Open Source News and Thoughts

So of course with the release of Firefox 2, IE7, Fedora Core 6 and recent announcements by Oracle, the OSS movement is once again in the limelight. Most of the news is really more evolution than revolution if you ask me.

First up Firefox 2.0. Improvements to footprint, a few polishes to the UI and better RSS support are the major highlights. To the average user I doubt you'll notice any stark differences. I haven't had much time to explore newer plugins for FF2 but thus far for my daily browsing activities this latest build of Firefox has not shown any issues.

Fedora Core 6 is a nice improvement to FC5 and overall I found the installation process to be smoother and considerably faster to load. A somewhat customized install took me roughtly 35 minutes to install. This included multiple desktop support, Web server, SQL servers and Samba as base packages. Stability seems fine though UI response in my VMWare session felt a little laggy.

Oracle offers support and indemnification to RedHat Linux users. This one really doesn't surprise me, as Oracle has tried to find a way to garner a larger user base. Their open feuding with RedHat has been the topic of much conjecture. I find it mildly amusing that Oracle chose to take the CentOS route and use the RHL source as the basis for their own flavor of RH Linux. Only time will tell how significantly this affects the RedHat business model of providing services.