Two Major Open Source Projects -- KDE and CMU Sphinx -- To Headquarter Development On VA Linux Systems' SourceForge.Business Editors &High Tech Writers SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 8, 2000 State-of-the-Art Open Source Projects Advance &uot;User Interface&uot; Technology in Graphical Desktop Environments and Speech Recognition VA Linux Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: LNUX) today announced that KDE (K Desktop Environment) A GUI-based user interface primarily for Unix and Linux machines, but also available for Windows and Mac. The source code is freely distributed and is maintained by developers around the world. , a leading graphical desktop environment for Linux and UNIX UNIX Operating system for digital computers, developed by Ken Thompson of Bell Laboratories in 1969. It was initially designed for a single user (the name was a pun on the earlier operating system Multics). workstations, and CMU Sphinx CMU Sphinx sometimes simply known as Sphinx is the general term to describe a group of speech recognition systems developed at Carnegie Mellon University. These includes a series of speech recognizers (Sphinx 2 - 4) and an acoustic model trainer (SphinxTrain). , an advanced speech recognition system for Linux and other platforms, have decided to center their Open Source development activity on SourceForge(TM). SourceForge, the world's largest Open Source development center, is designed to help Open Source projects such as KDE and CMU Sphinx accelerate development and create better software by consolidating development efforts, information and user feedback. Since its debut on January 4, 2000, SourceForge has grown rapidly at a rate of over 30 percent per week, with over 1,750 Open Source projects and more than 10,500 registered users. KDE and CMU Sphinx projects will now have access to SourceForge tools and resources, as well as its extensive community of developers, users and testers. SourceForge provides Open Source projects with resources for development, communication and distribution, including Web-based programming, project management and bug-tracking tools; mailing lists and discussion groups; and Web, FTP FTP in full file transfer protocol Internet protocol that allows a computer to send files to or receive files from another computer. Like many Internet resources, FTP works by means of a client-server architecture; the user runs client software to connect to and archival server space. KDE Development to Move to SourceForge KDE is one of the most popular graphical desktop environments for Linux and UNIX workstations, highly acclaimed for its ease of use and functionality. KDE's move to SourceForge allows the project's 300-plus developers to draw on SourceForge's continually growing developer base for its forthcoming KDE 2.0 release. &uot;As the KDE Project has grown to be one of the largest Open Source projects in the world, we have found ourselves constantly overloading our server resources,&uot; said KDE Developer/Evangelist Kurt Granroth. &uot;SourceForge's rich feature set and powerful servers, along with VA Linux Systems' long-running commitment to Open Source projects, made SourceForge the natural choice for future KDE development. By bringing developers together, providing them with the tools to create, communicate and code, and removing system administrative headaches from the process, SourceForge has clearly become the new home for Open Source development on the Internet.&uot; CMU Sphinx Speech Recognition System Code Released on SourceForge In another exciting move, the CMU Sphinx project for speech recognition software recently released its source code on SourceForge. The CMU Sphinx project -- developed at Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University, at Pittsburgh, Pa.; est. 1967 through the merger of the Carnegie Institute of Technology (founded 1900, opened 1905) and the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research (founded 1913). over approximately 15 years with the support of grants from DARPA DARPA: see Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) The name given to the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency during the 1980s. It was later renamed back to ARPA. (Department of Advanced Research Project Agency) and The National Science Foundation (NSF NSF - National Science Foundation ) -- has made Sphinx sphinx (sfĭngks), mythical beast of ancient Egypt, frequently symbolizing the pharaoh as an incarnation of the sun god Ra. The sphinx was represented in sculpture usually in a recumbent position with the head of a man and the body of a lion, 2 available on SourceForge under an Open Source license. Sphinx2 is a complete speech recognition library and a set of demo applications that show how it can be used. The speech recognition technology developed by the CMU Sphinx project could be applied to create &uot;smart&uot; appliances, allowing users to simply talk to devices to accomplish tasks. &uot;SourceForge lets us focus on advancing the state of speech recognition technology for Linux and other platforms, and relieves us from the burden of generating project administration tools ourselves,&uot; said CMU Sphinx developer Kevin Lenzo Kevin Lenzo wrote the initial infobot, founded the The Perl Foundation and the Yet Another Perl Conferences (YAPC), released CMU Sphinx into Open source, founded Cepstral LLC, and has been a major contributor to the Festival Speech Synthesis System, FestVox, and Flite. . &uot;VA Linux is sending a great message by contributing back to the community this way.&uot; &uot;The addition of projects such as KDE and CMU Sphinx, along with the hundreds of other Open Source projects they join on the site, is indicative of the widespread excitement for SourceForge,&uot; said John T. Hall, vice president of services for VA Linux Systems. &uot;SourceForge's mission is to provide the best available resources for developers to create, test and distribute state-of-the-art Open Source software.&uot; Other Major Open Source Projects on SourceForge Other recent additions to SourceForge's project roster include components of Squid, a high-performance proxy caching server See cache server and Web cache. for Web clients; Icewm, a window manager designed for speed and useability; Sketch, a powerful vector drawing See vector graphics. program; and AMANDA, a popular backup system Noun 1. backup system - a computer system for making backups ADP system, ADPS, automatic data processing system, computer system, computing system - a system of one or more computers and associated software with common storage . These projects join a wide range of tools and applications available on SourceForge, including several components of the Linux kernel (such as the NFS (Network File System) The file sharing protocol in a Unix network. This de facto Unix standard, which is widely known as a "distributed file system," was developed by Sun. See file sharing protocol and WebNFS. NFS - Network File System Project); major Internet client and server applications for chat, e-commerce, FTP, IRC (Internet Relay Chat) Computer conferencing on the Internet. There are hundreds of IRC channels on numerous subjects that are hosted on IRC servers around the world. After joining a channel, your messages are broadcast to everyone listening to that channel. , mail, news and the Web (such as Licq); as well as several business, scientific and educational applications (such as the Open Source Printing Project). VA Linux Systems released the source code to SourceForge itself under the GNU General Public License A software license from the Free Software Foundation (FSF) that ensures every user receives the essential freedoms that define "free" software, which is free of restrictions (see free software). (GPL See GNU General Public License. 1. GPL - General Purpose Language. 2. GPL - ["A Sample Management Application Program in a Graphical Data-driven Programming language", A.L. Davis et al, Digest of Papers, Compcon Spring 81, Feb 1981, pp. 162-167]. ), which gives developers the freedom to examine, modify and re-use the software &uot;source code.&uot; For more information on SourceForge, please visit http://www.sourceforge.net/ About VA Linux Systems Founded in 1993, VA Linux Systems, Inc. is the leading Linux and Open Source solutions company, offering a single point of contact for Linux systems, Open Source software, world-class professional services and enterprise-level support. VA Linux owns and operates many popular community web sites, including Linux.com, Themes.org and SourceForge, the world's largest Open Source development center. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., VA Linux is located on the Web at http://www.valinux.com/ Certain statements in this press release are forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause results to be materially different from expectations. Such risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the ability of VA Linux to attract and retain qualified personnel to perform services related to SourceForge, and industry trends related to Open Source and Linux. Investors are advised to read VA Linux Systems' Registration Statement on Form S-1, particularly the sections entitled &uot;Risk Factors&uot; for a fuller discussion of these and other risks and uncertainties. Note: VA Linux Systems and SourceForge are trademarks of VA Linux Systems, Inc. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. UNIX is a registered trademark in the United States and other countries exclusively licensed through X/Open Company, Ltd. All other trademarks and product names are property of their respective holders. |
|
||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion