Unixster

One of the key objections Mozilla and its supporters have had to the use of H.264 codecs for HTML5 video — the built-in decoding system being developed for the next edition of HTML — is that it’s proprietary technology. As such, there are no guarantees against the rights holders to that technology staking claims to it and charging money for it — and there may not be much protection against others who believe they have claims on it to test their theories in a full-scale patent infringement trial.

When the Symbian Foundation announced the opening up of its namesake smartphone platform on Thursday, it caused a major shift not just in the mobile landscape but also in the FOSS world. Announced by Nokia back in 2008, the transition of the leading platform from proprietary code to open source was completed four months ahead of schedule and is the largest in software history, the foundation said. “The development community is now empowered to shape the future of the mobile industry,” said Lee Williams, the Symbian Foundation’s executive director.

The Register’s latest video webcast, an expert look at open source and traditional proprietary software models, is now available on-demand from the Reg archives. This broadcast explores the relative merits of open source and traditional proprietary software, and discusses how they can best be made to co-exist happily. El Reg event moderator Tim Phillips welcomed Steve Harris of Novell and Freeform Dynamics’ Tony Lock into our swanky London studio. Joining the chaps over the wire from across the pond were Frank Rego of Novell and Jose Thomas of Microsoft.

This may be a category in which the proprietary tools win out over open source. Unless you tell me otherwise…

Yahoo! is losing the founder of Hadoop, that increasingly popular open source grid platform based on Google’s proprietary software infrastructure. On September 1, after three and a half years with Yahoo!, Doug Cutting will join Cloudera, the commercial Hadoop startup that launched earlier this year. As reported by the New York Times, Cutting announced his departure from Yahoo! this morning at a company meeting.

When people think about adopting an Open Source solution, the first factor that comes to mind is the price: it is usually cheaper than proprietary alternatives. What a lot of people fail to consider is that there are a lot of other advantages to Open Source that can be much more important than the price factor. Let’s have a look at a few of them…

FlameDesktop is a place where everybody could browse in a really inovative and user-friendly way for good Linux software. FlameDesktop aims to be a good entrance door to the Linux world. Based on concept that things should be easy to learn and intuitives to everyone. Think of FlameDesktop as a kind of Synaptic build for the web. The main goal is to have all the good software for Linux and software of the Ubuntu repositories (instalation with one click – apt-url) posted on FlameDesktop. There are already good sites for browsing Linux software like www.gnomefiles.org, www.kde-apps.org and sourceforge.net, among others. But the thing is that some only post software related to a especific programming language like GTK, QT, Java etc.. and others are, in my opinion, not very user-friendly. FlameDesktop dont care about divisions of software based on their written languages, or if they are open source, proprietary, or commercial ones. If it is usefull and well designed it will be there. Sooner or later.

Taking a stand will have its consequences. I’m having a rather traumatic experience with certain Microsoft products lately. My problem is that I’m trying to "get to know" Microsoft’s Hyper-V for my virtualization column over at Linux Magazine. The problem is, that to manage a true Hyper-V system remotely, you must have a Windows Vista or Windows 7 system. The problem with that is that I’m not gonna do it. I refuse to adopt either system, which in turn, will also prevent me from using Hyper-V or writing anything about it. I think that for Linux to survive and thrive as a desktop operating system, it needs some proprietary tools.

Free software may be becoming more attractive to businesses, but even though using the software is free, chances are they’ll still need to hire some technical assistance from time to time. Open source tech support experts sometimes need a few different skills than their proprietary counterparts, but their salaries are often quite similar — if not better.

The Symbian Foundation has released its first open source software package, the first step in the organization’s plan to eventually open source the entire Symbian mobile operating system. The Symbian Foundation was set up by in June 2008 by Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, NTT DoCoMo, Texas Instruments, Vodafone, Samsung, LG and AT&T to oversee the development of the Symbian OS as an open source platform, licensed under the Eclipse Public Licence (EPL). The OS had previously been developed as proprietary software by the Symbian Foundation.