Michael Widenius continues his campaign to keep Oracle from acquiring MySQL
with a
petition and a lengthy FAQ on what he sees the problems being. “If the deal is approved based on the fact that ‘MySQL can be forked’, that will be a big blow to open source Software.
It means that open source software is not protected for anti-competitive
measures and it will be ok for big companies to freely buy up their open
source competitors and kill them.
Note that not even PostgreSQL is safe from this threat! For example, Oracle
could buy some companies developing PostgreSQL and target the core
developers. Without the core developers working actively on PostgreSQL, the
PostgreSQL project will be weakened tremendously and it could even die as a
result.“
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols lists
his most popular and favorite Linux stories of 2009.
“Before jumping into this, let me say that’s what popular isn’t the same thing as what’s important. So, I’m giving you a twofer list. The first is the most popular of my stories, and then there are the stories, which I think are the most important for Linux’s future.“
Whyteboard allows you to annotate PDF and PostScript documents and various image formats. You can draw with common tools such as a pen, rectangle, ellipse, text tool, etc. You can draw shapes, which can be moved, resized, recoloured, etc. Your drawing history is stored, allowing you to replay it. Tabbed painting is supported, with each sheet having its own unlimited undo and redo operations. There are live-updating thumbnails for each sheet. Sheets that are closed can also be undone, restoring their data. Note controls, similar to virtual, editable Post-It Notes. A draggable, live-updating resizable canvas that stretches to whatever size you want.
Changes: A crash with loading fonts saved on Windows into Linux that don’t exist there on Linux (and vice-versa) has been fixed. Bitmap selection and pasting images were broken. Pasting the same image multiple times would create multiple copies of the image when saving; this release saves one file and refers all copies to that file. Weird toolbox behavior when changing between text/icons twice or more from the preferences has been fixed. There are a few translation improvements.
Release Tags: Bugfixes
Tags: Whiteboard, draw, annotation, PDF, PostScript, paint, annotator, Image Editor
Licenses: GPLv3
Siam Quantum (SQ) is a quantum chemistry program that calculates wave function and total energy of molecules. It currently supports restricted Hartree-Fock method using Gaussian-type basis functions. The source code is well documented because it was initially designed for academic purposes so that students can easily understand. However, Siam Quantum can also produce high quality results for research purposes because the energies calculated are comparable to the ones produced by other software packages such as Gaussian or GAMESS, with the errors in the order of 10^-6 Hartrees, which can be further reduced with more strict cut-off.
Changes: A minor bugfix regarding reading XYZ file format and adding support for plotting molecular orbitals in CUBE file format.
Release Tags: Stable, Bugfixes
Tags: Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Chemistry
Licenses: GPL
Elastix is a software appliance that integrates
the best tools available for Asterisk-based PBXs
into a single, easy-to-use interface. It also adds
its own set of utilities and allows for the
creation of third party modules. The goals of
Elastix are reliability, modularity, and
ease-of-use. It also features strong reporting
capabilities.
Changes: Several improvements such as the Elastix Operator Panel, a renovated dashboard, conference rooms, and much more.
Tags: Networking, Monitoring, Communications, Internet Phone, Telephony
The maker is a content management system (CMS) for
Web sites. It runs on your local computer and
publishes via FTP after you have made your
changes. All that is required is some Web space
with FTP access.
Changes: In the 1.0 release, it was impossible to publish unsupported files. This update takes care of the problem.
Release Tags: Bugfixes
Tags: Internet, FTP, Web, Site Management, Text Processing, Markup, HTML/XHTML, XML, XSL/XSLT
Licenses: GPL v3
The Intel Software Development Emulator is a
functional emulator for new and upcoming
instruction set extensions. The emulator is based
on the Pin dynamic binary instrumentation system
(and XED). It emulates the new instructions in the
SSE4, AES, PCLMULQDQ, and Intel AVX instruction
set extensions. This allows developers to gain
familiarity with Intel’s upcoming instruction set
extensions.
Changes: Better support for recent Linux distributions, like Ubuntu 9.10. Better support for debugging with GDB on Linux. Better integration with GDB 7.0.50. Windows uses dbghelp.dll 6.11.1.404. Fixes for paths with spaces. Tool arguments are grouped more sensibly. The AVX/SSE transition checker emits previous block information. The alignment checker has been upgraded. There are more CPUID feature knobs for SSE technologies. There is a new chip-check feature to restrict instructions to specific chips; see "sde -thelp". There is a fast icounting feature and various numeric fixes.
Tags: Software Development, Testing, Emulators
Rubytree is a simple to use general purpose tree
data structure implementation in Ruby. It provides
easy access methods for navigating the hierarchy,
as well as for accessing the nodes. It also
provides ability to marshal the entire tree structure.
Changes: This release updates the documentation. The build and packaging have been moved completely to Hoe.
Release Tags: Minor
Tags: Software Development
Licenses: BSD Original
etm provides a format for using simple text files
to store event and task information, a command
line interface for viewing tasks and events in a
variety of convenient ways, and a wx(Python)-based GUI for creating and modifying events and tasks as
well as viewing them. Alarms are supported for
events, as well as repetition for both events and
tasks in a powerful and flexible manner.
Changes: This release adds a command to copy an item to the system clipboard. It adds the ability to specify a list of templates in etmrc that can be inserted when creating or modifying entries. It will limit display to an error message if exporting to ical fails, and otherwise append confirmation of the successful export to the display. It adds the ability to specify a directory on the command line for testing purposes to use in lieu of the value of etmdata given in etmrc. It corrects several pychecker warnings.
Release Tags: Minor feature additions, Minor bugfixes
Tags: Office/Business, Scheduling, Information Management
Licenses: GPL
IMAPFilter is a mail filtering utility. It connects to remote mail servers using the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), sends searching queries to the server, and processes mailboxes based on the results.
Changes: This release brings support for combining searching methods in multiple mailboxes at the same or different accounts and processing of the results in bulk, along with support for meta-searching that allows searching on the previous searching results.
Release Tags: Stable, Major
Tags: Communications, Email, Filters
Licenses: MIT/X
