02 October 2010, 12:00

The H Week - OpenOffice forks, calls for UK Government action on open source, Stuxnet spreads

In the past week, The H reported on Oracle's OpenOffice.org being forked into LibreOffice, heard calls for action over UK Government's open source policies, saw Ubuntu 10.10 release candidate and Fedora 14 beta arrive, noted how HDCP could be decoded in software, detailed the spread of Stuxnet malware around the globe and brought news of the patches for the ASP.NET Padding Oracle vulnerability.

Featured

This week, The H featured an in-depth look at the launch of the LibreOffice fork of OpenOffice.org by Richard Hillesley, saw Open Core declared 'over' in a guest comment and listed a range of events of interest to the community coming up in October.

Open Source

There were calls for action on UK Government open source policy as speakers at Westminster eForum identified a lack of open standards and open procurement as a problem. Meanwhile the new UK Open Government Licence opened the way for easier re-use of government data, the EFF found itself on the side of Microsoft in calling for a rebalancing of patent trials and the Codeplex Foundation changed its name to the OuterCurve Foundation.

The ramifications of Oracle's acquisition of Sun continued; LibreOffice was launched as a community developed fork of Oracle owned OpenOffice.org, the leader of the team that developed the ZFS file system left Oracle to form his own start-up and ForgeRock resuscitated the Oracle abandoned OpenDS and launched OpenDJ.

New Linux distributions approach with the release of the release candidate of Ubuntu 10.10 and the beta of Fedora 14. Ubuntu 9.04 comes to the end of its life this month, the last release of GNOME 2.x before GNOME 3.x, 2.32, was released and Novell's SUSE Appliance Toolkit was updated to generate images for Amazon's EC2.

Mobile developers saw Android as a strong long-term prospect for future development and Sharp announced two Android based tablets for the Japanese market. Things were not looking as good for Symbian with the announcement that Samsung were dropping support.

Disputes over the Nagios trademark were resolved, Google announced WebP, an image format based on how WebM stores images, as an alternative to JPEG, Arduino launched two new versions of its open source microcontroller card, Wikimedia looked to P2P to reduce bandwidth costs for web video and researchers released open source code which can decode encrypted HDCP in software.

Open Source Releases

New releases for vtiger CRM, Apache Mina and Shindig, Eclipse Helios, Tiki Wiki and Opsview, a beta release of the Drizzle MySQL fork and more improvements for Mozilla's Jetpack.

Security

Stuxnet spread around the world as the finger of blame for the malware pointed in different directions. A report said there is a proposal for NATO to respond to cyber attacks.

The Padding Oracle vulnerability in ASP.NET had a fix promised and delivered by Microsoft, Adobe brought forward their patch day, ZeuS botnets started targetting SMS transaction authentication while the same botnets were found to be vulnerable themselves, and Microsoft added account theft protection to Hotmail.

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.

(djwm)

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