Monthly Archive:: April 2010

Well, this certainly explains a whole lot. Both Apple and Microsoft have stated that the legality of Theora is highly debatable, and as it turns out, they knew more than we do - most likely courtesy of their close involvement with the MPEG-LA. Responding to an email from Free Software Foundation Europe activist Hugo Roy, Steve Jobs has stated that a patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora. Update: Monty Montgomery of Xiph (Ogg and Theora's parent organisation) has responded on Slashdot: "If Jobs's email is genuine, this is a powerful public gaffe ('All video codecs are covered by patents'). He'd be confirming MPEG's assertion in plain language anyone can understand. It would only strengthen the pushback against software patents and add to Apple's increasing PR mess. Macbooks and iPads may be pretty sweet, but creative individuals don't really like to give their business to jackbooted thugs."

Via LWN: "Lennart Poettering has put up a lengthy post describing the 'systemd' project, which is creating a new init system. The whole thing is an interesting discussion of how system initialization should work. Upstart maintainer Scott James Remnant has posted a response to the announcement."

"Hyperion Entertainment CVBA announces the immediate availability of Update 2 for AmigaOS 4.1 for AmigaOne, SAM440EP and Pegasos II for registered users. Note that for this update you must have previously installed AmigaOS 4.1 Update 1. Installation of this Update 2 is required for the upcoming public alpha of Timberwolf . This is a minor update which contains mostly bugfixes."

I am almost flabbergasted by the spin and blunt-face upon which this news is delivered. We were just discussing the pot calling the kettle black with Apple / Adobe and now Microsoft have also come out in favour of a closed video format for an open web--IE9's HTML5 video support will allow H264 only. Update Now that the initial shock is over, I've rewritten the article to actually represent news rather than something on Twitter.

Now this sucks. We've encountered several 'leaks'over the past few months regarding a 'secret' project within Microsoft called Courier. The demonstrations showed a highly innovative dual-touchscreen tablet thingamabob that combined multitouch and pen input to create a completely new user interface. Today, Microsoft confirmed the project's existence (yay!)... By cancelling it (boo!).

It's that time of year again: a new Ubuntu release (or Kubuntu, if that's your thing). Canonical has just released Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx. This is a long term support release, meaning its supported period is far longer than that of normal releases. It comes with the latest and greatest the Free software world has to offer, while also adding some Ubuntu-specific features, of course.

"In order to ensure a consistently high quality browser across our most popular desktop platforms we have reluctantly decided to drop support for Solaris. This will allow our UNIX development team to focus all of their attention on bringing Opera for Linux and FreeBSD up to final release quality, meaning that a 10.5x release for these platforms will happen as soon as feasibly possible". Opera assure us that this will have no effect on the existing Linux and UNIX ports.

I think it's about time we got an Adobe category. Apple recently made public an API to allow OS X software access to hardware H.264 acceleration (albeit such acceleration is only available on chipsets since the Nvidia 9400M--early 2008) and Adobe have already baked this in to a beta preview of Flash 10.1 "Gala"! Update: Steve Jobs himself weighs in on Flash (via Engadget): "New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind."

So, the deal with HTC isn't the only partnership Microsoft entered into today. The Joomla! project has announced that Microsoft has signed the Joomla! Contributor Agreement, meaning the Redmond company is now a contributor to this GPL project. Microsoft code has already found its way into the upcoming Joomla! 1.6 release, and closer cooperation between Joomla! and Microsoft will follow.

Yeah, we're continuing with the mobile news for now. As it turns out, there are two ways to deal with ever increasing competition. Where Apple sued HTC, Microsoft has decided to do what it does best: they're trying to extract some form of profit out of the rising popularity of Android phones. This morning, the Redmond giant announced it signed a patent licensing agreement with HTC.

Piggybacking on the N8 launch, Nokia provided the first public release of the Nokia Qt SDK (beta). In essence, this product is the Qt Creator 2.0 (with the usual support for desktop development), enhanced with features necessary for Symbian and Maemo/MeeGo development: easy hardware debugging, as well as a simulator that mocks screen size and various hardware events like location changes.

The LLVM Compiler Infrastructure version 2.7 has just been released. It includes a new open source BSD licensed C/C++ compiler, clang. "This includes significantly better generated code, improvements to debug information generation and a broad number of new features in the core infrastructure. One exciting feature is that Clang is now able to bootstrap itself, a major milestone in any compiler's development and particularly notable considering the complexity of implementing C++!" LLVM also has a new official blog.

The inventor of the Ogg container format, Monty "xiphmont" Montgomery, has written up a remarkably detailed article refuting every complaint Mans Rullgard has posed in his anti-Ogg articles. "Mans Rullgard has written two long rants about the Ogg container in the past few years. One made it to Slashdot apparently based on the drama potential alone. If you don't know what I'm talking about below, don't worry about it, tl;dr. I'd not originally intended to respond to open trolling. The continued urging of many individuals has convinced me it's important to rebut in some public form. Earnest falsehoods left unchallenged risk being accepted as fact."

People have often rightfully pointed out that we here at OSNews do not seem to pay a lot of attention to RIM and its BlackBerry mobile operating system. Those people are right, but it stems from the fact that I simply have never actually seen, let alone used, a BlackBerry, which makes it very hard to write about. I'm hoping this will go a little way into turning that frown upside down: today, RIM demonstrated version 6.0 of its BlackBerry operating system. And it's on OSNews' front page.