December 11th, 2015

Dell Frees UEFI, iXsystems Wins Double Silver & More…

FOSS Week in Review

I honestly wish this news was better: Please allow a moment of silence for what seems to be the passing of Firefox OS. As a ZTE Open owner and a one-time regular user of that phone (until I needed something more dependable), this hits a sentimental note with me, since I was truly hoping that Mozilla would get the OS for the phone up to speed so it wouldn’t — oh, just to give a personal example — abandon users while performing important, job-dependent communications, for example.

And now, for the wrap:

Dell Fixing UEFI for Linux? Linux users may be able to update their UEFI firmware on devices, if Dell has their way. The computer manufacturing giant is looking at making things easier for Linux users, and Richard Hughes writes on his GNOME blog that this capability might be available as early as Fedora 24. “With Dell on board, I’m hoping it will give some of the other vendors enough confidence in the LVFS to talk about distributing their own firmware in public,” Hughes writes, and we have our fingers crossed here.

iXsystems Wins Industry Awards: iXsystems, a San Jose-based manufacturer of server hardware and the corporate steward of FOSS projects like FreeNAS and PC-BSD, has taken the Silver in the Product Line of the Year category for its Enterprise Storage Product Line and another Silver in the Most Customer Friendly Company of the Year category in Best in Biz Awards, an awards program judged by members of the tech press and industry analysts. Congratulations, iXsystems: A long-time FOSS advocate gets the recognition it deserves.

LibreOffice Gets Another Update: Italo Vignoli announced the final minor update to the conservative “Still” branch of development of LibreOffice 4.4.7. “This is a bug and security fix release and users are urged to upgrade,” Vignoli writes in a blog post. “Only 14 fixes this time that include the loss of bullets when saving in PowerPoint format, misaligned paragraphs in documentation, and a regression that caused Open Document formats to take a “looong time” to open.” Thank you for fixing that PowerPoint conversion issue, guys and gals — that was a big one.

Linux Certs Available for Microsoft Azure: Some FOSS hearts have been all atwitter this week with the news that Microsoft and the Linux Foundation have introduced a new certification combining Linux system administration with Microsoft Azure skills. This heart beating behind this sternum is not as atwitter as others — perhaps this is an inevitability and some may argue that this is just a corporate fact-of-life. But to use a sports metaphor, when you let your opponent back in the game, you risk losing it at the final gun. There’s the argument that because Microsoft “loves” Linux (and War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength) we should be more inclusive, but this is the company that considered Linux a cancer and has fought FOSS for decades. Rather than throw the Microsoft that is treading water a life preserver, I still think throwing it an anchor would be more fitting.

So while I figure out what I’m going to do with my ZTE Open phone, I’ll see you next week.

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