Latest News
Elliott Said to Plan Sale of Novell Business If Offer SucceedsAaron RicadelaBloomberg News March 11, 2010 - Elliott Associates LP, the fund manager that made an unsolicited $2 billion offer for Novell Inc., would sell the NetWare networking-software unit if its bid succeeds, a person familiar with the matter said.
Elliott, which owns about 8.5 percent of Novell stock, would also try to run the company more efficiently and bring about $400 million in cash that Novell holds off shore to the U.S., said the person, who asked not to be identified because details of Elliott’s offer haven’t been made public. Elliott may also try to find a buyer for Novell’s business that specializes in an open-source operating system, the person said....
...Full StoryDMTF Submits Completed OVF Specification for ANSI/ISO Standardization
DMTF.org March 11, 2010 - DMTF has been busy extending and refining the Open Virtualization Format
(OVF) specification. The organization recently completed version 1.1 of
the specification and has submitted it for consideration as an ANSI and
ISO standard. This is an important milestone for DMTF. The specification
will be put through a number of tests to ensure it meets a complex
system of checks and balances of reviews before it is adopted as an
American and International standard. DMTF will be tracking the OVF
specification as it makes its way toward becoming a national standard
and then an international standard.
Originally proposed in September 2007, the OVF specification describes
an open, secure, portable, efficient and extensible format for the
packaging and distribution of software to run virtual machines....DMTF has also submitted OVF to the InterNational Committee for Information
Technology Standards (INCITS) 'Fast-Track' process to develop it as an
American National Standard at American National Standards Institute (ANSI).
Once it is approved as an ANSI standard, OVF will be submitted to the
International Standards Organization (ISO) for consideration as an
international standardization.... ...Full Story
What to Expect from HTML5
Neil McAllister
InfoWorld March 11, 2010 - Support for the next generation of HTML is already appearing in today's
browsers and Web pages... Anticipation is mounting for HTML5, the
overhaul of the Web markup language currently under way at the Worldwide
Web Consortium (W3C). For many, the revamping is long overdue. HTML
hasn't had a proper upgrade in more than a decade... Many claim the HTML
and XHTML standards have become outdated, and that their document-centric
focus does not adequately address the needs of modern Web applications.
HTML5 aims to change all that. When it is finalized, the new standard
will include tags and APIs for improved interactivity, multimedia, and
localization. As experimental support for HTML5 features has crept into
the current crop of Web browsers, some developers have even begun voicing
hope that this new, modernized HTML will free them from reliance on
proprietary plug-ins such as Flash, QuickTime, and Silverlight....[but] some W3C insiders say the road ahead for
HTML5 remains a rocky one.... ...Full Story
And the winner of the Novell sweepstakes is...Microsoft?
Preston Gralla
ComputerWorld Blogs March 11, 2010 - Novell is facing a potential breakup if it's bought by Elliot Associates L.P., a hedge fund. The open source community is justifiably worried. But a chorus of people point to a potentially very unlikely white knight --- Microsoft. The company that some consider as the scourge of open source may well be Novell's savior....Microsoft would be buying more than just good will. It would gain a very substantial installed base to whom it could sell Linux services and products --- and you can be sure it would try to sell Microsoft technologies as well. So don't be surprised if Microsoft comes riding to Novell's rescue. ...Full Story
Disappointing news from CodePlex Foundation I've written on a number of occasions before about CodePlex Foundation, and in particular on whether it would be able to gain credibility with the open source community as a truly open, independent vehicle for progress. Chief among the recommendations I made for achieving that result was to create a larger, more representative board of directors. The slate that has now been released not only remains small, but remains incomplete (the clear implication is that the remaining seat will be allocated to whatever company is willing to become an additional financial sponsor). Moreover, it took more than six months to announce even this minimalist slate. This doesn't auger well for the future of CodePlex as a respected, independent voice for open source software.
The CodePlex Foundation Announces Appointment of Permanent Board Members
Press Release
CodePlex Foundation March 10, 2010 - The CodePlex Foundation, a not-for-profit foundation formed with the mission of enabling the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open source communities, today announced the appointment of four members to its permanent Board of Directors.
New appointees include Jim Jagielski, Chief Architect at SpringSource, a division of VMware, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Apache Software Foundation and an Advisory Board Member at Open Source Software Institute and Tony Hey, Corporate Vice President of External Research for Microsoft Corporation.
Continuing on the Board as permanent Directors are interim Board members Sam Ramji, Vice President of Sonoa Systems, and Stephanie Davies Boesch, Director of Program Management of .NET Framework, Microsoft.
Departing from the interim CodePlex Board are Miguel de Icaza, Vice President, Novell; Shaun Walker, Co-Founder and Chief Architect of DotNetNuke Corporation; Bill Staples, General Manager of the Web Platform and Tools Engineering Groups - Microsoft; and D. Britton Johnston, SQL Server Appliance Engineering - Microsoft. Outgoing Board members will continue to work with the CodePlex Foundation on the Board of Advisors.
The permanent CodePlex Foundation Board has five members, two drawn from launch sponsor Microsoft and three chosen from the open source and corporate development communities. The fifth permanent board seat will remain open while the Foundation continues discussions with potential corporate sponsors.... ...Full Story
And…Action! Standards Play a Leading Role at the 2010 Oscars
ANSI.org March 9, 2010 - [Sunday] night, as millions of people around the globe tuned in to watch Hollywood’s who’s-who walk the red carpet for the 82nd Annual Academy Awards, or “Oscars,” standards were in the house, on the screen, and behind the curtain making the magic of the movie industry’s biggest night possible.
While motion picture technology is developing in new directions – and dimensions – most movies, including many of this year’s Best Picture nominees such as The Blind Side and An Education, are still recorded on 35-millimeter (mm) film. The International Organization of Standardization (ISO) Technical Committee (TC) 36, Cinematography, Working Group (WG 1), Production technology, has developed a large number of standards related to motion picture photography, sound recording, reproduction, and projection....
In contrast to those traditionally filmed flicks, the sci-fi/fantasy box-office behemoth Avatar was shot entirely with digital cameras. INCITS/ISO/IEC 13818-2-2000 (R2006), Information Technology - Generic Coding of Moving Pictures and Associated Audio Information: Video, specifies the coded representation of picture information for digital storage media and digital video communication and specifies the decoding process....To assure that the Oscar broadcast is reliably delivered to those millions of home screens,...ANSI/SCTE 07 2006, Digital Transmission Standard For Cable Television. This ANS describes the framing structure, channel coding, and channel modulation for a digital multi-service television distribution system that is specific to a cable channel.... ...Full Story
W3C pulls former Novell CTO for CEO spot
Joab Jackson
Business Week March 9, 2010 - Filling a position left open since 2008, former Novell CTO Jeffrey Jaffe has taken on the role of chief executive officer for the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium).
Jaffe will work alongside Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who will remain the organization's director. While Berners-Lee will concentrate primarily on the direction of the W3C's standards, Jaffe will look to streamline the W3C process of working with members.... ...Full Story
Industry Coalition Plans Interoperability Program with Certification
William Jackson
Government Computer News March 8, 2010 - The Initiative for Open Authentication, an industry coalition promoting
the use of open standards for interoperable strong authentication, used
its annual meeting at this week's RSA Security Conference to discuss
plans for an interoperability certification program.
...The OATH Certification Program is intended to provide assurance to
customers that products implementing OATH standards and technologies
will function as expected and interoperate with each other. This will
enable customers to deploy 'best of breed' solutions consisting of various
OATH 'certified' authentication devices such as tokens and servers from
different providers... OATH has taken a modular approach and intends to
develop the profiles to address the different OATH specifications as
applied to the identified components of the OATH Reference Architecture.... ...Full Story
The Art of Narrative and the Semantic Web
Kurt Cagle
DevX.com March 8, 2010 - ...the vast majority of content that is developed on
the web [today] falls more properly into the realm of messages rather than
documents -- Facebook and Twitter notifications, resources generated
from rapidly changing databases, documents in which narrative content
are embedded within larger data structures, RSS and Atom feeds, KML
(ironically, Google Earth and Google Maps) documents and so forth.
Thus, a URL no longer contains a static narrative -- it contains a
constantly changing message....XML technologies are now about a
decade old, XQuery and XML Database tools are just now really becoming
main stream. Semantic Web technologies are beginning to emerge, but
widespread adoption is likely to still be two to three years out. However,
publishing and journalism are definitely at the forefront of that curve,
because these areas in particular are most sensitive to the need to both
provide enjoyable news content and the need to make such stories
manipulatable and discoverable within the ever increasing sophistication
and scope of the web itself. The narrative thread has become a rich,
interwoven tapestry, illuminated by brilliant strands of meaning,
semantics and abstraction, turning our writings into conversations, and
from there into dialogs.... ...Full Story
nuBridges Forms Tokenization Standards Group
Press Release
nuBridges.com March 5, 2010 - nuBridges announced today that it is leading the formation of a Tokenization Standards Organization to develop industry standards for the tokenization data security model. With a growing variety of solutions being developed and implemented around data tokenization, nuBridges invites tokenization providers to work together toward creating a single standard that will ensure a high level of security and interoperability.
The need for a Tokenization Standards Organization is the result of a rapid increase in the acceptance of tokenization as a security model for guarding payment card information as well as personally identifiable information (PII) and protected health information (PHI) during the past year. Another impacting trend is the use of tokenization to reduce scope for Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) audits....The initial goal of the Tokenization Standards Organization is to define an interoperable standard to address the business processes associated with tokens and tokenization functions.... ...Full Story
