17 April 2010, 15:03

The H Week - 2 proprietary products to go open source, LF boosts MeeGo & scareware on the rise

The past week has seen reports of plans to release two significant and previously proprietary products as open source. The Linux Foundation has been very active gaining new members, building support for Meego and holding its Collaboration Summit and Oracle is still keeping communities guessing over the future of OpenSolaris and MySQL. The Black Hat conference held this week in Barcelona has so far provided reports on two new attack methods and Google's statistics showed a rapid growth in scareware.

Featured

This week the H published a feature on the open source e-learning platform, Moodle and published part one in the Kernel Log series on the Linux kernel 2.6.34.

Open Source

EditShare, the new owners of Lightworks, a leading proprietary film industry video editor, announced plans to release the editor as open source. During the past week the Linux Foundation gained two new members: Collabora and LG. In the run up to the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit the Foundation also rallied strong support for the mobile Linux platform: MeeGo. Concern over the future of OpenSolaris was deepened when Oracle stopped the supply of free OpenSolaris CDs, but offered no explanation or indication of the possible future for the free Unix operating system. However Oracle did release a "much faster" beta of MySQL and reiterated its commitment to continued MySQL development and support. Statistics on the Android market showed real fragmentation, with several versions in use and apparently little effort being made by the manufacturers to push updates to the latest version. According to reports, Google will open source the VP8 codec, which will provide the open source community with access to a high performance HD video codec. Google has also funded development of an ARM optimised version of the Theora video codec. Mozilla launched the rebooted Bespin, their HTML5 based code editor project. James Gosling, the father of Java and CTO of Sun's Developer Products group announced his departure from Oracle following its takeover of Sun Microsystems.

Open Source Releases

Security

Two stories this week from the Black Hat conference that took place in Barcelona: a tool for cracking encrypted documents generated by older versions of Office which are still in widespread use and a new and powerful method for clickjacking. Google says its statistics show that scareware accounts for 15% of all malware found online and that figure is set to rise. New firmware from Zyxel for its ZyWall USG range of firewalls allows control over social network access. A configuration error at a small Chinese ISP resulted in thousands of web sites being misrouted for a brief period.

Security updates

To see all last week's news see The H's last seven days of news and to keep up with The H, subscribe to the RSS feed, or follow honlinenews on Twitter. You can follow The H's own tweeting on Twitter as honline.

(trk)

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