Stories about: Ubuntu

Software enables us to use computer hardware as well as connect and communicate in ways that drastically change the way we work and play. For users of software in developing countries, the adoption of software solutions and Information and Communications Technologies as an enabler for social and economic development, is severely limited by financial constraints. CIOs today are divided in to two groups: the first one being the one that has the budget and capability to test and implement a new technology infrastructure; and the other being the group that is bound by financial constraints. There is, however plenty of software choice that brings good value for money for both these groups.

Open source is changing the rules about how software is designed, created and distributed. But leadership isn't always nearly as innovative. Esther Schindler spoke with Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth and two of the dudes who run SourceForge, and discussed some of the lessons the open source community could bear to learn.

If you are running a Debian-based Linux system and haven't already caught up with the announcement [1] that there was a major flaw with the generation of SSH, OpenVPN, DNSSEC, SSL/TLS session keys and X.509 certificate key material, you might want to update your system to address the problem.

For an executive who had just had his company bought for a cool billion a few months ago and was on the eve of announcing a major update to his business' flagship database program, former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos, now Sun Microsystems' senior vice president for databases, didn't look comfortable. Mickos had come to the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit at the University of Texas Super Computing Center to explain that MySQL was not about to abandon Linux. His audience, the movers and shakers of Linux business and development circles, were not overly impressed.

Where do you see open source heading in the next five years, especially with regard to development, community, and market opportunities?

Providing high school students with PCs is seen as a first step to preparing them for a technology-literate future, but in the Philippines many schools cannot afford to provide computing facilities so after a successful deployment of 13,000 Fedora Linux systems from a government grant, plans are underway to roll out another 10,000 based on Ubuntu.

I'm actually beginning to picture a day when users start to ask their IT departments why they can't run Ubuntu Linux at work, the way they do at home.

John Halamka has a penchant for experiments with new technologies. In 2004, the now 44-year-old CIO of the Harvard Medical School and CareGroup, which runs the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre, who is also a practicing emergency room physician, was one of the first people to have an RFID chip containing a link to his medical records implanted in his body (it's near his right triceps.) In April, he and Harvard geneticist George Church will become the first humans to have their DNA sequenced and their full genetic makeup posted on the Web.