As we've reported, the diminutive $25 Linux computer dubbed Raspberry Pi is attracting developers and tinkerers, and we've also noted that it could succeed where projects like One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) ran into roadblocks--in the educational market. In fact, the tiny devices (see the motherboard shown here) have already drawn interest from educational system and technology industry leaders. Now, in a very promising step for the Raspberry Pi movement, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has pledged to give U.K. schools Raspberry Pis and pledged to train 100 teachers in how to pass Linux skills onto students. "Rebooting computer science education is not straightforward," Schmidt said at an event in London, according to the BBC.

Our Digital Content Editor Libby Clark is away from the office this week, so I'm bringing you the Linux.com Open Cloud Roundup. The release of ownCloud 4, and the data surfaced from the Future of Open Source survey provide some interesting news bits this week, while Reuven Cohen and Matt Asay both make interesting points about the trajectory of cloud computing in their blogs.

Build Your Own Open Source Cloud with ownCloud 4

ZDNet

Steven Vaughan-Nichols writes a useful review of this week's ownCloud 4 release, pointing to its ease-of-use and saying that "ownCloud brings everything I need in one place so that I can run my own cloud my own way." The best thing about ownCloud is you can keep all your data on your own servers and choose the other public clouds with which you want to integrate.

Open Source Finds its Way into Mobile, Cloud, Big Data

eWeek

A group of open source software companies this week released The Future of Open Source Survey, which we covered here at Linux.com. One of the interesting findings that eWeek surfaced in their story lead is that 40 percent of new open source projects in 2011 address cloud computing (followed by mobile apps and mobile enterprise projects). This reflects the importance of Linux and open source software in enabling an open cloud experience for IT users who need interoperability, low costs and flexibility.

Interest in Cloud Computing Has Peaked

Forbes.com

Reuven Cohen makes a case, based on web search data, that interest in the cloud has peaked. He shares data that shows web searches for cloud computing terms are down and points to Gartner's Hype Cycle to illustrate we're headed into the phase defined as the "trough of disillusionment." This is when the real winners and losers are exposed and real products start coming to market and real deployments can be analyzed from start to finish. The next phase? "Slope of enlightenment." We can't wait.

Red Hat Could Cash In With Open Source Cloud Juggling Act

The Register

While this post is a summary of Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst's OSBC keynote, Matt Asay makes some really important points about the role of Linux and open source software in the cloud. Here are just a couple excerpts:

"Cloud computing is all the rage these days, but it's really a natural consequence of the open-source trend that started decades ago. Cloud computing is essentially impossible in any major way without open-source software at its heart, a point Google has stressed for years. The economics just don't work without high-quality free software with minimal licensing friction."

"We see this in the explosion of interest in Big Data, but that's just the sexy, Silicon Valley way of articulating the shift toward information-driven businesses. Those businesses can only afford to be so information-driven, however, because of how open source and other technology forces have dramatically lowered the cost of computing and communication."

Seems to me we need to ask Matt to do another Q&A with us here on Linux.com about this topic (hint hint, Matt).

Until next week.

In an effort to measure the size of the universe, researchers are using the Jaguar supercomputer at ORNL to simulate the explosions of white dwarf star supernova. The physics of supernova explosions is something astrophysicists have been trying to figure out for about 50 years now," said Stan Woosley, principal investigator of an Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) project and professor of astrophysics at the University of California–Santa Cruz. "It is an...

Security researchers from North Carolina State University announced the launch of a new initiative – the Android Malware Genome Project – to find, collect and analyse Android malware and share it with researchers around the world...

Did you see the Google+ 2.0 update for iPhone and wonder if Google's attention had drifted away from its own baby? Don't fret, as the Android app has just been given similarly loving treatment. The interface shares the reworked stream look that we saw on iOS while keeping the swipe-to-switch category filters that Google+ has used from the start. There's...

Researchers have proposed an extension to the Internet's foundation of trust that's designed to root out fraudulent secure sockets layer (SSL) certificates before attackers can use them to impersonate online banks and other sensitive websites.

Matt Godbolt announces GCC explorer, a web-based tool for exploring how code tweaks change the machine code emitted by the compiler. "Particularly with some of the newer features of C++11 — lambdas, move constructors, threading primitives etc — it’s nice to be able to see how your elegant code becomes...

The generally accepted definition of "cloud services" - even the one prescribed by the U.S. Government (PDF available here) - includes the existence of metered or measured service - usually a flat rate that scales along with the service consumed. Now one of the cloud's most prominent competitors is opening up its enterprise license program to negotiation, enabling big customers - perhaps including the government itself - to name their price and enter into long-term, fixed-price deals. Box.net's move, announced this morning, opens the door for potentially very large customers to enter into long-term arrangements that would otherwise be quite expensive.

Recently, we covered syncing files to Amazon S3 using the S3 Tools. This time around, we're going to take a look at another handy tool for making backups, Duplicity. While Duplicity supports S3, it also supports a number of other services that S3 Tools do not. If the command line seems like a hassle, don't worry: the Deja-Dup front-end works really well for simple backups.

{lfnews}

I'm inspried by a variety of things, both small and large: a really good cup of coffee, great art, contribution, reading the Sunday New York Times, sitting in the Linux kernel panel session at LinuxCon. But this year in particular, I'm more inpsired than ever by what is happening because of Linux. The Raspberry Pi is putting computing power in anyone's hands; the Cadillac Cue is illustrating just the tip of the iceberg of what Linux is doing for car infotainment systems; and Google, Facebook and Amazon all continue to push the limits on how we connect as a global culture thanks to Linux. This year, too, Linux is playing a major role in how we define the open cloud and is bringing more attention to why we need to fight for openness in cloud computing.

All of these reasons and more are why we created a theme for this year's Linux Foundation T-shirt contest, "Inspired by Linux." My colleague Libby Clark last week shared a video that gives me goosebumps and that we can already see by the submissions coming in are inspiring people to design this year's T-shirt. To provide even more inspiration and direction on how to become a finalist, I thought I'd share last year's finalists. I hope this helps designers understand the basic elements we're lookging for when choosing the top 5-7 for community vote: artistic quality, originality, creativity, simplicity in design, and adherence to the contest theme. Enjoy the slideshow, and we look forward to reviewing your design. And, to this year's two winners-to-be, we'll see you at LinuxCon and CloudOpen!

Ever more mini-computers with ARM SoCs, on which hobbyists can run Android, Linux or other operating systems, are entering the market. VIA has now joined the fray by announcing the APC, containing an ARM SoC, for just $49...

While Canonical is known -- and commonly criticized -- for not investing in making heavy, low-level upstream Linux contributions, today a set of patches intended for upstream were published by a Canonical engineer concerning XWayland support...

Designed to be used by those who are actively getting shot at in warzones, not just those of us who are clumsy with our gadgets, the new Rampage 6 tablet is even more rugged than Panasonic's Toughbook tablet. Though, far less capable. More »...

Whether you are writing code or creating editorial content, a noisy computing environment often can silence your productivity. The Pyroom Text Editor gives you a quiet environment where computing noise cannot distract you from your creativity. Computing noise -- that is, computing distractions from the task at hand -- comes...

Samsung separately said that the Galaxy S III design was not changed to get around Apple's lawsuit. [Read more]...

SparkFun is not like BMW. We will never be the company to produce the luxury market version of breakout boards and development tools. I believe the only way SparkFun will survive this quickly changing world is to be malleable. We have to be ready to change. Read more... read more...

In a blog post Liz discloses that the foundation is working on an experimental camera which will be released later this year.

Engine Yard has announced that JRuby core team members Thomas Enebo and Charles Nutter are leaving the company to join Red Hat in an apparently friendly deal between the two firms. The first preview version of JRuby 1.7.0 has also been released...

After an unannounced delay, LLVM 3.1 and Clang 3.1 have been released, bringing a variety of improvements to the compiler infrastructure and C/C++/Objective C compiler...

It's been a "calm" release cycle, according to Linus Torvalds, but the 3.4 Linux kernel released on Sunday still has plenty of interesting new features. Top of the bill? A X32 application binary interface (ABI) that will help provide better performance for applications that don't really need huge chunks of memory or 64-bit variables.

"Openness" is not a term that jumps to mind when describing the Chinese government. Yet on Sunday when Chinese regulators approved Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility, they applied a surprising caveat: Google must keep Android free and open source for the next five years.

The approval lifted the last obstacle to the $12.5 billion merger and is resulting today in the completed Google/Motorola deal. As part of the announcement and as anticipated, Larry Page is naming Dennis Woodside as Motorola's CEO.

China's demand for openness is an ironic sequel to the 2010 disagreement with Google over another openness issue: Internet search. In 2010, Google refused to let China filter its search results, and was forced to retreat from the Chinese search market, leaving the homegrown, filter-friendly Baidu as the dominant leader. The rift may have led China to delay its verdict until several months after U.S. and EU regulatory bodies announced their restriction-free approvals in February.

While China's demands mean OEMs and developers can breathe a little easier about Android's future, few expected Google would soon discard its successful open-source strategy. Google has repeatedly vowed to keep Android open, to provide timely updates to all Android vendors without favoring Motorola Mobility, and to maintain Motorola as a separate, independent company.

Some speculate that Google may even spin off Motorola once it has plundered the U.S.-based Android device manufacturer's 17,000-plus technology patents. The patents, which should help Google fend off Android-related legal attacks, were widely seen as the main goal of the acquisition. Google will likely keep Motorola, however, as a means to project its own vision of Android devices, free from UI skins and bloatware. In addition, Motorola's set-top box division could help revive Google TV.

Google's five-vendor Nexus strategy

Google's open source commitment was far from a given. Some analysts advised the company to go proprietary as a way to eliminate fragmentation and better compete with Apple. In August, Piper Jaffray projected Google could earn $10.5 billion in profits by 2015 following the proprietary path.

Others suggested Google might pursue a middle ground by giving Motorola a head-start with new Android code before releasing code to others. Google has always denied the possibility, however, and China's approval would appear to prohibit this. In fact, a May 15 Wall Street Journal article claims that Google will debut the upcoming Android "Jelly Bean" release in November on unlocked devices from up to five manufacturers.

Previously, Google had released such Google-branded "Nexus" devices with only a single partner. HTC built the original Android phone and first "Nexus" phone, and Samsung built the next two Nexus models. Last year, Motorola's Xoom acted as an unofficial showcase model for Android 3.0 "Honeycomb" tablets.

According to the Journal's unnamed source, Google will once again attempt direct sales with the devices, as it did with the HTC Nexus One in 2010. Although participating Android vendors won't likely be permitted to add UI layers, they will enjoy early access to the latest code.

Presumably, Samsung, HTC, and Google's other major Android partners have been given a shot at a Nexus device, in addition to Motorola. Asustek has also been rumored to be working on a co-branded tablet with Google. China's Huawei or ZTE, both of which are rapidly building Android market share, may well share in the Jelly Bean debut, according to the story.

Mobile carriers, on the other hand, will likely be miffed, as the unlocked phones and tablets will work on multiple networks. The carriers can only hope that Google will fail to learn the lessons from its unsuccessful direct-sales scheme with the Nexus One.

Unlocked bootloaders aside, an open source Android is arguably as much in the interests of the carriers as it is with Android vendors, developers, and consumers. Google no doubt realized that a proprietary "Googarola" would further fragment rather than coalesce Android, and that the company might struggle to compete with Apple in its own proprietary hardware game.

FOSS purists would say Android isn't really open source at all, especially due to Google's lack of transparent governance. Yet, the company has finally stepped up its contribution of Android code back to the Linux mainline. More importantly, after protests about its nine-month hold-out on releasing Honeycomb code in 2011, it promptly released Android 4.0 code in November, along with the Honeycomb code.

Pure FOSS or not, Android is open enough to inspire a growing number of open source projects. According to a May 15 Black Duck Software study, 76 percent of the roughly 10,000 new open source mobile open source projects launched in 2011 were based on Android. In other words, Android is beginning to achieve enough open source momentum to ensure that no organization -- including Google, Amazon, Samsung, Verizon, AT&T, or even China -- will be able to fully control it.

Version 0.5.7 of the open source Flash player implementation for Linux focuses on features used by Flash games by improving its graph­ics capa­bil­i­ties...

If you're new or relatively new to Linux, you may be looking around for good Linux resources and perhaps some tutorials. Whether you're new to Linux or looking to become a more advanced user, there are a lot of free online books and tutorials that can give you guidance. In this post, you'll find our updated collection of many good Linux reference guides online--all available at no cost. Total Linux beginners can easily dive into The Linux Starter Pack. It's a guide that caters to newbies and provides numerous useful resources. We've covered Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference before here, and you can download it for free here. The online book is mostly identical to the fee-based print version, and the author, Keir Thomas, has written a number of books on Linux. There are seven chapters in the reference guide, with many screenshots, and information on how to move...

As of this week, GitHub is reaching out to Windows developers with the announcement of GitHub for Windows, a graphical client that will allow both developers and designers to seamlessly us the Git revision control system. The client is available as a free download now, and here are more details. The Git revision control system has soared in popularity in recent years, and developers have traditionally used it via command line or through a Mac-based graphical client that has...

Google's CEO, Larry Page, has announced that Google has officially acquired Motorola Mobility. The process started last August but the deal is now done. Google hasn't made a statement about what exactly they plan on doing with this acquisition, but he does introduce Motorola Mobility's new CEO, Google employee Dennis...

Version 4 of the ownCloud "personal cloud" system is out. "ownCloud 4 – built through active community support – adds innovative features like file versioning, – which actively saves files, allowing users to "rollback" to previous versions – and a new API — giving developers an easy, stable and supported...

Unless an app you have your eye happens to have a free demo version to muck about with, there’s little one can do to try out an Android app on a device in advance. Sure, you could buy the app straight from the Google Play Store and get a refund within 15 minutes if you’re not satisfied, but Amazon has a new solution in place that helps take the friction out of that testing process. The latest update for the Amazon Appstore Android app packs a welcome surprise — instead of being stuck Test Driving your apps on your PC, you’ll now be able to do it from...

Use these four Apache Hive query patterns to improve the process of developing Hive-based applications, enhance code reusability, and reduce HiveQL errors.

The Bluetooth SIG indicates the Samsung Galaxy S III is coming to T-Mobile, AT&T. [Read more]...

Bring up the term open source to many people, and they'll immediately think of community-driven software projects, but we've covered many open source hardware concepts here on OStatic over the years. And, last year, the official Open Source Hardware (OSHW) definition arrived in version 1.1. Recently, TED fellow Marcin Jakubowski delivered an address in which he discussed the open source blueprints for 50 farm machines, ranging from tractors to harvesters. You can get his thoughts in a video, but these farm-focused ideas are only a small part of the open source hardware scene. As NPR notes: "Using wikis and digital fabrication tools, Jakubowski's work enables anyone to build their own tractor or harvester from scratch. The effort is part of an overall project to write an instruction...

Google Chrome has beaten Microsoft's Internet Explorer as the most popular web browser worldwide, for the first time.

Thanks to China finally giving its stamp of approval, Motorola Mobility says its acquisition by Google can now close. [Read more]...

Oracle has released version 3.1.1 of Oracle VM Server for x86, its Xen-based virtualisation solution. It includes wizards for generating VMs and server pools, and users can now add virtual CPUs to running VMs...

If there's anything important in this competitive world, it's the ability to tell one's friends from one's enemies. We here in the Linux blogosphere tend to be pretty good at that, but recently a surprising turn of events left us befuddled. Namely: Mozilla's decision to leave Linux support out of...

The Chinese handset maker included a program with a hard-coded password in its ZTE Score smartphone which gives root access. The backdoor was discovered after a user posted the credentials on Pastebin...

ARM has published a new open-source X.Org DDX Linux graphics driver while working to enable support for their next-generation ARM Mali T6xx graphics core...

Linus has released the 3.4 kernel. Significant features in this release include the Yama security module, support for the x32 ABI, asymmetric multiprocessing support, the dm-verity device mapper target, and more. For details, see the always-excellent KernelNewbies 3.4 page.

Aside from releasing a stable Linux driver update last week, NVIDIA also pushed out a new 302-series Linux driver beta...

More than 50 percent of all software purchased within five years will be open source, according to a survey released Monday by a collaboration of 26 open source companies.

This year’s "Future of Open Source Survey" results signal a tipping point for open source software adoption in the enterprise and non-technical industries such as automotive, health care and finance. In the auto industry, for example, 59 percent of the companies surveyed use open source software and 35 percent said they’re evaluating it.

Of the 740 companies surveyed, 42 percent said adoption in the non-technical segments was the No. 1 trend driving open source in 2012.

"It indicates the maturing and awareness of the technology and its benefits," said Peter Vescuso, Executive Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at Black Duck Software, a survey sponsor.

Open Source Drives Innovation

That broader adoption creates a larger community for testing and feedback, a "virtuous cycle," that’s driving innovation in cutting-edge technologies such as cloud computing, mobile and big data, according to the report. The innovation cycle is also giving way to new business models.

Industries are moving toward cloud computing, which is enabled by open source software, said Michael Skok, General Partner of North Bridge Venture Partners. Cloud, in turn, allows for more mobile and data adoption.

"All of these areas build on each other as non-technical industries look to solutions," Skok said.

They turn to open source software to escape vendor lock-in, lower costs and increase quality, according to the survey. As further proof that the industry is maturing, this marked the first year that quality ranked among the top three reasons in the study’s six-year history.

"I see open source projects such as Drupal or Linux win more often because it’s the better technology, rather than just win on price," said Dries Buytaert, co-founder and CTO of Acquia and President of the Drupal Association. "It has the better functionality because we’re a community driven innovation model. That means it has become the better solution."

The combination of technology, development and business innovation is all coming from a more open and accessible community-based process.

"To call it open source software falls way short of all of these elements coming together," Vescuso said. "I’d characterize it as open innovation."

More interesting stats from the study:

Number of Survey Respondents in 2011: 455

Number in 2012: 740

41% Vendors
59% Non-vendors

Top Barriers to Open Source Selection:

Unfamiliarity with open source solutions 48%
Lack of internal technical skills 47%
Lack of formal commercial vendor support 35%

Factors influencing the choice of OSS projects for non-vendors

Project maturity 46%
Availability of commercial support 21%
Size of the community 20%

What aspect of OSS experience is most important to hiring decisions?

Experience with a variety of projects 35%
Code contributions 28%

Hot OSS companies

Red Hat
Canonical
Acquia
Enterprise DB
Google
Ntando

Samba4 aims to be a drop-in Active Directory server replacement. It's still in alpha, so the easy way to try it out is with Resara Server, which supplies a polished administration console and decent documentation. So grab your Windows peecees and come take Resara for a spin.

In my talk at Linux Fest Northwest — and I say this often to anyone who will listen — I mentioned that there is a "digital Darwinism" at play in the FOSS paradigm. That is, distros and FOSS programs rise and fall depending on the quality of the software and the community that gathers around them. Good distros and programs — the "fittest" — survive, and the others, well, not so much. That’s OK: It may be harsh, but such is the way of the FOSS world. In case you’re wondering why I’ve started off on a tangent instead of going off on one somewhere in mid-blog, I bring this up because I think Fuduntu is one of those distros that can be a strong contributor to FOSS, not to mention a quality distro coupled with a growing community. That said, it has a bright future. In giving the latest version of Fuduntu a ride — Fuduntu 2012.2 — it is a refereshing change of pace. Originally based on Fedora but later forked (and the installer will look very familiar to Fedora users), the distro — as the name Fuduntu implies — ties the...

As the Intel Ivy Bridge benchmarks being delivered on Phoronix and coming up in the coming days are frequently using the latest Intel Linux graphics development stack, for those curious here is a comparison between the stock Ubuntu 12.04 packages and when running the latest Linux kernel / Mesa /...

Windows Phone has inched past the iPhone at ekeing out market share in the lucrative Chinese market. [Read more]...

As if anyone needed any more proof that the Samsung’s Galaxy S III would sell like (slightly more expensive) hotcakes, a report from the Korea Economic Daily reveals that the long-awaited handset racked up over 9 million pre-orders from mobile carriers across the globe. To put that number in a bit of perspective, the tremendously popular Galaxy S II was officially unveiled at MWC in February 2011, and managed to rack up 3 million global pre-orders by the end of April. Its successor, on the other hand,...

No other market debut has matched the frenzy created by Facebook. DealBook’s live blog will be tracking reactions to the company’s I.P.O. throughout the day.

The Facebook IPO is expected to usher in a day of massive trading volumes on the markets, and some believe that might translate to a lift for some tech stocks. But one that could really use some help has just been served another course of bad press: Nokia is apparently burning through its cash reserves — fast. The company, for years the biggest mobile phone maker in the world, has fallen on very tough times, as competition from companies like Samsung, Apple and a barrage of inexpensive device makers, have translated into declines in sales, market share and profitability. That’s now translating into what has been identified as another issue: the burning of the cash pile. In the last five quarters, Nokia has burned through €2.1 billion ($2.7 billion) from its cash reserves. Analysts polled by Reuters on average believe that at the rate Nokia is going, it will go through another €2 billion ($2.5 billion) in the next three quarters, with the total current cash pile of €4.9 billion ($6 billion) gone within two years. To put that in some context, in 2007 Nokia had cash reserves of €10 billion in 2007 ($12.7 billion). That points to its cash pile burn accelerating — a result of...

The retailer is now alerting customers that their orders for the Evo 4G LTE are being delayed indefinitely since Sprint has changed the release date. [Read more]...

The computer is the size of a USB stick and features a 1.5GHz Cortex A8 processor with 512MB of RAM and a MALI400 GPU. It can decode 1080p video via its HDMI output and has two USB connectors...

The Fedora Project has pushed back the final release date for version 17 of its popular Linux distribution by one week while its developers work to fix four blocker bugs...

The two rivaling software giants are rumored to be in a run-off to introduce new Infrastructure as a Service platforms for the cloud, which could mean trouble for Amazon. [Read more]...

In a blog post today Mandriva COO Jean-Manuel Croset announced that the new strategy going forward will be to let "the distribution evolve in and under the caring responsibility of the community." Mandriva SA will, of course, be a part of this entity. Croset continues by saying that "a workgroup of community representatives is...

HTC's One X and EVO 4G LTE are both held up in customs right now. Patent trouble. But according to updates folks who preordered the Sprint phone, the EVO 4G LTE has a tentative date of May 23. More »...

The order comes after two key HTC smartphones are stopped at the border as a result of their ongoing dispute. [Read more]...

There are nearly 4,000 different types of devices running Android, OpenSignalMaps has found. More than 1,300 of them have custom ROMs that tweak the android.build model. Android brands are almost as diverse as the models, OpenSignalMaps discovered. Further, the application programming interface level, meaning the Android version, has also become...

The latest version of Rocks cluster distribution – an open source toolkit for real and virtual clusters – has been released.

This week's open source cloud headlines yielded the not-so-suprising news that NASA will discontinue support for the OpenStack cloud platform it helped engineer. The reason? OpenStack is now receiving commercial support and the agency's funds are best spent elsewhere, according to Datacenter Dynamics. 

Uptime: NASA to cut involvement in OpenStack
Datacenter Dynamics
The agency that was central to developing the OpenStack platform has announced it will no longer be involved in the project. NASA will also stop work on Nebula, the cloud infrastructure developed alongside OpenStack.

OpenShift PaaS Roadmap for Enterprises Outlined by Red Hat
Application Development Trends

Red Hat announced its open source PaaS offering for the enterprise, a competitor to VMWare’s Cloud Foundry. 

A Mobile Storm in the Cloud (Infographic)
EngineYard.com via AllTop
This isn't open source specific, but the connection between mobile computing and the growth of PaaS, the third largest cloud category, is interesting. PaaS is expected to grow 232% between 2010 and 2014. Who are the big open source PaaS providers? Red Hat's OpenShift, for one. VMWare's Cloud Foundry is another.

Open Source Cloud Computing: Could It Be Part of Your Next Cloud Project?
Midsize Insider
When does it make sense for mid-size businesses to use open source frameworks for cloud computing? Web and social applications are a good fit. Internal IT skills are a must, according to this article. And for many, it may be too soon. The article argues that security is still an issue for SMBs in cloud adoption, but a Microsoft study on cloud adoption disagrees.

Marten Mickos: Openness is Winning in the Cloud
Linux.com
The CEO of Eucalyptus says open source cloud startups are scaling in size with important customers and a large install base that make them competitive with closed source solutions.

After years of trying and failing to discourage manufacturers from adding user interface (UI) layers to Android, Google appeared destined for success with the visually refined Android 4.0 ("Ice Cream Sandwich"). Despite predictions that ICS would kill off the "skins" for good, however, HTC's Sense and Samsung's TouchWiz have not only arrived in new Android 4.0 versions, but they have met with positive reviews.

This week, these top two skins were joined by LG’s Optimus UI 3.0, yet another feature-rich interpretation of Android 4.0. Debuting soon on the new LG Optimus 4X HD and Optimus LTE II, the latest Optimus skin features great customization and the ability to take photos via voice command. Along with a growing list of third-party launchers and custom ROMs, vendor-supplied UI layers continue to both complicate and energize the Android standard.

Ranging from cosmetic modifications to more fundamental UI modifications and feature suites, UI layers offered some advantages in the early days of Android. Yet, as Android evolved, the skins have hindered more than helped, burdening users with sometimes cartoonish interfaces and awkward feature alternatives. More to the point, the UI layers often reduce performance and battery life, while cluttering the screen and wasting storage with "bloatware." Skins have also been criticized for delaying products and OS updates, and making it harder for Android app developers to reach a broad audience.

Some vendors have retreated from the skin game. Notably Motorola began scaling back its MotoBlur interface in 2010, and the latest, MotoBlur-derived Motorola Application Platform hews close to stock Android. HTC and Samsung, however, have stubbornly pushed out major Android 4.0 updates of their Sense and TouchWiz skins, respectively.

Their persistence was recently explained in a Laptop story by Drew Bamford, HTC's lead designer for Sense 4.0. HTC's goal with Sense, he said, is to "create that continuity of experience and that bridge of an identifiable HTC experience across our products."

Glowing reviews

Although some critics contend the new skins hide ICS' best design improvements, most reviews have been quite positive. Even the techies on the Android forums have had nice things to say, and some have even suggested they may keep the layers instead of rooting and replacing them with custom ROMs.

In the case of Sense 4.0, which debuted on the HTC One X, the praise focuses on the more refined interface. HTC has scaled back many of Sense's previous excesses, removing features that ICS already excels at. Its subtle matte-finish interface is far less cluttered, and new customization features include personalized widget sets, customizable lockscreens, and optional overlays.

Despite Samsung's addition of a nature-themed cosmetic overlay to the ICS-ready TouchWiz Nature UX, the UI layer is less dramatically altered from the previous TouchWiz 4.0 than Sense 4.0 is from Sense 3.5. Yet Samsung has loaded up TouchWiz with a bevy of innovative features, making it more of an application suite than a skin. Like Sense 4.0, Nature UX builds upon ICS enhancements with new lockscreens and improved camera controls, but it goes much further.

As demonstrated on the Samsung Galaxy S III, TouchWiz adds the somewhat Siri-like "S Voice" concierge service, as well as a picture-in-picture function. Various enhancements make use of sensors and cameras. For example, the "direct call" feature lets one switch from a messaging to a voice session by holding the phone to one's face. "Smart stay" uses face recognition to send the phone into a blank power-saving mode when one's glance is averted. And for the ultimate gee-whiz effect, tapping on a familiar face in a photo instantly pulls up the subject's contact info.

Uninstall isn't an option

Clearly, Sense and TouchWiz have both been greatly improved. Yet, a chief criticism of both UI layers remains the same: neither are easily removed. There's no uninstall function, and especially in the U.S., locked bootloaders dissuade users from modifying the vendors' branded experiences.

This is no big deal for Android techies, most of whom will continue rooting their devices to replace the latest skins with custom ROMs. An increasing number of stock Android 4.0 firmware alternatives are available from CyanogenMod, XDA-Developers, and others, and some let users switch between modded versions of vendor skins in addition to stock ICS.

For most consumers, however, the risk of "bricking" one's device into a coma makes rooting the phone with a new ROM an unwelcome option.

As Ryan Whitwam notes in a May 8 story in ExtremeTech, there are less risky ways to nudge a skinned phone toward Android purity. Installing an ICS-ready launcher like Apex and ADW adds home-screen customization options that approximate a stock Android experience. Whitwam also points to alternative browsers and other apps that can help restore a stock experience. These solutions, however, do not necessarily remove bloatware or address potential performance, storage, or battery problems.

Despite the drawbacks of fragmentation, vendors should be encouraged to make Android anything they want -- even if they go as far as Amazon with its partial fork of Android 2.3 for its Kindle Fire tablet. And in the interest of providing users with an open platform, too, perhaps the next versions could offer the option to uninstall.

It's official: Android smartphones are dominating the overall smartphone market. Researchers from Gartner report that Android phones represented 56 percent of the global smartphone market in the first quarter of this year, while Apple's iPhone was next in line with only 22.9 percent of the market. And, if you've been underestimating Samsung's force in the mobile phone market consider some key data about its leadership in the market for Android phones. According to Gartner: "Samsung became the world’s top mobile handset vendor during the quarter, displacing Nokia which had held the No. 1 spot since 1998. Samsung’s mobile phone sales reached 86.6 million units, a 25.9 percent increase from last year. Samsung took back the world’s No. 1 smartphone position from Apple, selling 38 million smartphones worldwide. In addition, Samsung’s Android-based smartphone sales in the first quarter of 2012 represented more than 40...

It's mid-May -- do you know where your Ice Cream Sandwich update is? Six months after Android 4.0 made its debut on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, millions of owners of legacy Android devices are still anxiously awaiting the day the new firmware gets downloaded on their own electronic real estate. At least the scene today is much more pleasant than it was just a few months ago, as ICS is finally rolling out to several popular devices. But if you're...

New iPad mini intel suggests the tablet will hit the market in the third or fourth quarter as Apple has lined up suppliers for the LCD panel. [Read more]...

Would a rose by any other name still smell as sweet? Or would it, perhaps, end up sweeter? That, essentially, is the question at the heart of the forking process, which in turn is at the heart of a key situation today. Namely: Now that we have LibreOffice, do we...

According to The Wall Street Journal, Google is planning to launch Jelly Bean, the next version of its Android mobile operating system, on several Nexus smartphones from a number of different manufacturers...

The representatives of both parties have signed a brief that stipulates how the copyright infringement damages will be treated in the lawsuit. Meanwhile, the jury is discussing the patent issues...

Version 13 of Linux Mint, code-named "Maya", is based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and offers a choice of Cinnamon 1.4 or MATE 1.2, a fork of the older 2.x branch of GNOME, as the default desktop environment...

There are a lot of excellent reasons to get involved with an open source project. You can learn a new language, improve your existing skills, be challenged by a community that is at the top of their field or even get better at managing complex distributed projects. There are also...

NVIDIA has released the updated 295.53 binary Linux display graphics driver for GeForce and Quadro hardware...

Cloud computing promises new career opportunities for IT professionals. In many cases, existing core skill sets transfer directly to cloud technologies. In other instances, IT pros need to develop new skill sets that meet the demand of emerging cloud job roles.

A well known company, Valve, that distributes nonfree computer games with Digital Restrictions Management, recently announced it would distribute these games for GNU/Linux. What good and bad effects can this have?

As part of our ongoing focus on open source cloud, we talked with Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos about the commoditization of hypervisors, what’s driving his company’s growth and its plans to release Eucalyptus 3.1 soon, marking the company’s shift to a much more open development model. The interview is presented in two parts. Yesterday’s post covered the open cloud, the role of APIs and where open source cloud computing is headed.

Linux.com: What’s driving private cloud (Eucalyptus’s specialty)?

Marten Mickos: The driving force now is agility. Companies need the elasticity of cloud to assign infrastructure resources on the fly to different applications and shift the workloads around. That’s why our customers do it. Cloud is a new piece of software on your servers so there must be a benefit to installing it. Agility is that benefit. Longer-term, cloud also gives better manageability and higher utilization.

Linux.com: How much overlap is there between the surge in interest in big data and the open cloud movement? Is one influencing the other?

Mickos: I think both are driven by the large increase in the number of connected devices. The underlying trend is connected devices. How many new devices with an IP address are there? They produce a lot of data and have compute needs. They need clouds to run on and big data to be analyzed. You can run big data solutions on cloud platforms. That’s just a practical reality.

Linux.com:  Is virtualization in the cloud going away? More companies are offering cloud services without the hypervisor. What does that mean for VMware and others?

Mickos: Virtualization is needed and useful but ultimately it will be compressed into the hardware, into the CPU. Sure you can do deployments that don’t use hypervisors and get some improvements in use case. But how do you maintain flexibility of your own virtual machine? I don’t think they’re going away but I can see them being commoditized.

But we shouldn’t think companies like VMWare are losing their business anytime soon. Although the technological change could happen fast, customer deployments happen slowly. They virtualization vendors will be able to monetize that for many years to come. And now they’re moving up the chain into PaaS and IaaS that they didn’t have before.

But with a hypervisor background you might not have the needed frame of thinking for building a cloud. A hypervisor is a single piece of software; it runs in one machine. A cloud platform like Eucalyptus is essentially a multi-machine piece of software.  It takes a different mindset to develop distributed systems.

Here’s an analogy: The world had hierarchical databases, and then someone developed a relational database. It wasn’t the hierarchical designers who came up with it, it took new guys.

Linux.com: Where is Eucalyptus now?

Mickos: We are unique in the space in that we’ve had production use of Eucalyptus for over two years. We have taken a step into mission-critical uses and now have high availability (HA) in the product.

Linux.com: What’s new for you this year and where are you headed?

Mickos: We are growing very rapidly. We shipped Eucalyptus 3.0 which is revolutionary in that it has features no other cloud service has. We signed a deal with AWS and have raised $30 million in capital a few weeks ago.

We have lots of customers going and that’s just the U.S. We’re equally active in China , India and Europe. We’re pushing hard on all those fronts and shipping software faster than before. And we have the financial funds to keep expanding. But it’s always hard to build a company.

The 3.1 release is coming out in two months from now. It will mark the transition we agreed on internally in terms of a new development model. We’re working now under an agile model and we’ll use Git and GitHub for our source code repository.  This marks a much more open model for how we develop our product.

Linux.com: Does that mean Eucalyptus will be completely open source, or will you still reserve some aspects of your code for customers under an "open core" model?

Mickos: The platform is totally open, we will have plugins we give to paying customers. The good news is anybody can develop plugins so we’re a much more pluggable architecture and we’ll welcome that sort of development.

Our GTC 2012 coverage continues as Dan Olds examines the growth of the CUDA environment from 150,000 downloads in 2007 to 1.5 million today: More importantly, there are 35 NVIDIA-fueled hybrid supercomputers on the Top500 list today. The NDUT Tianhe-1A system, with 14,300 CPUs and 7,100 NVIDIA GPUs, held...

Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) has a lot to like. It's cheap, can be used for storing a little bit of data or as much as you want, and it can be used for distributing files publicly or just storing your private data. Let's look at how you can take advantage of Amazon S3 on Linux.

In its latest legal salvo, the iPhone maker has asked the ITC to dismiss five patents that Google issued to HTC last year. [Read more]...

So much has happened recently in the Linux community to be inspired by. This is my second month as the Digital Content Editor for Linux.com and as a newbie member I’ve already met so many amazing people and seen so many significant milestones pass just since I started.

- With the Linux Foundation’s Annual Development Report we learned that more than 7,800 developers from almost 800 different companies have contributed to the Linux kernel since tracking began in 2005.

Their contributions make Linux the largest collaborative development project in the history of computing. That’s pretty amazing, and inspiring.

- Linux Creator and Linux Foundation Fellow Linus Torvalds in April was named a Millennium Technology Prize laureate -- an honor considered to be the Nobel prize of technology.

Wow, am I proud to work in the same community as him.

- New advances are happening all the time, whether it’s Ubuntu’s recent 12.04, the soon-to-be-released Linux 3.4, OpenStack and the open cloud movement, Android seizing market share or the myriad other technologies and trends that form the Linux juggernaut.

You had me at Ubuntu.

Bottom line: This community is continually innovating and inspiring the next generation of Linux products and developers. The list of accomplishments is as diverse as the community that contributes to the success of Linux. I can’t help but be in awe, and I’ll bet you can’t help it either. That’s why we’ve chosen the theme of this year’s T-shirt design contest to be "Inspired by Linux." Tell us:

How does Linux inspire you?

We invite you to take that kernel of an idea and turn it into an inspiring T-shirt design for the Linux community to wear proudly in our 3rd Annual Linux Foundation T-shirt Design Contest. The design can depict literally or figuratively the events or ideas that get you pumped up for Linux. It can have words, graphics, or both in whatever font and colors you like. Let Linux be your muse.

Submissions are due on June 8. (Submit your design and see the official rules and submission guidelines.)

This year we’re pleased to announce that two winners will be selected by the communty. The first place winner will be reimbursed $2,000 to be applied toward airfare, hotel and admissions to their choice of LinuxCon North America in San Diego, CA on Aug. 26 - 29, 2012, or LinuxCon Europe in Barcelona, Spain Nov. 5-7, 2012. Second place will be reimbursed $1,000 toward LinuxCon North America or LinuxCon Europe in 2012.

We’ve also taken steps this year to ensure a fair voting process. The Linux Foundation staff will choose the top 5-7 submissions from designs received by the deadline. The community will then vote on the finalists to choose two winners. Voters must be registered members of Linux.com and must be logged in to vote. Only one vote per registered member is allowed.

First place will be awarded to the design that receives the most community votes and second place will go to the runner up. Winners will be announced on or around July 17, 2012.

Good luck! I can’t wait to see all of your designs. And if you're looking for more inspiration, check out our contest video:

It was all the way back in August when Google announced plans for its biggest acquisition ever, agreeing to buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. Since then, shareholders and regulators around the world have signed off on the arrangement, but China has remained the sticking point for Google to move ahead with the final deal. One thing that every analyst agrees on once the deal goes through is that it will kick Google's true, long-term strategy surrounding the Android mobile OS into high gear. Now, there are reports coming in that imply that Google's long-term Android strategy may include some surprises. For a long time, many observers have speculated that Google might play favorites with hardware manufacturers as it moves aggressively into the smartphone business and pushes its Android strategy forward. In the past, the company has drawn criticism for allowing this or that hardware maker early access to the latest version of Android. According to a Wall Street Journal report, Google's long-term strategy may be to favor a cadre of hardware makers with the latest versions, and to sell...

With a record 104 current top-level projects and 51 projects in the incubator, the Apache Software Foundation declares an "unprecedented" first quarter...

Here’s hoping that you already managed to get your hands on an HTC One X, because it may be a while before they appear on store shelves again. According to a release put out by HTC last night, U.S. Customs has blocked shipments of AT&T’s HTC One X and Sprint’s EVO 4G LTE thanks to an ITC ruling handed down last year. The news may come as an especially large bummer for Sprint customers looking to upgrade to the new EVO, as a new report from the Wall Street Journal indicates that device will miss its original May 18 launch date. Sprint has since scrubbed their website of references to the device’s forthcoming launch, and there’s still no word on a revised launch window. To get a firmer grasp on why this is happening, we have to flash back to 2011. After...

Version 0.9 of the video editor includes a rewritten effect stack, a new automatic audio alignment function and various usability enhancements...

Samsung is outshining Nokia and Apple in mobile phone sales, but the iPhone maker saw its global market share more than double, says Gartner. [Read more]...

The company says that the new user interface will be known as the Optimus UI 3.0, and run on top of Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). [Read more]...

SugarCon, the SugarCRM user meeting held in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago, did some important things for Sugar. It was a coming out party of sorts for a company with a distinct business model and strategy, namely open source. It was also validation of that strategy and, for...

Android apps could be run on the open source Tizen platform using OpenMobile's proprietary ACL (Application Compatibility Layer). The company has been showing running apps at conferences...

Red Hat is celebrating the fact that Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is now ten years old. The latest version of the product, RHEL 7, is scheduled to be released in the second half of 2013...

MediaGoblin, which released version 0.3.0 this month, is a free and open source media hosting platform. Chris Webber, project founder and lead developer, took a few minutes to talk to us about the project so far and its future. Read more...

With the patent phase of the lawsuit now handed over to the jury for a decision, Oracle once again moved for infringer's profits and then changed its mind. Meanwhile, Judge Alsup revealed that he had programmed before...

To further enhance the Linux virtualization experience with VMware products, the company is preparing to push the Virtual Machine Communication Interface and VMCI Sockets into the mainline Linux kernel...

Sign of a maturing marketing flattening out, a lack of compelling devices, or a contraction in the economy? Gartner today released figures that note that worldwide sales of mobile phones were actually down by two percent this quarter, to reach a total of 419.1 million units — the first time the market has declined since the second quarter of 2009, the analysts say. Gartner’s explanation is a slowdown in demand from Asia-Pacific, because of a lack of compelling new devices getting launched in the period: users are simply holding out until something better comes along. Nevertheless, of the vendors that are doing well, Samsung is riding at the top of the list, with 20.7 percent of all mobile sales globally, and among smartphones, it is the only Android vendor to have more than 10 percent market share. This will be the quarter that people will remember as the one when Samsung swapped places with Nokia, which has now slipped down to second position with 19.8...

You've probably read about Android market fragmentation and wondered just how big a deal it is. This visualization spells out the problem quite clearly: there are almost 4,000 unique Android devices out there running a single app available on Play. That, right there, is fragmentation. More »...

Olivier Larrieu has announced the release of Hybryde Linux 1, a desktop Linux distribution with one unique feature - the ability to switch rapidly and fluidly between a number of desktop environments and window managers without logging out and without having to close open applications first. The list....

Open source cloud computing software startup Eucalyptus has had an eventful past few months:

- In March the Infrastructure-as-a-Service company signed a deal with Amazon Web Services to improve its compatibility with the Amazon API and address customers jointly. This makes Eucalyptus the only cloud vendor to land a formal agreement with the market-leading platform, though it’s not the only one using the API.

- In April the company raised $30 million in Series C funding, setting it on solid financial footing to fuel its rapid expansion says CEO Marten Mickos.

- And Eucalyptus 3.1 is coming soon, marking the company’s shift to a much more open development model and placing it firmly at the center of the open source cloud computing movement.

As part of our ongoing focus on open source cloud, we talked with Mickos about Linux and the open cloud, the role of APIs and where open source cloud computing is headed. The interview is presented in two parts. In part two we discuss Eucalyptus’s business in more detail.

Linux.com: Open cloud has been gaining momentum in the past few months with the announcement of CloudOpen and activity around OpenStack. What’s driving that attention?

Marten Mickos: I think generally speaking people are realizing how important cloud is. And when you look at what’s out there, there’s VMWare and then there’s nothing. And then you have four open source projects: OpenNebula; OpenStack; CloudStack; and Eucalyptus. When you want an alternative you are immediately in open source space.

Linux.com: What has changed in open source cloud computing since you spoke about it a year ago at LinuxCon?

Mickos: Products have matured. It’s following a typical technology adoption lifecycle, described in Crossing the Chasm. We’re still early but we’re less early than a year ago.

Linux.com: In that talk last year you said GPL was vital to Linux, do you see a similar legal framework developing for the cloud yet?

Mickos: It’s an important question but it’s a little philosophical. We have GPL which defines software as free and open. When you go into the cloud it’s not only about source code - it is also about data and API. Today, openness in data and API is up to each vendor - there isn't yet a common rulebook for it like the GPL is the rulebook for free software.

But I do think we’re seeing de facto standards emerging in cloud. To take Eucalyptus as a specific example, we do the same cloud API as Amazon. We see EC2 as a de facto standard.

Linux.com: The Linux Foundation has announced a new conference this year, Cloud Open, intended to encourage collaboration among open source players in cloud computing. What do you see as the Linux Foundation’s role in the open cloud movement?

Mickos: The Linux Foundation is one of the most central bodies in software in the whole world. We don’t hear much from The Linux Foundation because it’s so well managed. There haven’t been any big conflicts. Linus Torvalds keeps working on the kernel and after 20 years it keeps feeding a huge ecosystem downstream. Just doing that is already amazing.

I don’t think The Linux Foundation feels that it has to take on some mandate. It is important and relevant that KVM and Xen are now part of the Linux kernel. That’s an indication of the importance of cloud. It’s so important to keep Linux in active development in managing all the work from different parties, which is the key mandate for The Linux Foundation.

Linux.com: What about the role of Linux in open cloud?

Mickos: As we get more datacenters running in the cloud the underlying architecture will be Linux. Cloud will mean an increase in the Linux install base. Linux is so well suited for it. It powers already the largest datacenters and as we move to cloud architectures it’s good to have it there. I think cloud will increase the share of Linux on servers.

Linux.com: What’s your outlook on the open source cloud movement in general?

Mickos: Openness is winning in cloud. I was just at a Goldman Sachs cloud conference. Out of 15 companies presenting, ten were open source companies. That’s significant. There’s much more coming and promising startups are scaling in size. Companies like Cloudera, Acquia, Opscode and Puppet Labs.

They have a large install base, they have great customers, and they’re competitive against closed source. It bodes well for the world of open source. It’s important in my mind that open source isn’t just a technology, but that there are businesses who thrive on and around open source. Take Red Hat as an example. People forget how critical it is that they’re successful showing that open source makes business sense. We need such role models and it’s very healthy for the open source community.

Linux.com: You’ve said that we’re in a transitional period in which programming freedom isn’t about source code anymore, it’s about API’s. What do you mean by that? And how does that apply to the open cloud?

Mickos: It is also about source code, but it’s not only about source code. I’m a huge supporter of open source, but the attention is pointing more to the APIs. Ten years ago you’d say that your application runs on Linux. The question now is does your application run on AWS? And of course AWS runs some Linux. But we have reached a new abstraction layer. We are higher up. And we talk about apps running on a specific cloud, not on a specific operating system. It’s difficult to find a public cloud today that doesn’t run on Linux.

Linux.com: Your talk about making API’s open was prescient considering the precedent now being set by Google and Oracle. What is the danger here?

Mickos: I’m not a legal expert so don’t want to comment on the specifics of the lawsuit. But generally speaking there are many products that claim Amazon API compatibility or are developing it.

Google followed up with its closing arguments in phase two of the Oracle suit over Java, reiterating that it had no knowledge of Sun's patent portfolio. [Read more]...

In its continuing campaign to pressure cloud providers to use cleaner energy, Greenpeace sets up a "pod" and projects images onto Apple's headquarters. [Read more]...

As with gold or oil, data has no intrinsic value, writes Webtrends CEO Alex Yoder. Big science, which bridges the gap between knowledge and insight, is where the real value is. [Read more]...

Oracle offered closing statements in the second phase of the trial, claiming Google infringed upon two patents related to the Java Virtual Machine. [Read more]...

MoboTap‘s popular Dolphin Browser has racked up over 16 million downloads worldwide, but that hasn’t stopped them from taking steps to expand internationally. The company announced earlier this morning that they have entered into a new agreement with Japanese wireless carrier KDDI that will see their browser pre-loaded on a number of new Android handsets going forward. KDDI is Japan’s second-largest wireless carrier with nearly 35 million subscribers under their belts, with just about 20% of those users owning smartphones. All things considered, it’s a big chance for MoboTap to bolster their brand outside the confines of the United States. MoboTap and Dolphin are no strangers to the Japanese market — they teamed up with Softbank in 2011 — but MoboTap views this new partnership with KDDI as a critical part of their international...

Demand for phones with Google's mobile OS jumped across the world since around the start of the year, says research firm Kantar WorldPanel. [Read more]...

Running OXID eShop Community Edition (Version 4.5.9) On Nginx (LEMP) on Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 11.10 This tutorial shows how you can install and run OXID eShop Community Edition (version 4.5.9) on a Debian Squeeze or Ubuntu 11.10 system that has nginx installed instead of Apache (LEMP = Linux + nginx (pronounced...

A bug report on Mozilla's bug tracking system indicates that the organisation does not plan to support its web application store on Linux at launch. However, the problem is being worked on by members of the community...

The company is reportedly considering bringing its Cloud Smart Terminal to iOS and Windows Phone 7, though it's not clear how Apple will respond to that. [Read more]...

The 4G LTE version of Samsung's popular phone is finally on the receiving end of the latest update to Android 4.0. [Read more]...

Today marks the tenth anniversary of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and many people who have followed the rise of the RHEL platform may be surprised that it is so young. Released while the burning embers of the dot-com boom were still smoldering, it--along with Red Hat's comprehensive support for an open source platform--appealed to many businesses who wanted a low-cost way to facilitate useful workplace applications without massive IT headaches. And, as Red Hat itself notes, RHEL has also found a home in government installations. According to a tenth anniversary statement from Red Hat: "In 2003, the U.S. Army commissioned a study on ‘The Business Case for Open Source Software’ and the then DOD CIO John Stenbit released the first DOD-wide guidance on open source software, which implicitly permitted its acquisition, development, and use. Nine months later, in July of 2004, the Office of Management and Budget issued a similar memo that covered the government as a whole." "At the same...