CompuWorld

Assignment Zero (zero.newassignment.net/), a collaboration between Wired magazine and NewAssignment.Net, the experimental journalism site established by Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University, intends to use not only the wisdom of the crowd, but their combined reporting efforts — an approach that has come to be called “crowdsourcing.”

The idea is to apply to journalism the same open-source model of Web-enabled collaboration that produced the operating system Linux, the Web browser Mozilla and the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

There have been people doing the same stuff as above in there own personal blogs and websites but a central portal will surely provide them to express there ideas and experts review them. Assignment Zero will use custom software to create a virtual newsroom that allows collaboration on a discrete, but open-ended, topic from the very start.

The current topic is crowdsourcing, so the phenomenon will be used to cover the phenomenon itself. Citizens with a variety of expertise — the “people formerly known as the audience,” — will produce work to be iterated and edited by experienced journalists.

Explore the innovation here. Who knows if in future this develops to be a news portal with same standards as Wikipedia!

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25th October 2006, Oracle announced same enterprise class support for Linux as for its database. They received huge positive response from the Linux community and they promised to keep a close watch on the compatibility issues.

But now IBM is not ready to guarantee that its computer programs are compatible with Oracle Corp.'s recently launched version of the Linux operating system, an IBM spokesman said on Friday. This means that if IBM software programs turn out to be incompatible with Oracle Enterprise Linux, then it will be up to Oracle -- and not IBM -- to resolve the issue, said IBM spokesman Matthew McMahon.

Oracle, which started selling Linux in October, has said its product is identical to one from Red Hat Inc. the No. 1 vendor of the popular open-source operating system, and will seamlessly run software written for the Red Hat system. But users need outside critics to support the move for oracle to win over this field. Once a giant like IBM starts supporting oracle, then there would be no one stopping them.

"What Red Hat is selling to the customer is peace of mind. Oracle cannot do that because it is unable to certify comparability," said Trip Chowdhry, an analyst with Global Equities Research.

With February coming to an end, Oracle is eagerly waiting for outside support to be somewhere around the leaders in the real race. Time will do the judgment.

Microsoft is NOT always against Open Source. Bill gates announcement that Microsoft was going to support a distributed identity system known as OpenID is the proof to that. Gates, who is pushing for an information world where certificates -- not passwords -- control access to services and programs, said OpenID and Microsofts' approaches were "complementary". Microsoft plans to integrate OpenID with CardSpace.

What is CardSpace?
Windows CardSpace, formerly codenamed “InfoCard”, is a piece of client software that enables users to provide their digital identity to online services in a simple, secure and trusted way. It is what is known as an identity selector: when a user – or subject – needs to authenticate to a website or a web service, CardSpace pops up a special security-hardened UI with a set of “cards” for the user to choose from. Each card has some identity data associated with it – though this is not actually stored in the card – and has been given to the user by an identity provider such as their bank, employer or government. In fact, the user can also act as an identity provider – this is essentially what we do every time we register at a website. The CardSpace UI enables users to create Personal cards and associate a limited set of identity data. When the user chooses a card, a request in the form of a web service call goes to the relevant provider, and a signed and encrypted security token is returned containing the required information (e.g. credit limit, employer’s name and address, or perhaps a social security number). The user, in control of the flow of information at all times, then decides whether to release this information to the requesting online service. If the user approves then the token is sent on to this relying party where the token is processed and the user is authenticated.