Paul Nowak

Drupal Developer's Journal on Ulitzer Plone and Drupal are two leading open source Content Management Systems (CMS). Both were recognized in the 2009 Open Source CMS awards, run by Packt Publishing.  Both also have large installed bases and large developer communities.  This is ... (more)

My recent switch to a single-boot Ubuntu setup on my Thinkpad T60 simply floors me on a regular basis. Most recently it's had to do with the experience of maintaining the software. Fresh from a very long Windows 2000 experience and a four-month Windows XP experience along with a ... (more)

I recently wrapped up an 18-month stint on the business subcomittee of the Wireless Washtenaw Initiaitive, a project to bring wireless broadband to the citizens of Washtenaw County, Michigan. It's part of a growing movement by local government to help citizens participate in toda... (more)

I've been a long-time Python fan. It's a language that's so easy to program with that I end up turning to it for a great many things and I find myself wishing for a Python interface in pretty much any application that moves or plays with data in anyway. I also give Python-based p... (more)

There was a report last week at the “The Inquirer” that gave us a little insight into the prospects for the future arc of Intel’s Itanium server chip line. For the past two years with the advent of the Opteron line of server chips that offer 32 and 64-bit native... (more)

Bruce Perens, cofounder of the Open Source Initiative and long-time leader of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution, announced plans at the November 2003 Desktop Linux Consortium event in Boston to start a project called UserLinux. UserLinux is to be a Linux distribution based on a s... (more)

Read Paul Nowak's other recent LinuxWorld essays here. Microsoft’s reported source code leak of portions of the Windows NT and Windows 2000 operating systems today has the potential to be the best thing that ever happened to Microsoft technically. Think about it from the perspectiv... (more)

Today’s confirmation from the Red Hat Network that support for Red Hat 7.x and 8.0 is ending in December 2003 and that Red Hat 9.0 support will end in April, 2004, has all the trappings of a company that is growing up and growing out of its freely downloadable history. I sadly ma... (more)

In 1968, Garret Hardin wrote a seminal paper that ran in Science Magazine called “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Hardin defined the commons as a place where multiple people are each endowed with the privilege to use a given resource, and no one has the right to exclude another. Thi... (more)

Title: OOo Switch: 501 Things You Wanted to Know About Switching to OpenOffice.org from Microsoft Office Author: Tamar E. Granor Publisher: Hentzenwerke Publishing ISBN: 1-930919-36-0 No. of Pages: 305 OpenOffice.org (OOo) is an open source replacement for the Microsoft Office sui... (more)

From the start, questions have surrounded the process and people SCO used to determine the alleged code violations in Linux. There is the phantom MIT mathematics department team which MIT itself can’t identify and which SCO has since said were people with former MIT mathematics ... (more)

With increasing frequency, we are now seeing stories that have some mention of how a particular problem was solved only through Linux and its openness. The Hollywood animation studio ILM admits they couldn't have done some of the really tough load balancing code used in their rend... (more)

The business world has never seen anything like the Linux ecosystem before. Many of us barely have our heads around the competitive landscape of the proprietary software publishing business with its near-zero cost to produce additional copies, complex licensing terms, huge gross ... (more)

Everybody in the open source world and in IT in general knows that the forces of open source software development will quickly replace any code SCO shows as being clearly infringing of any SCO rights. SCO knows this. You know this. My grandma might even know this. Yet, no rationa... (more)