open-source software

Mozilla Thunderbird 3.0: New calendar, better search

A new Mozilla Foundation effort to improve its Thunderbird open-source e-mail software now has an official name--and its first public goals.

Thunderbird 3.0 is due to ship by the end of the year with a more comprehensive search feature and official integration of the Lightning calendar add-on, said David Ascher, chief executive of the newly named Mozilla Messaging subsidiary. The first alpha release will come sooner, though, for those who want to test the software.

"I'm expecting we'll have some public releases probably within three months," Ascher said.

Mozilla is best known for its success with the Firefox browser, which has dented Microsoft Internet Explorer's dominance and sparked programmers to build a rich selection of extensions. Now the group is trying to apply the formula to e-mail software. Even though many rely on Web-based services for the chore, e-mail software is still widely used, and Thunderbird could open another major beachhead for open-source software in mainstream computing.

Although Mozilla Messaging's priority is to produce good software, not specifically to dethrone Microsoft's dominant Outlook software, the new calendar ability makes Thunderbird a more viable competitor, particularly in corporate environments.

Adding a third Mozilla group can be confusing, so let me spell out the distinctions for those of you who haven't scrutinized every development in the last 10 years since Netscape and its acquirer, AOL, spun off the Mozilla project in 1998. The Mozilla Foundation, a not-for-profit group, is in charge overall; for-profit subsidiaries Mozilla Corp. and Mozilla Messaging run the Web browser and e-mail projects, respectively.

Mozilla Messaging also has named a three-person board of directors: Ascher; Chris Beard, general manager of Mozilla Labs; and Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL, the open-source database company Sun Microsystems has just agreed to acquire for about $1 billion. More are likely to be added later as the organization grows, Ascher said.

Ubuntu picks KVM over Xen for virtualization

Heading in a different direction from its main rivals, Ubuntu Linux will use KVM as its primary virtualization software.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server both use the Xen virtualization software, a "hypervisor" layer that lets multiple operating systems run on the same computer. In contrast, the KVM software runs on top of a version of Linux, the "host" operating system that provides a foundation for other "guest" operating systems to run in a virtual mode.

"We've chosen to settle on KVM as our main virtualization focus,&… Read more

KDE 4 gives Linux some Mac, Windows flavor

KDE programmers released a significantly revamped version of its Linux graphical interfaces software on Friday, incorporating several features that also appear in Windows Vista and Mac OS X.

Among new features in KDE 4.0 are a start menu on steroids called Kickoff, new ways of viewing widgets and applications, a revamped file browser, and a new look to some entertainment applications that I hope will help pioneer a new user interface technology.

Unfortunately for KDE fans, the upgrade to version 4.0 comes at an awkward time, just a few months before Ubuntu's planned release in April of … Read more

Mozilla promotes Lilly from COO to CEO

Mozilla Corp., the for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, has promoted Chief Operating Officer John Lilly to chief executive, the organization behind the Firefox Web browser and Thunderbird e-mail software said Monday.

Former CEO Mitchell Baker will remain chairman, the organization said, where she'll focus on high-level issues such as standards, interoperability, and issues around people's data.

"John Lilly is the right person to guide the product and organizational maturity of MoCo. John has been doing more and more of this since he took on the COO role in August of 2006. John understands Mozilla, is astonishingly … Read more

Q&A: Red Hat CEO believes Delta past isn't a liability

Some folks paused when they heard an airline executive was taking over as Red Hat's new chief executive. But Jim Whitehurst thinks his job as Delta Air Lines' chief operating officer will serve him in good stead.

In an interview Friday, the 40-year-old said he believes his experience running much of a 50,000-person company and focusing on top priorities will serve the Linux seller well as it tries to increase revenue.

Whitehurst also has at least a touch of the open-source zeal of his predecessor, Matthew Szulik, who left the CEO job January 1 because of family medical … Read more

OpenMoko Linux phone to get Wi-Fi, faster chip

OpenMoko is upgrading its Linux-based mobile phone with a faster processor, Wi-Fi networking, and better graphics abilities, the company said Thursday.

The Neo FreeRunner has a faster 500MHz processor, compared with 266MHz for the Neo 1973 introduced last July.

It's also got built-in hardware for 2D and 3D graphics along with new motion sensors that can trigger automated behavior. The wireless networking supports the 802.11b/g standards.

The company will preview the new version at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week and begin selling it to developers in the spring.

OpenMoko is a subsidiary of First International Computer, … Read more

First Perl revamp in five years released

The Perl Foundation has released Perl 5.10, the first new version in five years of a programming language with an emphasis on rough-and-ready practicality over syntactical formality.

The new version has some features designed to make programming a notch easier, according to the announcement last week. Among those features is a "say" command that eases some text-output chores, a "switch" operator to send a program in various directions depending on different situations, and improvements to the all-important "regular expression" methods for handling text. The Perl interpreter, which runs Perl programs, also is faster … Read more

Red Hat exec: New CEO has open-source cred

Michael Tiemann, a Red Hat executive with close to two decades of open-source business experience under his belt, has come to the defense of the company's new chief executive.

Red Hat said last week that Jim Whitehurst, 40, will take over as Red Hat CEO and president on January 1, replacing Matthew Szulik, who's stepping down, though remaining chairman, because of family medical issues. Whitehurst worked at Delta Airlines from 2002 to 2007, rising to the position of chief operating officer.

Tiemann, who's Red Hat's vice president of open-source affairs and who helps to run the … Read more

Open-source Samba gets inside look at Microsoft specs

A complicated third-party arrangement means that the open-source Samba project will be able to make use of proprietary documents describing Microsoft file-sharing software.

Samba, governed by the General Public License (GPL), lets Unix or Linux servers behave like Windows machines used to share files over a network and control networked printers. But the effort has been difficult: Microsoft doesn't go out of its way to share the details of the protocols; patent infringement concerns also have appeared more than once.

On Thursday, though, the Samba team announced a deal that gets around the previous barriers. The increasingly influential Software Freedom Law Center, … Read more

Underexposed blog: Links of the day

Marc Fleury dings Apache Software Foundation -- JBoss founder says Apache should get over the BSD license and work with other Java projects such as JBoss or Sun Microsystems' OpenJDK rather than replicate its own. Harald Welte leaves OpenMoko -- He's getting back into GPL enforcement after "quite a bit of internal friction" at OpenMoko, an attempt to make an open-source mobile phone that began at Taiwanese company FIC. Ulrich Drepper: Energy saving is everybody's business -- A call to arms for programmers to make their code interrupt the CPU less often, and a hint that … Read more