Practical Technology

for practical people.

January 9, 2011
by sjvn01
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Android runs down iPhone in the Smartphone Races

Yes, Apple’s iPhone is popular, and yes it looks like Verizon is finally going to release an iPhone, but Android phones have turned out to be even more popular.

In its latest survey of U.S. mobile phone industry during the three month average period ending November 2010, comScore reported that while RIM continued to lead among smartphone platforms with 33.5 percent market share, Android charged past the iPhone to take second place. To be exact, Google Android captured the number two spot in November with 26.0 percent of U.S. smartphone subscribers. Apple took third with 25.0 percent; followed by Microsoft with 9.0 percent and Palm in the back with 3.9 percent.

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January 8, 2011
by sjvn01
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No GPL Apps for Apple’s App Store

Some people swore to me that just because the free-software General Public License (GPL) clashes with the Apple App Store’s Terms of Service (ToS), didn’t mean that Apple would actually pull down GPLed apps. Well, Apple just did. Rémi Denis-Courmont, a Linux developer and the popular VLC media player, has just announced that Apple had pulled the popular GPLed VLC media player from its App Store.

Denis-Courmont wrote, “On January 7th, Apple removed VLC media player from its application store for iDevices. Thus the incompatibility between the GNU General Public License and the AppStore terms of use is resolved–the hard way. This end should not have come to a surprise to anyone, given the precedents.”

It certainly didn’t come as a surprise to Denis-Courmont who pointed out that Apple’s ToS conflicted with VLC’s GPLv2 licensing on October 25th when he sent a formal notification of “copyright infringement … to Apple Inc. regarding distribution of the VLC media player for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. VLC media player is free software licensed solely under the terms of the open source GNU General Public License (a.k.a. GPL). Those terms are contradicted by the products usage rules of the AppStore through which Apple delivers applications to users of its mobile devices.”

His action did not go over well with some other VideoLAN, the non-profit organization behind VLC, developers. As Denis-Courmont wrote at this time, “Some people have commented that this will damage the project’s reputation. Maybe so. Blame those who published and/or advertised VLC for iPad. The fact of the GPL incompatibility was already well known.”

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January 7, 2011
by sjvn01
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Broadcom (Yes, Broadcom) joins the Linux Foundation

A major pain point for Linux desktop users over the years has been a lack of Wi-Fi chipset support. That’s been changing for the better over the last few years, but I still find it a little amazing that on Monday, January 10th, the Linux Foundation will announce that Broadcom, yes Broadcom, will be joining the Foundation.

You see, for years, Linux notebook users have had a hate-hate relationship with Broadcom. While Atheros and Intel provided Linux Wi-FI drivers and code, Broadcom did little to nothing for Linux users. Broadcom started changing its ways in 2007 and started offering more and more support for Linux. Then, in September 2010, Broadcom released the source code for the “initial release of a fully-open Linux driver for its latest generation of 11n chipsets.”

Since then, that driver has been integrated into the latest Linux kernel release 2.6.37 and, as a result, is actively being improved upon by the entire Linux community. Even so, for Broadcom, with its vast portfolio of semiconductors for wired and wireless communications, to join the Linux Foundation is a surprise. It’s also a very pleasant one.

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January 6, 2011
by sjvn01
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Qualcomm & Atheros: The Marriage of 4G and Wi-Fi

The biggest technology news this week didn’t come from CES in Las Vegas. No, the biggest news story was that Qualcomm, a major mobile phone radio silicon player, is buying Atheros, one of the leading lights of Wi-Fi silicon. Put them together and what do you get? I’ll tell you what you get; you eventually get PCs, notebooks, tablets, smartphones, whatever, that can cheaply connect with both 4G and Wi-Fi networks.

Universal connectivity is one of the big CES themes. As NPR’s Laura Sydell said she’d seen “more Internet-connected devices than I’ve ever seen [before] at CES and some of them are talking to one another.” Of course, people at CES are also seeing how all this connectivity can fail, and I mean really fail as Nvidia’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang will be “happy” to tell you all about that.

Besides there just not being enough bandwidth to go around at CES, one of the things they’re not telling you at CES is how hard it is to put all that 3G, 4G and wireless technology into a single device. That’s why I thought the news that Sierra Wireless bringing ready to go 4G for device OEMs was noteworthy news. This isn’t easy to do.

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January 6, 2011
by sjvn01
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New OpenSUSE Foundation will still be dominated by Novell

One of the questions that has yet to be completely answered by Attachmate’s pending acquisition of Novell is what will happen to its associated community Linux, openSUSE. Some people in the open-source community, including my friends, Pamela Jones of Groklaw and Andrew “Andy” Updegrove, a founding partner at the law-firm, Gesmer Updegrove, are concerned that Attachmate/Novell will be calling the shots in the post-buyout openSUSE.

Much as I hate to disagree with two people I respect and like so much, I don’t see why they think that there’s a big deal is here.

Jones points out that “There’s more than one stakeholder in the OpenSUSE foundation being set up, and you’ll see that discussed in the log. Trademarks have economic value, and if the community is helping in building that value, I think it’s logical that they should gain a share of ownership rights so as to get some share in that value and some say in what happens with the trademark.”

She’s right, of course. The other stakeholders should get something more than a virtual pat on the head, but they won’t. This was also the case before Attachmate arrived on the scene. When push came to shove Novell has controlled openSUSE since the day it was first spun out.

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January 5, 2011
by sjvn01
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LibreOffice: Ready for Liftoff

LibreOffice, the Oracle-free fork of the OpenOffice office suite, may, or may not, end up being the default office suite in Ubuntu, but its first release is almost here.

Before getting into that though, there have been rumors running around that Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, had already committed to using LibreOffice in its next release, Ubuntu 11.04. True, Ubuntu has always been interested in replacing OpenOffice with LibreOffice Indeed, Mark Shuttleworth told me back when LibreOffice was starting to break away from OpenOffice that, “The Ubuntu Project will be pleased to ship LibreOffice from The Document Foundation in future releases of Ubuntu. That’s not the same thing though as saying it’s going to ship in Ubuntu 11.04.

Earlier today, Rick Spencer, Ubuntu’s Engineering Director, told me that “The Ubuntu desktop team and the community are making a final call on whether to go with Libre or OO.org at the Ubuntu/Linaro Rally scheduled for Dallas next week and assuming a decision is reached there we will confirm it at that point. The informal mail post sent by Matthias, one of our developers was simply pointing out the options available, not confirming a decision.”

No matter what Ubuntu may, or may not, do though LibreOffice is on its way to its first release.

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