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Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

We’ve certainly seen a variety of crashings go down on stage, but a determined protester and undeterred advocate for open source software rudely (albeit humorously) interrupted Bill Gates‘ speech at Peking University in Beijing, China. Gates, who was speaking on the topic of Innovation in China’s future and receiving (yet another) honorary manager title, had his after-party all shook up by an off-kilter open source proponent who reportedly darted across the stage, “loudly shouted against Microsoft’s monopoly,” proudly displayed a sign of “Free software, open source,” and was promptly “tackled by security and removed for questioning.” It was suggested that the culprit may have been a member of the Linux Professional Institute, and while we’re not exactly sure if Michael Dell would’ve shown any forgiveness, feel free click on through for a closeup of the sign and the unfortunate aftermath.

[Via SeattlePI, thanks Ralf]

Continue reading Open source protestor crashes Bill Gates’ speech in China

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

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A man holding a “free software, open source” sign walked on stage during Bill Gates’ appearance at Peking University today. This Associated Press story has further details about what happened, and here’s a Reuters photo.…more

Filed under: Transportation

A group of Dutch researchers recently took the wraps off what they claim to be the world’s first open source car, rolling out their “c,mm,n” vehicle (pronounced “common”) at the AutoRAI car show in Amsterdam for all to see and potentially modify. While it’s not clear if that open sourceness extends to the whole thing running on Linux, you will be able to get your hands on the vehicle’s complete technical drawings and blueprints, and of course submit your own tweaks and improvements for others to do as they please with. As it currently stands, the car keeps things environmentally-friendly with a hydrogen engine, and apparently lets “c,mm,n” drivers share traffic information with one another, although that would seem to be be a less than effective solution until folks start modding these en masse.

[Via Core77]

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

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There’s been huge coverage of the fact that Sun Microsystems has announced that it will release the core products which it has been marketing as Java as open source.

What much of the coverage doesn’t mention is that what they’re open sourcing is not "Java," since they’re not relinquishing that trademark, but merely something technically indistinguishable from it. Sun is likely to provide a comprehensive test suite and allow those that pass with flying colours to use certain trademarks in restricted ways, much as they did a few years ago with their 100% Java program several years ago.

The move from Sun is a logical response to the increasing maturity of the already GPL’d classpath and gcj projects, which taken together amount to a reimplementation of Java. By GPL’ing the "real" Java, Sun prevents the open source community from abandoning it for the the new contender.

Having two separate implementations of Java is actually a great thing, because it promotes competition between them. The Classpath/gcj implementation, for example is already available on far more platforms than Sun’s java, simply because it is built the same portable framework as gcc, the Gnu Compiler Collection.

Read more on almost every tech news site.

cheers stuart

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