Gawker: valleywag, eu

European regulators jump on the Google-Yahoo antitrust express

Jackson West — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 10:00:00 EDT

While Google and Yahoo have said that their planned search advertising agreement will only cover the United States and Canada, that hasn't stopped European Union officials from looking into the deal on behalf of the World Association of Newspapers trade group. The EU joins the United States's Department of Justice and the State of California's Attorney General Jerry Brown in raising questions about the deal. [Reuters] (Photo by Steve Cadman)

Eurowonks take fun out of open source

Paul Boutin — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:40:00 EDT

The European Commission's Software Quality Observatory for Open Source Software has released a "software quality checking platform" called Alitheia Core, designed to formalize quality control over open-source code. It doesn't boost my confidence that the demo site is throwing 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable errors this morning. You'll have to settle for the press release:

European consortium releases Open Source quality assessment platform

* Submitted by: Sirius
* Friday, 11 July 2008

The European Commission supported Software Quality Observatory for Open Source Software (SQO-OSS) project has announced the release of its software quality checking platform, Alitheia Core.

Developed by a consortium of European businesses, academics and open source software projects, the new application will analyse the product quality of open source software projects and assess the true potential of the development communities around them.

A demonstration of the system is available at the Alitheia Core demo server, where users will be able to see the system as run against a selection of different open source software projects.

As the Alitheia Core matures it will allow open source software projects to deploy the system for themselves to monitor their own code quality.

Alitheia Core's current features include:
- System administration allowing the installation of new project data
- Metrics: lines of code count, lines of comments count and a cross-language metrics tool
- A web-based user interface for the display of calculation results

This release should be considered a usable alpha release; whilst core functionality is provided, performance issues remain and customisation is currently disabled. The Alitheia Core is released under the 2-clause BSD license.

The Alitheia Core source code may be obtained from the project's SVN server or a pre-compiled package of the source can be obtained. Distribution-specific packages for Linux users will be available for Alitheia Core in forthcoming releases.

The SQO-OSS project is always looking for new contributors. Currently its focus is on extending the portfolio of metric plug-ins available to the system. All contributions (bug reports/fixes, code, etc.) are all gratefully received.

Professor Diomidis Spinellis, Project Coordinator said: “This release opens up SQO-OSS to the scrutiny of the open source software developers and users community. It demonstrates SQO-OSS's commitment to the deployment of a practical working system.”

NOTES TO THE EDITOR

ABOUT SQO-OSS
SQO-OSS is a community-based project dedicated to checking the quality of Free and Open Source software and making its data publicly available. It's founding partners are the Athens University of Economics and Business, the Aristotle University Of Thessalniki, Klarälvdalens Datakonsult AB, KDE e.V., ProSyst Software GMBH and Sirius Corporation plc. For more information visit the SQO-OSS community website.

CONTACT
For further information please contact:
- Diomidis Spinellis, Project Coordinator, dds@aueb.gr
- Giorgos Gousios, Project Manager, gousiosg@aueb.gr
- Tom Callway, Project Dissemination, +44 870 608 0063

Eurocrats to review Nokia's Navteq deal

Jordan Golson — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 17:00:00 EDT

The EU will review Nokia's $8.1 billion buyout of digital mapmaker Navteq. The Commission believes the deal could hurt competition. Navteq only has one large rival, Tele Atlas, which is being acquired by GPS maker TomTom. The EU is already examining that transaction. [FT]

EU fines Microsoft 899 million euros — and the euro just hit an all-time high

Jordan Golson — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:02:45 EST

European Union regulators fined Microsoft 899 million euros — $1.35 billion and counting — for failing to comply with a 2004 antitrust decision. The order said Microsoft overcharged for patent licenses and documentation which developers needed to build applications on Windows. Compliance with this antitrust order is the reason Microsoft released 30,000 pages of documentation last week — all under the guise of being "open source" friendly. Unfortunately for Microsoft, the euro hit an all-time high against the dollar this morning, priced at $1.5057 to €1. If Microsoft had just settled this in 2004, instead of fighting, it would have saved $400 million. (Photo by AP)