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Systems integrator CSC said that 15,609 City of Los Angeles employees have been transitioned to Google Apps.

The browse-and-you’re-hacked vulnerabilities affect both Windows and Mac users. One of the three vulnerabilities is the DLL load hijacking issue that haunts hundreds of Windows applications.

If you try to contribute to a corporate open source project, especially a “dual core” project, you will probably be given a “contributor agreement” to sign.

The agreement gives all copyrights and patents to the project’s corporate sponsor. The wording can differ, which is why a group called Project Harmony is working to harmonize them.

This is a different issue from that of the license. Many projects licensed under the GPL are still subject to contributor agreements.

These agreements have their fans, and their purpose. They let business be done centrally, without having every minor decision subject to a veto by developers.

Having a corporate center to an open source business can be a very good thing, assuring regular updates, a quality Web presence, and software worthy of use by an enterprise.

But they also have detractors. Count former Sun open source executive Simon Phipps (above) among their number. The agreements are coercive, and make some pigs more equal than others in what should be a shared development experience, he writes.

I’m of two minds on this.

In theory  Phipps is right. Projects like the Linux kernel and Mozilla run quite well without contributor agreements.

On the other hand, some pigs are more equal than others, in that they provide the bulk of the work and expense a project may need to survive. In most projects run by Google, the contributions of Google employees go far beyond the combined efforts of their communities.

This is true on smaller projects as well, even those under the GPL. Projects like Appcelerator began as a single company’s dream, and much of the work continues to be done by that firm. That’s one reason CEO Jeff Haynie felt he could unilaterally switch to the Apache license in 2008.

License and contributor agreements don’t have to be done by fiat, of course. Red Hat amended their agreements with some transparency earlier this year. The process can be reassuring and increase the amount of community development.

My own view is that this is much like the open source incline itself, or the open source development incline. That is, there are many places you can fall on the incline, but the further down you go — the less dependent you are on contributor agreements for instance — the greater your community contribution is likely to be.

The answer for your project depends on how much of the development burden your company honestly expects to take on, and how dependent you are on your community for coding. It’s a question, in other words, you need to go into with your eyes wide open.

Whichever side of the table you happen to be on. [poll id="117"]

Oracle will pay new co-president Mark Hurd $950,000 a year with a target bonus of $5 million. Hurd’s with a cap of $10 million.

Just two months after making Chatter generally available, Salesforce today is announcing Mobile Chatter, apps for the iPad, iPhone, Blackberry and Android devices.
In this first couple of months, more than 20 percent of the company’s customers - 20,000 of the 82,000 customers - have adopted the free Chatter tool, which looks and feels a lot [...]

New Micro Focus tools for moving mainframe data to Microsoft SQL Server and migrating PL/I applications

New Micro Focus tools for moving mainframe data to Microsoft SQL Server and migrating PL/I applications

SDK steps up several gears and supports 198 languages

Managing processors, memory, and other resources

New Micro Focus tools for moving mainframe data to Microsoft SQL Server and migrating PL/I applications

SDK steps up several gears and supports 198 languages

Firefox 4 beta 5 is now available and offers new hardware acceleration, multimedia and security features.

The latest beta, for example, offers hardware acceleration through Direct 2D by default. Direct 2D was introduced with Windows 7, was made available for Vista, and exploits built-in graphics hardware in Windows PCs with DirectX 10 to enhance performance on graphics heavy websites, said Firefox lead developer Mike Beltzner in his blog today.

“You should notice that some pages are a lot faster and more responsive, in  particular, pages that use advanced animated graphical effects,” added other Firefox developer Bas Schouten in his blog about the feature.

Beta 5 also includes a new Audio API for visualizing audio that exposes raw audio data within the video and audio elements of HTML5. Mozilla claims that developers can use this API to change how users experience the web.

“Until now, people havenât had the ability to interact with sound on the Web in all the creative ways that video and images allow,” Beltzner wrote. “With this new API, developers can read and write raw audio data within the browser, presenting audio information in completely new ways that could allow, for example, for people to visually experience a speech or a song through Firefox.”

Beta 5 also supports the HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) protocol for addiitonal security. “This allows web sites to “insist that they only be loaded over SSL,” Mozilla notes.

Beta 6 is very tentatively set for release on September 10 but that may slip by as much as a week, project leaders indicate. Firefox 4 entered beta testing in June.

On September 7, I began receiving notes from several customers of Microsoft’s hosted Online Services — which include Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Communications Online, Live Meeting and the BPOS bundle of these services — of new and troubling access problems.

Symantec, maker of the Norton Anti-virus software products, will not be welcoming its shareholders into a nice hotel ballroom for an annual meeting. Instead, the company will hold a virtual meeting - and that has some shareholders upset.
In a statement, the United States Proxy Exchange, a non-partisan advocacy group that fights for shareholders’ rights, said [...]

A day after becoming Oracle’s co-president, Mark Hurd is facing a lawsuit from Hewlett-Packard over trade secrets and confidentiality agreements.

The third member of Microsoft’s new trio of small business servers, codenamed “Small Business Server 7″ is running behind the other two, and is now set to go to public beta by the end of September.

Every tech giant—Apple, Microsoft, Google and others—wants to change your TV viewing habits. And they all have failed so far. Is there anything different this time?

The effort, officially called the Skype Channel Partner Program, will aim to train and certify systems integrators.

Dell will float bonds as it raises money potentially for new acquisitions. Hewlett-Packard’s stronger balance sheet enabled it to trump Dell and win storage vendor 3Par.