Calling all Open Source innovators: showcase your innovative product at the ‘Demo Cup’ and enter it for the ‘Open Innovation Awards’ at the 2010 Open World Forum

Paris, 30 June 2010, for immediate distribution.

The Demo Cup, which will take place on 1 October in Paris at the 2010 Open World Forum, is a ‘demo’ competition, open to all Open Source and free software innovators.

Twelve companies, chosen from written applications, will be nominated and invited to give an eight-minute presentation of their work to the large audience expected to attend the Open World Forum, including decision-makers with a keen interest in Open Source, and a jury of experts in innovation (investors, Open Source integrators and experts).

The Open Innovation Awards 2010 will be awarded to the top best presenters at the Demo Cup. The contest is open to all Open Source projects and solutions getting ready for commercial launch or already on the market. The jury will be looking at those projects and solutions most likely to have a significant impact on society and on the marketplace.

This week I was troubleshooting a Windows 7 issue I was having: on a fresh install, it seemed I was unable to install new software from my network, though installing from a DVD or file downloaded and saved on the local machine was working just fine. After the requisite amount of cursing flung in the direction of Redmond, I eventually found a message thread that described a problem very close to what I was seeing, with a resolution. The poster’s PC was crashing randomly, mine was only when executing a file from a Samba share — I could copy files to or from the Samba share, but not execute a file (e.g., execute the Firefox or OpenOffice.org install programs).

Turns out that if you set “security = share” in your smb.conf, you will cause Windows 7 to crash most ungracefully with a BSOD memory dump that disappears quite quickly on you. Change the line in smb.conf to “security = user” and Windows 7 starts behaving again.

Kinda sad that a single setting on a remote machine would so easily cause a BSOD in Windows 7. Worst part is that it’s not an unusual setting (it was the default until not too long ago). One would expect at least a “normal” Windows error message rather than a full system crash.

In April 2009, Oracle announced that it had agreed to acquire Sun. Since Sun had acquired MySQL the previous year, this would mean that Oracle, the market leader for closed source databases, would get to own MySQL, the most popular open source database. If Oracle acquired MySQL on that basis, it would have as much control over MySQL as money can possibly buy over an open source project.

Obviously, MySQL users and supporters will have an interest in seeing that Oracle is not able to exert its full influence over MySQL, leaving customers at their mercy, since MySQL has become such a major competitor to Oracle. No surprise that there’s now an online petition campaign to  Save MySQL!

London Stock Exchange dumps Windows for Linux:

When it comes to business computer systems, nothing is more mission-critical than the massive trading software systems that underlie stock markets. A failure of an hour here can mean billions of dollars of lost trades. The LSE (London Stock Exchange) learned that the hard way when their .NET/Windows Server 2003 trading platform died like a dog early last September. The new LSE management is not going make that mistake again. This October, the LSE purchased MillenniumIT and will be switching its stock exchange programs to the company’s Linux-based Millennium Exchange software.

Esther Schindler sifts through 25 highly anticipated open-source releases coming this year which will be of interest to people in various categories from IT Admins to programmers to mobile users: “These open-source browsers, dev tools, mobile apps and more promise that ‘Oooh, cool!’ sense of discovery.”

Royal Pingdom serves up 10 interesting open source software forks and why they happened. Some reasons better than others, of course. Interesting to note where the fork surpasses the original project in popularity, and where it doesn’t. Two of the listed forks were in pursuit of Mac support.

Steve Wozniak speaks out, predicting the death of the iPod and suggesting things he doesn’t like about the iPhone, comparing it with Google’s Android platform. Woz is quoted as saying that “the iPod has had a long time as the world’s most popular media player, and that it will fall from grace due to oversupply.” Hmmm. Is it a victim of its own success, then?

Mandriva’s latest release: Mandriva Linux 2009. Get it while it’s hot! Mandriva’s always been a bit of an overlooked distro, imo… but it continues to install easily and work very well. Reviews are appearing now for those who like to read before they download. Time to update my Mandriva systems…

This is amusing: apparently the roots of the iPod’s development are traced back to 1979, when “Kane Kramer from Hertfordshire filed a patent for a digital music player that stored just three and a half minutes of music to a solid state chip.” He didn’t renew the patent in 1988, so he hasn’t seen a dime from it. “To be honest,” he said, “I was just so pleased that finally something that I had done which has been a huge success and changed the music industry was being acknowledged.”

The launch today of Canada’s new DNCL has the website flooded — earlier today it displayed an error page, and when I tried again just now (noon Central), the site displays and allows you to enter a number, but is still to flooded to generate the necessary captcha to complete the registration. I imagine that Michael Geist’s iOptOut site will probably be getting extra traffic today as well — it picks up where the DNCL leaves off, since the list presently has too many exemptions. Story at the Globe & Mail and CTV’s “What you need to know about the Do Not Call List.”