Free Can Mean Big Money: The Open Source Economy

I read something in one of the comments for an OSNews posting a couple weeks ago that sent me thinking. It wasn't an original or profound thought. In fact, it's a rather commonly-held opinion that happens to be quite misguided. It's an opinion summed up by the "open source = communist" meme that gets thrown around in thousands of flamewars all over the internet. In this essay, I will explore why this idea is wrong and demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of economics.

HP unveils Unix roadmaps

HP World HP will be a pitching a story of Unix harmony and advancement at its HP World user conference here this week. First up, HP has now released HP-UX 11i V2 for both its Itanium and PA-RISC based servers. This means PA-RISC customers no longer have to wait until HP-UX 11i V3 arrives to use the same operating system as their Itanium counterparts. The bad news, however, is that both sets of customers will have to wait until the second half of next year to get their hands on V3 - a product once due at the end of this year.

Peter Mitchell Sets Up XDarwin 4.4 with KDE

Australian Peter Mitchell has written up a description of his efforts to use XDarwin in combination with KDE. In his article, he describes the command line installation steps for running GNOME and KDE using XDarwin as the windowing layer. He describes both the challenges he faced and some suggestions as to the best order in which to install the various components necessary to run GNOME and KDE environments on Mac OS X. Also, the XDarwin project is to switch from XFree86 to X.org.

LLVM 1.3 is released

Version 1.3 of the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure is now available. LLVM is a open-source system that focuses on providing compiler components to build all kinds of compiler-related programs, including traditional static compilers, JIT compilers, profile systems, debuggers, script engines, etc. Release 1.3 provides many new features, including new beta support for PowerPC code generation and improvements to the C/C++ compiler's optimizer.