Google Open Sources OCR Code, Launches Digital Library Project

A recent Google Inc. blog post by Uber Tech Lead Luc Vincent reveals an exHewlettPackard & Co. employee now working at the search giant has helped to dust off an optical character recognition (OCR) engine with the intent of putting it into the open source domain.
 
Tesseract the engine was developed between and by HP Labs but was tucked away when the company pulled out of the OCR business.

Google called on the Information Science Research Institute at

IBM extending tech support to raw Eclipse platform

IBM is announcing plans to provide technical support for the Eclipse open source tools platform thus giving customers a single point of contact for both open source and IBM's commercial technologies for software development. IBM will also unveil plans for upcoming tools geared to the new Eclipse . platform and it is rolling out online developer resources for Eclipse users. IBM is making the announcements at the EclipseWorld conference in Cambridge Mass.
 
Through its IBM Rational Elite Support for Eclipse

Internet Explorer Loses More Ground to Firefox

While Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser has lost further market share this year there has been a significant slowdown in the acceptance of its largest competitor the open source Firefox browser according to a white paper released by Janco Associates on Aug. .
 
Internet Explorer has continued to lose market share this year to . percent share in July from . percent in January and . percent in July . That comes off its January peak of .

Google, Real, Mozilla in Pact

Google Inc. has extended a multiyear deal with RealNetworks Inc. to promote Google software across Real's entertainment and multimedia products the companies said on Wednesday.

RealNetworks and Google together with Web browser maker Mozilla Corp. said they had agreed to distribute the Mozilla Firefox browser together with the Google Toolbar along with Real's RealPlayer audio and video playback software.

No financial terms were disclosed.

Google Toolbar is a software program users install inside a browser allowing them to more quickly search the

Google Sets Up Open Source Service

Google has launched a beta site service for open source software called Google Code Project Hosting available at http://code.google.com/hosting. Announced late last week at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland Oregon and sporting a tagline of "Release Early Release Often" Google Code provides space for developers and users to exchange open source software and collaboratively work on projects.
 
On its FAQ page Google describes the service as a site for "external developers interested in Googlerelated development. It's

Freeswitch: The New Open-Source Telco Switch

The first opensource carriergrade telephony switch will be introduced next month at the ClueCon conference (www.cluecon.com) in Chicago.
 
Dubbed FreeSwitch the opensource project aims to build a highly scalable switching platform that can run on AMD Intel and PowerPC and runs for just $ to $ per server. Protocols employed include SIP H. Asterisk's IAX and XMPP/Jingle.

Even if marginally successful FreeSwitch could shake up the telecom industry. Carrier grade switching platforms such as those from Broadsoft

Hackers Turn To Open Source

Hackers have borrowed the same opensource development techniques used to build Firefox Apache and Linux as they collaborate on malware projects a security company's researchers claimed Monday.
 
The McAfee Avert Labs researchers who contributed to the debut issue of the company's "Sage" security journal laid out their case in several articles ranging from one on opensource software in Windows rootkits to another on opensource and profit.

In fact even though attacks have shifted to a formoney model in the last

IBM To Release Full Notes For Linux

IBM is making a full Notes client available for Linux a bit earlier than expected.

While IBM has long been an ardent Linux proponent and promised full support for Macintosh Linux and Windows clients in its next release codenamed Project Hannover the company has accelerated the Linux piece. A Notes client for Red Hat Enterprise Linux Update will be available on July with a version for Novell SUSE Linux Desktop for Enterprise version due within after that IBM

IBM To Support Xen Virtualization Software For Suse 10 Linux

IBM said it will support Novell's Suse Linux and Xen virtualization on its IBM's BladeCenter and other x hardware. It will also allow management of Xen virtual machines under its Virtualization Engine. That allows IBM customers to use familiar IBM management software to provision and manage multiple Xen virtual machines.
 
Xen can convert a lowcost Intel or AMD processorbased server into multiple virtual machines each running a separate application. As freely available open source code Xen is expected to

Firefox Grows To 15% Of U.S. Web Browser Market

Firefox's share of the Web browser market has surpassed % in the United States and % globally according to Web analytics company OneStat.com.

Niels Brinkman cofounder of OneStat observes that Firefox usage is growing again after a period of no growth.

Since May Mozilla Firefox has grown .% in usage globally. Microsoft Internet Explorer has had a .% decline in the past two months. IE's global market share now stands at .% according to OneStat.

Both Internet Explorer and Firefox are due for

JasperSoft Launches JasperIntelligence

The BI platform which left beta this week comprises several products all of which have been upgraded to coincide with the latest release. The products are JasperAnalysis which provides online analytical processing for small and midsize businesses; JasperReports iReports and JasperServer.
 
JasperAnalysis new to the framework provides realtime analysis of large datasets officials with the San Francisco company said. The tool provides a graphical interface organizing information along different axes to identify trends anomalies and correlations within the data. Reports

Dashboard: Open-Source BI Projects Take Off

The pace of opensource business intelligence development has accelerated in recent months with new releases of commercially supported products and the emergence of noteworthy enduser applications. Developers are enhancing their BI components and solidifying frameworks that integrate tools with workflow management capabilities. They're also demonstrating the ability of opensource databases and BI platforms to deliver advanced analytics and operate on large databases at a fraction of the cost of conventional commercial systems.
 
Analytical consultancy Daxpy has created what is perhaps the

Oracle Wants to Hold Your Linux-Leery Hand

Oracle is catering to the Linuxleery announcing June the Oracle Validated Configuration program to provide pretested architectures for running Oracle on Linux.
 
The free offering includes specs for common mixes of software hardware storage and networking.

The architectures are designed to lift the burden of pricey testing off of customers' backs and get those customers up and running faster while also helping to improve performance scalability and reliability.

Wim Coekaerts the company's senior director of Linux Engineering

Open-Source Trend Brings Big Challenge To Software Leaders

As more companies and government agencies use open-source software, a trend many expect will continue, traditional software companies face the wrenching decision of how much they should move toward open source, if at all.
 
Two companies stand out for not embracing open source at all. But then, they might have the most to lose from open source. They are Microsoft , the largest software company, and SAP, the largest maker of business software.

Many other big software vendors, most

Mozilla Readies Firefox Security Patch

The open-source Mozilla project this week will release an update to its Firefox browser that will fix a publicly disclosed security issue in the software. News of the update came as developers also confirmed that they were dropping a highly anticipated bookmarking feature, called Places, from the next major Firefox release, due later this year.
 
The Firefox 1.5.0.3 update was scheduled to be delivered Friday, but it is now expected to be released "early [this] week," a Mozilla spokeswoman said.
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