Tuxera, the Finnish company behind open-source file system NTFS-3G, has announced a confidential intellectual-property deal with Microsoft, under which it will be permitted to carry on distributing its open-source NTFS product and to offer new exFAT drivers.

Tuxera said on Wednesday that it is also joining the Interop Vendor Alliance, a Microsoft-led collaborative forum for interoperability with Microsoft systems.

"The confidential Intellectual Property Agreement is basically about patents and giving us access to some Windows source code," Tuxera chief executive Mikko Välimäki told ZDNet UK. "ExFAT is part of the forthcoming SDCX standard for flash cards, and we'll be selling our driver to OEMs for devices like cameras."

ExFAT is an extension of Microsoft's FAT file system, and is considered by Microsoft to be complementary to NTFS, the standard file system in Windows.

"We're talking to Microsoft about an open-source exFAT driver, but that's not covered by the agreement. We cannot sell end-user ... Read more »

KDE 4.3 (Codename: "Caizen") Delivers Incremental Innovations to the Free Desktop Users and Software Developers

4 August, 2009. The KDE Community today announces the immediate availability of "Caizen", (a.k.a KDE 4.3), bringing many improvements to the user experience and development platform. KDE 4.3 continues to refine the unique features brought in previous releases while bringing new innovations. With the 4.2 release aimed at the majority of end users, KDE 4.3 offers a more stable and complete product for the home and small office.

The KDE community has fixed over 10,000 bugs and implemented almost 2,000 feature requests in the last 6 months. Close to 63,000 changes were checked in by a little under 700 contributors. Read on for an overview of the changes in the KDE 4.3 Desktop Workspace, Application Suites and the KDE 4.3 Development Platform.

Desktop Improves Performance And Usability

The KDE Desktop Workspace provides a powerful and complete desktop experience that fe... Read more »

The release team has just done something a bit different from past release cycles to test out some modifications to our usual work flow: with the release of the first release candidate, 4.3 has been immediately branched off of the mainline trunk, and trunk is now 4.4. In the past we've done this only when the new release is actually made, not during the release candidates.

This gives people working on 4.4 features, or fixes that can only go into 4.4 due to things like string changes, a free hand without having to wait out the weeks during the extra hard freeze that comes with release candidates. This is very nice timing for Akademy, which is coming up very soon now.

That means that if you fix a bug in trunk, you now have to backport it to the 4.3 branch. I updated the svnbackport script in kdesdk/scripts/ today to target the 4.3 branch by default. Please keep up with all the great bug fixing for 4.3 so we can make 4.3.0 as solid as possible. Even though 4.3 has been branched, there is still time for yet more fixes.

It does sort of really send home, at least for me, the fact that 4.3 is... Read more »

We are happy to tell you that Serna Free XML Editor is going to be open-source software soon!

We love Serna and wish to share our passion with anyone who wants to make it better. Our mission is to make XML accessible to everyone, and we believe that open-source Serna could enable much more users and companies to adopt XML technology.

Typically, PC users do not give the low-level software on their computers a second thought. Known as the basic input-output system, or BIOS, this software plays an extremely important role in the way that computers work--checking and preparing hardware when a machine is switched on--but most people don't even know it's there.

California-based Phoenix Technologies--the largest provider of BIOS software to computer makers--has tired of being invisible. Building on the virtualization technology more common to high-power workstations and data centers, the company has revamped its BIOS software to offer features that people tend to associate with a full-blown operating system: the ability to access more peripherals, such as disks and mouses, and networking and wireless communications.

Earlier this year, Phoenix launched the slimmed-down operating system, dubbed HyperSpace, and in June, the company plans a major update, which will add e-mail capabilities and instant messaging. The goal is to allow people faster access to the core tasks for which they use their computers, says Woody Hobbs, CEO of the company.

"Our standard here, when we want to see how the PC should work, is to look at smart phones," he says. "Those are on almost all the time, they don't boot very often, and they are instant-on."

The core system software, as t... Read more »

Over at the Lynx blog, Dougie Richardson cast his vote for the best comment made during the course of Ubuntu's Open Week. While his choice might be completely subjective, there is no denying that Mark Shuttleworth's response when asked whether WINE (in its own right, or as a general synonym for Windows compatibility) or native Linux ports were more important to Ubuntu's success was thought provoking.

The question (and answer) invite all sorts of tangential queries. What should any desktop computer be expected, by default, to deliver? If equivalent applications on different platforms have identical features and functionality, and content produced by one application can be opened and modified on the other, will user interfaces and familiarity matter less -- or more? If Microsoft made every last line of its code available to peruse and modify right now -- how would Windows change? How would Linux change? If you need a Philips head screwdriver, is it possible to squeak by with an approximately sized flat head type?

(12:24:03... Read more »

Our development team is pleased to announce the 9th increment of the 0.3 series of ReactOS, an open source Windows® compatible operating system.

As we draw ever closer to the 0.4 series, more and more work is being put into bugfixing existing code in an effort to get more applications and drivers working. This release is testament to that and is our most compatible release to date. However, the development team have still been working on expanding the features alongside bugfixing existing features, and quite a few additions have found their way into this release. Two key areas which stand out are the much improved network stack and the emergence of sound support in the kernel via the new kernel streaming services.

Along with the rest of the 0.3 series, this release is still considered alpha quality software so it may not run all your apps or run on your hardware.

Changes summary

A detailed consolidation of all changes can be found in the changelog. A sum up of some of the more important changes is as follows:

• Reduced minimum memory requirement to 32Mb. In theory ReactOS can now be installed with 24Mb and run with only 20M... Read more »