Apple berated

Apple's attempt to quash an effort to help the latest iPods and iPhones work with non-Apple software such as the Linux operating system is out of line, the Electronic Frontier Foundation said Tuesday, states PC World.

Earlier this month, a lawyer from Apple's legal counsel, O'Melveny & Myers, managed to get an open source project called the iPodhash pulled from Bluwiki, a free Web site used to create Wiki pages, saying the project is illegal under the terms of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Bluwiki's founder, Sam Odio, complied with the takedown request, but said in an interview that iPodhash's developer is not trying to get around Apple's copy protection. "He's not developing software to unencrypt the songs," he said. "What he's actually doing is unencrypting the data base."

The LinkedIn social network has just upgraded its people search features, based on the open source search project Lucene, states OStatic.

MySpace recently updated its search features using Lucene and made contributions to Lucene, and OStatic's own search features are also powered by Lucene.

The Web site suggests leaders of Web sites, blogs and Web applications should look into the open source information retrieval engine.

HPC systems software provider Univa UD has released a fully integrated, community-enabled open source software stack that simplifies cluster deployment, reports TMCnet.

The solution, called UniCluster, comes with Oracle Unbreakable Linux support and makes the development, delivery, and maintenance of Intel Cluster Ready certified clusters easier and quicker.

Univa UD also said its joining Intel in the company's Cluster Ready cluster architecture and certification programme, which verifies clusters for compatibility, quality and performance.