by Dan Levine and Jim Finkle | Reuters | Aug 23, 2011

Online data tracking service comScore Inc siphons confidential information including passwords, credit card numbers and Social Security numbers from unsuspecting users, according to a lawsuit filed on Tuesday.

The proposed class action lawsuit, filed on behalf of two plaintiffs who downloaded comScore software, also says comScore scans all files on users’ personal computers and modifies security settings, among other allegations.

The lawsuit against comScore, one of the leading companies that measures and analyzes Internet traffic, seeks an injunction against several alleged practices, as well as damages under U.S. electronic communications privacy laws.

ComScore collects data from people who get free software and chances to enter sweepstakes in exchange for their participation. It sells that information to more than 1,800 businesses around the world, including Best Buy Co, Facebook, Microsoft Corp and Yahoo Inc, according to comScore’s website.

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The Google Toolbar for Firefox has been removed from the Free Software Catalog.

Read more from Google here.

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In a statement issued on Friday, Oracle announced that it intends to discontinue commercial development of the OpenOffice.org (OOo) office suite. The move comes several months after key members of the OOo community and a number of major corporate contributors forked OOo to create a vendor-neutral alternative.

OOo is one of many open source software projects that Oracle obtained in its acquisition of Sun. OOo has long been plagued by governance issues and friction between its corporate stakeholders. Sun’s copyright assignment policies and bureaucratic code review process significantly hindered community participation in the project. Oracle declined to address these issues after its acquisition of Sun and exacerbated the friction by failing to engage with the OOo community in a transparent and open way.

A group of prominent OOo contributors eventually decided to fork the project, creating an alternative called LibreOffice. They founded a nonprofit organization called The Document Foundation (TDF) in order to create a truly vendor-neutral governance body for the software. LibreOffice is based on the OOo source code, but it also incorporates a large number of other improvements driven by its own developer community.

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Open source software (OSS) is recognized for the cost savings it delivers when compared with proprietary alternatives. As enterprises continue to adopt OSS, the open source communities, mostly made up of volunteers, have been calling on enterprises to make contributions and donations with the aim of fostering open source software innovation and growth.

With more that 1,000 open source communities in existence today, enterprises have many options when choosing where to contribute. With each community potentially delivering enterprise-grade technology, large companies have many reasons to keep open source alive and well. How can enterprises evaluate which communities to work with and how to get involved? Here are some suggestions.

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Dubai: Don’t believe everything you read about tech camps siding only with either proprietary software (PS) or open source software (OSS), says a Harvard Business School professor.

Dr Josh Lerner, co-author of a new book, Comingled Code, said on a growing scale, businesses, governments and educational institutions are mixing both forms of private and free public software to achieve their needs, nixing the notion that it’s one winner takes all in the software industry.

Lerner, who co-authored the book with Mark Schankerman, said: “Standard dichotomy between PS and OSS is exaggerated and misleading”, and that both forms are increasingly being used in an evolving co-existence to get the job done.

“While they are different, each has strengths and weaknesses, but it’s not like it’s oil and vinegar that they are diametrically opposed,” Lerner said.

“We did a survey across 15 countries of 2,000 software developers and 2,000 users comprising non-profit, governments and corporations. We found there was a very striking overlap on the user and producer side.”

After crunching the survey data, Lerner said one of the things which stood out was “co-mingling was taking place here.”

The big reason for the mixing, he said, is that quite often proprietary software that is heavily restricted by large corporate giants such as Microsoft cannot cover all user needs, who could then use free open source software to fill in the gaps.

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BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA — Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011 — Free Software Foundation president Richard M. Stallman announced the winners of the FSF’s annual free software awards at a ceremony on Saturday, March 19th, held during the LibrePlanet 2011 conference at Bunker Hill Community College.

Two awards were given: the Award for the Advancement of Free Software, and the Award for Projects of Social Benefit.

The Award for the Advancement of Free Software is given annually to an individual who has made a great contribution to the progress and development of free software, through activities that accord with the spirit of free software.

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Mozilla, a global, nonprofit organization dedicated to making the Web better, is proud to release Mozilla Firefox 4, the newest version of the popular, free and open source Web browser. Firefox puts users in control of their Web experience, providing a streamlined user interface, fun new features, a boost in speed and support for modern Web technologies. 

Firefox 4 is available to download for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in more than 80 languages. Firefox 4 will also be available on Android and Maemo devices soon.

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After several delays, Firefox 4 will officially launch today.

We got our hands on the final version after it leaked yesterday and picked out the best and most useful features so far.

Right off the bat, we noticed that browsing is faster. But it seems like a lot of the design tweaks such as tab placement and the add-ons library has been borrowed from Google Chrome.

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A basic desktop PC should be equipped with a number of important software applications including email, web browser, word processor, spreadsheet and more. Here is a set of free software titles that will work for many types of users.

Security

The first thing I do when I am setting up a new PC is to remove the trial-version of the commercial security suite. While McAfee and Norton / Symantec will help to keep your PC safe they are bloated and consume too many resources. To keep your PC secure I recommend AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition . This is the baseline program you want to maintain security.

If you are connected directly to the Internet, that is you are not behind a firewall enabled router, then you should have ZoneAlarm, too. Please note, AVG and ZoneAlarm are free for non-commercial use only. If you are a business looking for an inexpensive security solution, please contact me for more information.

Browsing and Email

Your Windows based PC came with Internet Explorer and if you don’t have it yet, you should upgrade to IE Version 8. In my opinion, however, the best free browser is Mozilla Firefox. It is actively maintained and updated by members of the project and there are hundreds of extensions that allow you to customize it so you can make the Internet your own.

If you prefer desktop email clients to web based, then Mozilla Thunderbird is the way to go. The Lightening extension provides calendaring making this an excellent alternative to Outlook. Combine these products with GMail, Google’s free email service, and you can take advantage of the IMAP and iCal technologies. They let you work with the Mozilla tools on your desktop(s) and GMail’s browser based interface when you are mobile or at another’s PC. This setup gives you the best of both worlds.

Productivity

Instead of MS Office, use OpenOffice.org. It is a very mature Office Suite that includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation editor, image editor, math equation editor, chart editor, and database access tool. The components were developed together from the ground up so they all play together very well. Because their interfaces are so similar, most users of Word and Excel are able to adapt very quickly to the corresponding Write and Calc found in OpenOffice. This one switch alone can save your organization hundred$ per worker. And again every few years. With OpenOffice you will never pay a licensing fee for office software again.

For graphics editor check out Paint.NET. It is an excellent alternative to Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw. Another good alternative is GIMP.

Utilities

PDF Creator lets you turn any document you can print into a PDF file for publishing on the web or email distribution.

CDBurnerXP Pro is a great tool for creating media and music CD’s, installation programs, presentations and other CD distributions.

Instead of WinZip, try 7Zip. I believe it to be a far superior tool and there are no annoying pop-ups reminding you to pay up.

Find these and more free software at The Free Software Catalog.

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1. Begin using open source tools for some of your less than mission critical functions. This is a good way to get familiar with finding, downloading and installing open source solutions. Because you will be using them in the peripheries of your operation there is less risk that any part of your operation can be disrupted. Firefox and KeePass are pretty good choices for this because they are more personal tools then they are enterprise tools.

2. Begin using open source solutions next to the commercial versions. This is a great way to see that open source solutions can be and are just as good as their proprietary counterparts. Choose OSS applications that also run on Windows. This will greatly simplify your ability to evaluate them. If you use MS-Office, install OpenOffice and use it occasionally. It works directly with the MS-Office file formats and you’ll find the learning curve is not very steep. Use Firefox next to IE and Thunderbird/Lightening next to office. In the case of Office vs OpenOffice / Thunderbird you may find that the MS products are a bit more rich in features, but most users find they don’t use those features very often. In the case of Firefox, I think you will find it much better than IE.

3. Setup a Linux box. If you’re like most small businesses, you have one or two old PC’s lying around. Brush off the dust and install one of the popular GNU/Linux distributions. Most of them run pretty well even on older PC’s with less capacity, particularly for evaluation purposes. You’ll have to invest a bit more time with this project, but in the end, should you choose to move to Linux based servers, you can save thousands when deploying new database, web and application servers.

4. Work with IT consultants that have experience with open source. In my travels I have seen many computer consultants that are animately opposed to using open source. As I get to know them better, I realize that it’s only because they have no experience with it. They’ve been working with MS products so long, they don’t want to take the time to learn anything new. That’s fine for them, but can get very expensive for you. A consultant with OSS experience can share their opinions of products with you, help you with the deployment of products and create custom solutions using them.

5. Conduct a pilot project using your new LAMP Stack. Once you have a Linux server running use your IT consultant to build a simple application that you can begin using. As you see that the benefits are equal to that of an MS-based solution, you will have the confidence to move forward with more OSS products and custom solutions based on them.

Despite the popularity of Microsoft in the small business environment, their solutions are not always your best choice, particularly when you factor in the high licensing fees of server based software. You will get more from your IT infrastructure when those license fee dollars can be directed towards building useful solutions for your business. The clients I work with that choose open source software solutions find it is a great way to maximize their return on investment. So slip of your MS loafers and dip your toes into the OSS pool. I promise, the water’s not that cold.

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