Hothead games will apparently be releasing their “Penny Arcade Adventures” for Linux (as well as Mac and Windows.) Nice to see a commercial game for Linux, but Penny what??? Suppose it might be good? At least it will be nice to see “System Requirements: Linux” on a box for once.
IBM has announced that it will begin to contribute code to the Open Office project. They will also begin to use Open Office technology in their products. Not much to say about this, but still interesting.
Official Press Release
A few days ago I posted about AMD’s plans to release specifications and code to help development of open source ATI drivers. I also pointed out that Intel and Nvidia both had their own drivers. What I did not mention and many articles are pointing out (see this Phoronix story) is that Nvidia’s drivers are not open source. Their are other open source drivers out there, such as the “nv” driver, but they are 2D only or still in development. So the questions is, will Nvidia put out open drivers?
Linux.com got some fairly official information from AMD about their new open-source ATi video drivers. They plan to release specifications and code to the open source community and claim they will continue to work with the open source community. They are working with Novell right now, but they say this is just to get started.
Nvidia and Intel drivers are already avaliable and for the most part work well, so if AMD (ATI) drivers were released video cards could become yet another thing you don’t have to worry with Linux.
Update: Mark Shuttleworth, the leader/founder of Ubuntu, shared his thoughts about AMD’s drivers with Phoronix. Basically, he liked what they had done a lot, but go check out the story.
Yesterday, September 2, was the ending date for countries to vote on ISO approval of Microsoft’s proposed OOXML open document standard. But the controversy surrounding this process is almost certain to continue, regardless of how the vote comes out. (See Computer World article.)
As I see it, ISO approval of OOXML would just about guarantee that Microsoft will ignore the existing ISO approved ODF open document standard, and instead devote its immense resources to supporting its own OOXML open document standard. Microsoft is on record with its Open Specification Promise, saying that anyone will be able to use the proprietary elements of the OOXML standard without royalty to Microsoft. But even if that promise is sincerely honored, it seems certain that the OOXML standard will be more difficult to work with than the ODF standard, and especially so for non-Microsoft developers.
Update: Websites are beginning to tally up the votes. See this website.
Linux.com reports that FileZilla 3, the new version of a very popular previously Windows-only FTP client, is now avaliable for Linux (as well as Mac OS X and Windows.)
Linux Loop News