success in Japan.

Symbian supporters two-time them
Both Samsung and Motorola have in the past sold handsets that use the Symbian OS, but since Nokia have been tightening their clutched on Symbian, it’s likely that they’re becoming increasingly nervous of using it.

The idea of being in control of their own destiny – at least to the software platform – will be much more appealing.

What’s driving this?
Mobile operators are always looking at finding ways for more people to sign to their networks, so decreasing handset costs while maximising features is of the utmost importance for them. This is made clear by Kiyohito Nagata, Vice President and Managing Director of NTT DoCoMo’s Product Department

Open is the new proprietory
Clearly being ‘open’ (the interpretation of which is highly variable) is quite the trend in mobile, with Nokia open sourcing their s60 browser a couple of weeks back.

Much excitement is being generated by those companies already using Linux in their handsets. In a ‘don’t forget we’ve been doing this for ages’ way, Yoshiharu Tamura, Executive General Manager, Mobile Terminals Business Unit, NEC Corporation expounded , “As one of the leading pioneers with almost two years of experience shipping Linux-based mobile phones, we are delighted to participate in this initiative. We expect the foundation activities will accelerate further expansion of mobile Linux application developer participation, as well as global market growth of 3G mobile handsets.”

Not to be left out from showing off, Osamu Waki, Managing Director of Panasonic Mobile Communications, plugged like mad, “Linux sits at the core of Panasonic Group’s software strategy, and to date we have shipped nearly 8 million Linux based handsets in the highly competitive Japanese market.”

Nokia Mobile S60 Browser Code Goes Open Source

Nokia Mobile Browser Code Goes Open Source At the W3C conference in Edinburgh today, in a move to get the mobile industry (and possibly more) to standardise on a single Web browser, Nokia has released the source code for the mobile Web browser it developed last year.

Using the same open-source frameworks used by Apple’s Safari browser, originally created by the KDE team, Nokia designed a browser for its S60 phone range, adding various enhancements designed to improve mobile browsing.

Under the open source deal, any individual software developer, third party mobile phone makers or operators can get their grubby mitts on the software engine that powers the Nokia-developed browser and customise it for their own needs.

Nokia’s S60 Web Browser for S60 is a fully fledged affair, offering full mobile browsing of complete Web pages straight off the Internet, complete with support for AJAX technologies, dynamic HTML and scripting languages.

Nokia intend to offer “active participation” with the open source community, sharing enhancements, widgets and improvements to the core browser engine in real time.

Nokia Mobile Browser Code Goes Open Source “We want to reduce the fragmentation currently in place in mobile browsing,” said Lee Epting, VP of Forum Nokia, Nokia’s software development support program.

Although sceptics may suggest the last thing rivals would want to do is to start using a Nokia browser, she insisted that the terms of the ‘liberal license’ would let anyone use the code to develop their own commercial offerings.

The source code will be made available to open source developers through the WebKit Open Source Project.

Further resources can also be found at Nokia Opensourcesite and Nokia S60 browser.

Firefox Grabs 10 Percent Of Browser Market

Firefox Grabs 10 Percent Of Browser Market Mozilla’s Firefox continues to bite into Internet Explorer’s once-unassailable market dominance, snaffling 10 percent of the Web browser market in March, according to Web audience measurement firm Net Applications.

Their report claims that the free, open source Web browser from Mozilla.org was used by 10.05 percent of surfers last month, a notable shimmy upwards from 9.75 percent in February.

It’s got a long way to go before it starts to rival Microsoft’s behemoth of a browser though, with various versions of Internet Explorer (IE) still hogging 84.7 percent of the market.

Lagging behind in third place was Apple’s Safari Mac-only browser, used by 3.19 percent of surfers, with trusty old Netscape in fourth place with 1.05 percent of the market, followed by Opera at 0.54 percent.

Firefox Grabs 10 Percent Of Browser Market Firefox’s rise has been slow but inexorable, with the improved feature set of version 1.5 helping them garner a 3.34 percent share over the year.

Over the same period, Internet Explorer saw 3.89 percent of their market slip away, with the long wait for IE7 not helping their cause.

“With a strong feature set, aggressive product development cycle, open source platform and by offering the browser for free, Firefox has the strategy in place to maintain its growth,” commented Net Applications analyst with a cool name, Vincent Vizzaccaro

Despite Firefox’s continuing growth, Vincey boy added that Microsoft, “has the much easier task of defending an entrenched position rather than attacking one.”

Firefox Grabs 10 Percent Of Browser Market Get optimising!
If you’re already using Firefox, take a look at the top ten plug ins at download.com and get customising.

Our favourites aren’t on their list, however. We recommend the Spellbound specllchecker , Chatzilla IRC client and the dead-simple-but-useful Copy Plain Text extension which, err, copies text without formatting.

Mozilla.org

Firefox Grabs 20% Of Europe. Sometimes.

According to figures released by French Web metrics firm XiTi, the open source Mozilla Firefox browser has now grabbed a massive 20% average market share in Europe, creating a growing challenge to the current leader, Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Basing its figures on a Europe-wide sample of 32.5 million Web sites visited on the 8 January, 2006, XiTi declared Finland to be the Firefox hot spot of Europe, with 38% of surfers using the free software.

In second and third place were Slovenia and Germany with 36 and 30% of users, respectively.

Over here in Blighty, it seems that the Brits are yet to be wooed by the might of Mozilla, with the country recording one of the lowest proportions of Firefox users in Europe – just 11%.

Although the continuing onslaught of Firefox looks disastrous for Microsoft, the figures come with a Godzilla-sized caveat, as Tristan Nitot, the president of Mozilla Europe, explains:

“We should emphasise that these measures have been done on a Sunday, when Firefox usage peaks. The Firefox browser is less used during the week, as enterprises are more conservative when it comes to using a newer browser.”

Other Web metrics companies have produced somewhat less spectacular estimates of Firefox’s market share, with OneStat.com reporting in November last year that the browser had notched up a global market share of 11.5%.

Once again, the UK was found to be lagging behind, with just 4.9% of surfers using the software.

Elsewhere, the Mozilla Foundation has set a March launch date for a version of Firefox that will run on Apple’s shiny new Intel-based machines.

Mozilla Firefox
XiTi

One Laptop per Child: The Machine, The Impact

One Laptop per Child: The Machine, The Impact The $100 laptop project launched by MIT Media Lab, gained a big boost yesterday when the labs Nicholas Negroponte met with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia.

Kofi Annan opening address summed up the project and its hopes succinctly, “The true meaning of one laptop per child, is not a matter of just giving a laptop to a child, as if bestowing on them some magic charm. The magic lies within. Within each child there is a scientist, scholar, or just plain citizen in the making. This initiative is design to bring it forth into the light of day.”

No right thinking individual could possibly doubt the value of this project. There may be a lot of commercial concerns, but we’ll get to that later on.

The Specs
It will be Linux-based, full-colour laptop that uses a wind-up handle as a power source. Run at 500MHz, with 1GB of memory and a built in 1 Megapixel camera it should run most applications that could be required (remember Linux doesn’t suck up a lot of the processors power). Just the laptop screen alone is expected to cost around $35, pretty good when a screen on a laptop is normally $150 alone.

One Laptop per Child: The Machine, The Impact “USB ports galore” will be provided as will built-in WiFi. The only thing it will be missing is a hard drive. We’d imagine that this will be down to the additional power drain they have, and to try and maintain the necessary ruggedness. The networking will be via a wireless mesh.

The driving theory of the project is that Learning is seamless – not just something that you do at school. This has lead to the need for an adaptable design, enabling it to be used as an electronic book (with the fingers at the back controlling the cursor), a games machine, TV set and, of course, laptop.

One Laptop per Child: The Machine, The Impact All software will be open source as in Negroponte view “open source software is the key to innovation in software and learning technology.”

It’s been reported that Steve Jobs had offered Apple OSX for nothing for use in the project, but it was turned down as it wasn’t open source.

Availability and impact
The laptops will be financed though domestic resources (ie the countries government), donors, and what was rather mysteriously described as “other arrangements.” It will be at no cost to the recipients themselves.

The current plans call for producing five to ten million units near the start of late 2006 or early 2007, launching in six countries. Not bad considering that Negroponte first publicly announced it in January 2005. The promise is to bring the price down at each technical advance.

Negroponte spoke about “the same laptop being commercially available, at say $200” for small businesses. They hope to announce the construction partners soon.

One Laptop per Child: The Machine, The Impact The impact of this project could be huge on many fronts – if it comes into being – and we’ve no reason to imagine that it won’t. Giving any and every child access to a computer, and teaching them to use it and inspiring them will be the start of a revolution bring free communication and equal learning to all citizens.

We don’t think that the impact will stop there. If the world is aware that there are laptops, perfectly able to carry out most daily required computing functions, that only cost $100, why would anyone want to pay for other ‘full price’ machines? The impact on the supply of hardware in the part of the world that already has computers will be huge.

All power to this project. Let’s help technology change the world for the better.

MIT Media Lab One Laptop Per Child
Watch the Launch video(Real video)

Dell Serves Up OS-free Desktop For Open Source Fans

Dell Serves Up OS-free Desktop For Open Source Fans Dell have started shipping a Windows-less desktop PC for customers looking to install other operating systems on their PCs.

The company, who already sell high-end PCs and servers equipped with Red Hat Linux, claimed that they were reacting to “growing consumer demand for open source ready” computers.

Although many users have elected to strip out pre-installed copies of Windows in the past, Dell is hoping that open source punters will appreciate the cheaper cost and lack of hassle.

Dell Serves Up OS-free Desktop For Open Source Fans Dell’s new Dimension E510n PC comes with a blank hard drive untouched by all things Microsoft, with the company bunging in a copy of the obscure FreeDOS operating system for users to install, if they so desire.

FreeDOS is an open-source version of MS-DOS, although the E510n PC is advertised as “a desktop on which you can run Linux or other open-source operating systems.”

But don’t go looking for support if your Linux-based machine throws a wobbly as the product’s Web page clearly states, “Dell does not support non-Dell installed operating systems.”

Dell Serves Up OS-free Desktop For Open Source Fans The base machine’s reasonably specified (a Pentium 4 processor, 512Mbytes memory, 128MB ATI Radeon X300SE HyperMemory video card, Sound Blaster®Live! 24-bit Audio and 80GB hard drive), and knocks out for $774 (~e647~£439).

As ever, there’s also a host of customisable configurations available on Dell’s US site, although we couldn’t find any mention of it on the UK site.

Dell US

Microsoft In The Sights As Google And Sun Announce Deal

Microsoft In The Sights As Google And Sun Announce Deal Google and Sun Microsystems have come up with a broad, but fuzzy, deal which will see the two companies developing and distributing each other’s technology in a move to challenge Microsoft’s Office suite dominance.

“We’re going to put our assets together so we can leverage one another’s distribution,” said Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive officer (and former Sun executive).

Under the deal, Sun will bundle the Google toolbar as an option when consumers download the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) from Java.com, while Google will distribute the java technology.

With Sun’s JRE already registering 20 million downloads per month, the move looks set to dramatically increase the number of Google toolbar deployments.

Microsoft In The Sights As Google And Sun Announce Deal It’s also expected that the deal will make it easier for freeloading punters to obtain OpenOffice, Sun’s well-regarded, freely distributed office productivity suite which directly competes with Microsoft Office.

“Working with Google will make our technologies more available more broadly, increase options for users, lower barriers and expand participation worldwide,” said Scott McNealy, Sun’s chief executive officer.

“We want to leverage the network economics. There are 80 million unique Google site users per month,” he added.

Both companies have suggested that the toolbar bundling is merely the start of a beautiful friendship, although neither would offer any specific details.

Schmidt dropped a few hints, “Google and java are two of the most widely recognised technology brands because they provide users with online tools that enhance their lives on a day to day basis,” he said. “We look forward to exploring other areas of collaboration.

Microsoft In The Sights As Google And Sun Announce Deal Bundling the two products together seems a wise move, increasing the appeal of the Google Toolbar and making Java a more attractive proposition for software developers.

Although Schmidt wasn’t in the mood to chat about it at the launch event, many pundits are expecting Google to offer a hosted version of the OpenOffice productivity suite.

“We will work to make the distribution of [OpenOffice] become broader. We are not announcing specifics,” he said.

Execs were equally tight-lipped when asked about the financial terms of the deal, although they expected it to generate substantial revenue.

“We’ll use their advertising and they’ll use our technology,” said Sun’s McNealy.

“There is going to be a lot of money flowing both ways if we do this thing right,” he added.

Java

Open Media Common: Sun’s Open-Source DRM

Sun’s Chief Operating Officer Jonathan Schwartz has been speaking at the Progress and Freedom Foundation Aspen Summit about how incompatible strains of DRM from different companies will not be good for the consumer.

Now, we don’t have the benefit of having heard his speech, but it strikes us that he’s a little late to this party. This idea is hardly news to anyone who’s spent more that half a day thinking about the future of digital media. Projects like Coral Consortium have been underway for sometime, exactly for this reason – but at this time Coral is proprietary.

Jonathan’s proposal to elevate the problems on incompatible DRM systems is Open Media Commons, which would be an open-source, royalty-free digital-rights management standard.

It appears that his idea is to launch the idea/project, not deliver a solution tomorrow. He’s offering to start it off by giving Project DReaM, to an internal Sun Labs project, to the initiative. The strange collection of capitalisation around Project DReaM is derived from “DRM/everywhere available.”

Where this type of headline-grabbing announcement is great, is in starting to bring the debate about who should own/benefit from the locking mechanism placed around digital media to the fore again.

It also panders to the media companies who are generally _totally_ paranoid/fed up with having to not only use a protection scheme they don’t own, but also to pay Microsoft for the pleasure of selling their snippets of media to the general public – each and every time they do.

Reuters, who broke the story, got this quote from Jonathan, “The industry generally falls into two camps: Those who support what we’re up to and others who want to collect a fee” for using their own DRM standards.

If it does nothing more that stopping or delaying a media company in making their decision to sign with one of the major DRM providers, then we suspect Jonathan would be pleased.

Jonathan has over the last year, been blog-tastic, writing long, detailed postings about many things – he’s clearly not someone who sleeps a great deal. A lot of his entries have been about open source, indeed in June Sun started to open-source their Operating System (OS) with the project OpenSolaris and Java server software, calling it Glassfish. Not only that, but they have an Open-Source Officer, Simon Phipps.

All of these actions are designed to attacking any income that their competitors (including Microsoft) derive from selling software. Sun, of course, is also in the hardware business, which conveniently will run the open source software.

What we do find a little strange is there are no references to Open Media Commons or Project DReaM on Sun’s Web Site.

While it is good that a company as large/established as Sun is talking about opening DRM up, not to be locked in to any single provider of DRM – we’re not yet convinced that this particular idea has a solid ring about it.

Open Media Commons – Updated
SunSource
The Progress & Freedom Foundation
Jonathan Schwartz’s blog
Sun Micro shows open-source DRM project