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Yes it is true. A personal experience below.

Using real open source projects in the context of a University course can be a quite successful experience. Both from the didactic point of view and from a software production perspective.
Five years ago I decided to involve my students of the advanced computer graphics course at the Pisa University in the collective writing of an extensible mesh processing system that we called MeshLab with a plugin based architecture that allowed a easy to be managed compartmental development. Students get very involved and, beside the computer graphics hard core topics of the course, they learned a lot in term of collaborative development, ethics of sw development, open source licenses. At the end of that course a working system was successfully distributed under a GPL.
Since then, every year, I have repeated this approach extending it, and with the helps of tens and tens of willing students the system evolved into a serious complex mesh processing system, GPL'd, multiplatform, included in ubuntu and that is used worldwide by ten of thousands of users in academic and commercial environments.
I found that the knowledge of participating to the development of a **real** system gives the students a really strong motivation to give their best. The fact that their contribs will be released publicly with their name linked to the commits and listed in the official developer page was a strong incentive to do not cheat. For most of them it was the first time that they were making something real (not only exercises) something with a purpose that was quite different from the standard "get the score" approach. Many of the students continued to maintain their portion of code well beyond the course terms (some even after graduating).

I cannot but thanks my students for the dedication that they have shown in the projects.
Just google for MeshLab for more details of it.
P.

If you are playing with someone else's money - even as a learning exercise - you have an obligation to act in their best interests. Otherwise, you're just doing a Halliburton on a smaller scale. Save your good intentions for your own money.

You are spot-on, but this doesn't answer the question he asked. Assuming (hypothetically) you were ordered to invest in Open Source, what company would you invest in? Novell?!?! (SARCASM THERE!)

It's not hard to understand a mutual fund's interest in Open Source. The PHB's hear that buzzword as often as they hear web2.0, right? Okay, so people want Open Source to work for them, make them money, you know, just like everything else.

This is where I get off the train, so the rest of this post is a tangent. But the question is valid, and I'm choosing not to answer it either. Someone else feel free to jump in with options like Google, Red Hat, even Oracle... Now let me explain why Open Source is not a part of my investment strategy

(Standard disclaimer that the following is not to be construed as investment advice and I am not liable for your financial losses -- or gains.)

I think that looking at the whole point of the FSF's Free Software (intentionally narrowing the definition, since the BSD license makes things more complicated for this discussion) -- Free Software is not only liberated from closed-source restrictions such as copyright and IP laws so that it can be shared openly, but this also means the act of copying it can be performed at zero cost. Zero-cost copies are an inherent element of the internet and commodity computing. Therefore, although Free Software makes great sense in business plans, it is the antithesis of business!

Free Software provides the same thing that other communities provide: donated goods and services that have market value but have been "given back" to the community. Thus, Novell faces serious repercussions if they are booted from the community -- and that could hurt their balance sheet. However, even though the community involves sales, transactions, etc., where a customer pays money (e.g. Red Hat support contracts), the donated goods and services produce a segment of the market that has zero market value. Whether we are talking about Free Software, with the technology to give the donation to everyone in the world, or other communities where hospitals are sometimes willing to write off medical expenses when the patient is completely overwhelmed by medical bills -- the effect is to make the goods and services (software or medical bills) of zero value. Why would a hospital do this? Why would a "hobbyist" (Bill Gates' term) or programmer give away software? Some would argue this threatens the very livelihood of the one giving away stuff.

But the hospital or programmer receives intangible goods and services in return. Put simply, it's a return to a basic barter system. I, the hospital director, authorize certain "free care." In return, I receive the goodwill of members of my community. If I am overwhelmed with immigrants from far-away communities who demand my free care, and then depart, the economics of medical care might overwhelm me. (But many hospitals are so well-funded that this really isn't a problem.) Any marketing student will tell you that the goodwill of your community can have a concrete impact on your balance sheet. As a contributor to Free Software, I receive the goodwill of members of the community. In this technology realm, though, there can be as many leechers as kernel.org and sourceforge.org can handle before hypothetically the community would start to suffer.

Thus companies like Google have exactly the right business plan. By investing in open source software, they invest in the community goodwill where the community is the entire planet. Then they capitalize on this by asking the community to view their advertisements, use their online office tools, se

The stinking pile of evidence is all well preserved.

JOIN US!
Our quick response open-source-team to eliminate "Loopt Inc.".

To put them out of business we need little of your free time and little programming skill to build fully open sourced and GPL'ed GPS map and tracking software.


---
Open source sanitizators aka Open source KKK buddies
Getting legitimate closed source businesses out of business since 1992.
Don't forget we work around the clock, 7/24/365. Who will dare to chalenge us?
JOIN US!
Free as in beer forever and ever.

JOIN US!
Our quick response open-source-team to eliminate "Loopt Inc.".

To put them out of business we need little of your free time and little programming skill to build fully open sourced and GPL'ed GPS map and tracking software.


---
Open source sanitizators aka Open source KKK buddies
Getting legitimate closed source businesses out of business since 1992.
Don't forget we work around the clock, 7/24/365. Who will dare to chalenge us?
JOIN US!
Free as in beer forever and ever.

JOIN US!
Our quick response open-source-team to eliminate "Loopt Inc.".

To put them out of business we need little of your free time and little programming skill to build fully open sourced and GPL'ed GPS map and tracking software.


---
Open source sanitizators aka Open source KKK buddies
Getting legitimate closed source businesses out of business since 1992.
Don't forget we work around the clock, 7/24/365. Who will dare to chalenge us?
JOIN US!
Free as in beer forever and ever.

Reward for open source is to literally destroy those rich fu***s producing close source, stupid dumb-ass. Timber!!!! Another closed source project burned alive on our "open source timber hill". JOIN US! KKK open source buddies OVER THERE! WE ARE PUTTING CLOSED SOURCE PEOPLE OUT OF BUSINESS 7/24/365.

Elephant graveyard of failed software and you may try your luck there, but real programmmers code they own code. Only losers rip.

Any serious commercial software house will smack you in the face with a flat refusal if they hear you worked for SourceForge.org, this is just ridiculous, only some terrible loser programmer would want to join the elephant graveyard of failed software to help undermine any existing software business.

When I was finally confident with WEBCALENDAR, I pitched it to my boss ( make sure you schedule 30 mins in his/her calendar or else you will get interuptions etc , and you will not be able to get your idea across ) . After showing the calendar system , he was impressed , I told him not only is it in house , web based, but FREE.

We just roled out the calendar this monday, and trained about 20 people, and everything went well.

It was very great to see something you are trying to implement actually happen, and everyone thanks and appreciates my hard work in bringing this to them.

This has opened the door for OSS at our district.

Manuelpl

First I want to say that I am not a fan of MS. My main living room devices for the last three years are a hacked Tivo and a PC with various "test" builds of MythTv.

Last month my spouse got tired of me futzing around with the MythTv box and purchased a MCE 2005 PC for the living room. At first I thought I would hate it because of the noted DRM, but after setting it up and using it for a while I have to say that I am impressed. The machine runs smoothly and I now finally have a slick/easy way to browse my MP3 and DVD backups off of my main file server. I am really impressed with how well the box plays DVD backups. After testing about thirty DVD backups I have not found anything that has DVD menus that choke the box (wish I could say the same for my homebrew solutions). The DRM has absolutely no control over my use of the box. I only give the MCE box read only access to the content on my file server, which means that my media library will continue to be safe from being crippled with DRM. I continue to use my favorite apps to rip/move content (audio/video/tivo/dvd) to my collection on my main file server.

The MCR 2005 box is not perfect. I will still continue hack away with Linux and MythTv, but now there is a PC in the living room that my whole family can use to enjoy my media library.

Also, writing add-ins is very easy, there is a good sized developer community and the SDK is a free download.

Sounds like you inserted a live CD once and that's about you linux experience.

1: There's hardly a 'common' application that isn't available under linux, and a lot of commercial windows applications run under wine (XMLSpy, Flash, Director, Photoshop, WinZip etc..)
Sometimes the application are better under linux (e.g. the ones that talk to you palm) and sometimes there better under windows. If your insearch of 'desktop' linux applications you can try going
to Freshmeat, Source forge or for kde apps there's kde apps, I'm sure you'll find anything you look for, well except the odd brand name.

I don't understand this ease-of-use thing either, try mandrake or knopix. You can even have a go at installing and setting up Gentoo if you want, just remember to print out the installation guide before doing a stage 1 from you USB key.

As someone who's been using Windows for 10+ years and linux for 5+ I have found that most problems are easily solved under Linux, but when you've got a problem under Windows you end up banging you head against the table trying to fix it.

Check Sourceforge, there are several being worked on, I'm sure they could use the help.

2 to bring up firefox and go to SourceForge

3 to type in "Diskless workstation" in the search box

5 to scan the results and find this project.

Oh lookie, you want the server to be debian? Amazingly enough, there is a link.

There has been a spate of fish hacking (what else do you do with a Big Mouth Billy Bass after the five-minute period it can hold your interest?)

Recently I exhibited my seven-bass animatronic work called School of Fish Pain at the DC Museum of Contemporary Art. I used Audacity to edit the audio clips the fish say. The fish cry out and whap their tails in pain. It hurts to be dry.

When the price dropped, I bought one and modded it out. It makes a wicked little living room all in one media center, once you strip out all the MS crap.

If MS dropped the price to drive the sale of games, it didn't work on me, I've yet to play an acutal game on it!

I suppose I should give some props to xbox linux, too. I had it running debian for a while.

Yes, because no-one is going to make things if other people can just take a copy without paying.

CoSource does this but doesn't have any means for the customer to check whether progress is being made (although they define a third party to judge when the project is completed). And this is where XP comes in: through UserStories, UnitTest s and ContinuousIntegration the customer can always check progress. Plus after each 2-4 week iteration they can terminate the project and only pay for the work done to that point.

XP would not be enforced, can't anyway, but the intention is to offer tools which allow the customer and developers to a) communicate and share ideas, b) allow the customer to see whether progress is being made and c) both sides to check the quality. Tools should not be forced upon projects, however, customers would have the right to define which tools should be used for a project (after all they sponsor the projects). However, to a certain extent, a project should be given time to find it's own tools of choice.

Benefits for customers:

1. Many potential customers can combine forces and allow a product to be dev

The most promising SVG editor looks to be Sodipodi. There's a small but active development community grown up around it, and its pretty easy to get involved and help add to it. Work is under way to modularize a few pieces - libnr (a new SVG renderer to replace libart in Sodipodi), libcroco (a CSS library), and a new effort aimed at breaking out Sodipodi's SVG drawing canvas into something reusable.

One direction I'd love to see Sodipodi go is to gain additional technical drawing capabilities, so that it could be used for things that Dia isn't quite up to - like diagrams that need an artistic flair to them.

There are a lot of web based mail/office systems in OSS that could be a good replacement. One of the first ones I used was twig, with a not so flashy interface, but very good functionality, but there are a lot of alternatives. Or go to some kind of groupware, like phpgroupware mentioned earlier or PHProjekt, that is also very good. Also not only groupwares have a webmail interfaces, other kind of projects have it, like TikiWiki, that can have another central functionality, but as it have integrated webmail it could be good as a replacement integrated with more solutions.

Please, people, if you don't know what s/he's asking, keep your trap shut, m'kay? We're talking audio here, so signal-to-noise ratio counts, you see...

But, do you want to go the hardware or software recording route?

If you have a decent enough computer (G3 macs or PII upwards x86s will do the trick for about 16 tracks), you might consider getting a good soundcard.

I personally use a M-Audio Delta44, 4 inputs, 4 outputs, nothing more. Perfect for recording. They have nice break-out boxes, so you don't have to crouch behind your computer when plugging in your guitars, basses or mics, they work under Macs, PC's and have linux support via ALSA (yes, linux can do multitracking as well). When you need more tracks, you can just add more cards and get 8/8 or up to 16/16 in/out-system.

As for recording software, well... my delta came with a cut-down version of Logic Audio, which should be good enough for start. Most 'pro-sumer' soundcards come up with basic software, so you shouldn't need to cough up any more money for it in the beginning.

Other software: Cubase is nice, and there's nice 'lite'-versions for beginners (some soundcards come with this instead of logic). Cakewalk is quite popular as well.

If you just want audio recording (the aforementioned do MIDI as well), then there's Cool Edit Pro. For free, there's Audacity (audacity does Windows, Linux and Mac) which is proficient enough multitrack audio editor. SLab is a good linux multitrack recorder.

And mp3, well, you don't want to use mp3 for multitrack recording, but most modern software can import mp3-sounds, and output the result to mp3 (some of them [cool edit/audacity] can do ogg as well)

If you want a proper hardware recorder (which are nice, since you can take them to your rehersal space, summer cottage, ..., what have you), then there's plenty to choose from. Most of these are a couple of years old, so you can find them for reasonable prices used (or even new!)

Roland VS-8xx series, they're nice, compact, can do 4-track recording, and 8-track playback. Loads of features, and useful later on even if you grow out of this one. Earlier models had inbuilt harddrives, the later ones have ZIP-drives (if I remember correctly). If you can get one for cheap (and i think you should), then go for this one.

Korg D-8. A bit easier to operate, but quite useful nevertheless.

And i think Fostex had some as well, just keep your eyes open in the pawnshops.

GAIM has a pretty good MSNm client library, and the most recent Win32 GAIM alphas are quite stable and usable. http://gaim.sourceforge.org/ should link you to their homepage. I hope this helps.

BBSing is alive and well for door games.

I make a Tradewars2002 helper for java.
Its even open source!

Go to www.j-twat.com to check it out, or to the sourceforge page here

Digital camera image processing has moved to the 16-bit realm. That's what's keeping me on Windows, although not at all exclusively.

I don't discount The Gimp, but its strictly 8-bit in all its glory. FilmGimp is beginning to bridge that gap. In fact, it's a credible tool for manipulating 16-bit TIFs. In addition, the ImageMagick package does provide a number of tools for 16-bit TIF processing as well.

Still, I can't get a cutting edge sharpening or noise reduction algorithm for 16-bit TIFs in Linux.

What's available in Windows? Well, more than Photoshop. All sorts of little specialty apps. As an example, here's a free, but not open source sharpening application that draws its algorithms from bleeding-edge medical diagnostics imaging software, with sophisticated edge sharpening and halo controls.

Not only does it output 16-bit images, but intermediate calculations are done in 32-bit for superlative accuracy!

Is ImageMagick evolving in this direction? I hope so.

And what's the future of printer support for 16-bit images?

And the tools it comes with are designed for recovery and forensics, not demonstrating your sound and video cards.... so beware and enjoy!! The partitions are mounted read-only by default, for instance, and there are tools for undeleting files as well as for copying all data to a network-mounted filesystem, includes nfs samba ssh etc ;^]

Exchange 2K is different. It's built around SMTP, POP, LDAP, and iCalendar. It's using standard protocols. Where are the UNIX clients to support them?

With Mac follows cohesion from the main Apple offices and the Jobby the friendly CEO.

The cohesion within the Linux community is different entirely, although present nonetheless. Go here for an example.

To hold the two side by side is entertaining, but nothing more.

Galeon shows them just fine.

1. If you're willing to get a year-old machine, almost any distribution will support almost all the features on any Sony, IBM, or Dell. Specifically we have had good luck with all IBM ThinkPads, Dell Inspirons, and Sony Vaios.
2. The best machine for the ultimate power user is unquestionably the Dell Inspiron 8000. The 1600x1200 display works perfectly in X4. Many of our university astronomer customers opt for this system. For a powerful machine that you can port around daily, the IBM ThinkPad T20 series is expensive, but very nice. Its 1400x1050 display works perfectly in Linux. Both of these machines have an Intel eepro100 ethernet which works perfectly in Linux. They both have the Lucent winmodem which can also be made to work in Linux. They both have CDRWs which will burn CDs in Linux.
3. By far our most popular machines are the Sony Z505 and R505 machines which weigh 3.75 pounds and are still very fully featured. APM can be a problem with these systems, but X runs at 1024x768, the USB floppies work, the memory sticks work, and they also have the internal eepro ethernet. Their winmodem is worthless in Linux.
4. Of extreme popularity lately has been the Transmeta Crusoe chipped Sony PictureBook (C1VN/C1VP). It weighs just over two pounds and also runs Linux very well. The camera works. Due to its small size, it does not have internal ethernet, serial or parallel ports.

Kernel: linux-2.4.7 + 2.4.8-pre-3 + kerneli patch (kernel.org)
Sound: alsa-0.9.0beta5 (www.alsa-project.org)
PCMCIA: pcmcia-cs-3.1.27 (www.pcmcia-cs.sourceforge.org)

My personal machine upon which I have done all of my development work for the past year is the IBM T21. The person who does all of our web and Perl development uses the small C1VN. My wife, who has to carry her computer in a backpack all over downtown Atlanta, uses the Z505.

... Should be done through Freenet
Come on, let's hear it, Distributed, Free, Secure (not yet been hacked :) )

At Sourceforge I am beginning an open source pool simulation project, and this information is exactly what I was needing.

I had already spent a few days at a pool table making measurments with a ruler to figure out the physics of pool, but this will save me years of work. The project, by the way, is called X-Pool and I am very interested in recruiting developers.

- qpt

From the geek in me, that's really cool!

From the logical side in me... If the developers hacking these systems would concentrate their obvious talent into something like perfecting support on standard PC/Mac etc hardware I think it may be more benificial to the community at large.

As the Dreamcast will be totaly revamped in its next iteration (probably), making this port almost useless. If this port only runs in backward compatibility mode, whats the point? And to what end other than a cool hack that gets posted on /. does this have. Are all the pimple faced kids who are playing games on theirs going to rush out and download a port of BSD to run on their systems? If they have a burner to make the CD, don't they already have hardware that's probably pretty cool already?

So the intention of getting cheap hardware that can be usefull is now useless? Who becomes the end user? Some little old lady who's grandkid has all the cool toys and has thrown his Dreamcast asside for the new PS2 he finally got off backorder?

I think if the community of hackers is to survive, focus must be applied. How many projects at source forge are duplicates doing the same code for the same end but independant of each other.

And for the troll... wouldn't it be cool to build a cluster of these...

Before you hack that fish... think about why your doing it.

Yes LaTeX2HTML is good. A kludge, but a good kludge none the less. However it remains a kludge.

So, the prequisite for something like this to gather steam is a MathML browser. Another killer reason to get the Moz Lizard.

Then there are structuring issues.

A mad sprawl as generated by a Wiki? Why not, Wiki's tend to self reorganised themselves.

Or a highly scholarly arrangement of committees and subcommittees etc. etc.

I think there is room for both...

Who will host it? Source Forge?

Please someone, start up the ultimate Free Math Site as a Wiki!

"PCMCIA stuff" already works very well. I have had 2.0 and 2.2 kernels running on a couple different Dell laptops. The only real difference with 2.4 is that the PCMCIA stuff will be more integrated with and released as part of the kernel instead of a separate module package. Many PCMCIA cards already work really well and other (most notable 32 bit cardbus cards) are morely in beta but can be gotten to work with some fidgeting. David Hinds does a wonderful job with the PCMCIA support and is also quite helpfull if you have problems getting a supported card working. Go take a look at http://pcmcia.sourceforge.org/ for more information (including which cards are currently supported).

Proxim:
One of the engineers at Proxim maintains a mailing list for running RangeLAN2 and symphony radios under linux. It gets a fair amount of traffic, and updates are posted fairly often.
You can download the driver at:
Lucent:
http://www.komacke.com/distribution.html

There is a stripped down version of Lucent's WaveLAN driver code which is used by the WaveLAN driver for Linux. You can find this one at:
http://www.wavelan.com/support/s oftware/index.html

There is also a Linux driver for the Aironet radios which can be found at: ftp://sourceforge.org/pcmcia/contrib/

My personal opinion is that the Aironet driver is kind of nice, since it is small and efficient (neither the Lucent nor the Proxim drivers are), and since Aironet has an 11Mb radio, is compatible at least with Lucent's Access Points (and should be with other 802.11 radios), Aironet is nice if you want speed under linux. Unfortunately, I am not sure whether Aironet supports WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) or not yet, and I know the Linux driver doesn't yet, so if you are interested in Security, I would recommend the Lucent Radio.


Obligatory Note: This is my personal opinion, and should not be construed as the opinion of any other entity.

QuakeForge is already discussing this problem and is planning to fix it WITHOUT requiring a closed source solution because we believe any closed source solution could at best be considered a stopgap measure. We will be coordinating our efforts to fix the problem with the Quake Standards Group. Any ways we discover in which cheating is possible will be fixed as soon as we discover the nature of the problem and the best course of action to correct it.

In the meantime we'd like to ask everyone to consider that at least half of the reports of people cheating are probably false alarms anyway. There are real problems in how the client and server trust eachother at the moment which are bound to lead to some problems now that it's possible to modify the clients, but they're certainly not fatal to quake as a game or the quake development projects such as QuakeForge.