Showing headlines posted by SamShazaam

When it became clear that SCO wouldn't prevail, Microsoft expected only to face close partner IBM. Microsoft did not brace for Novell, an adversary with a decades-long score to settle with Redmond. Through discovery, Microsoft's correspondence with SCO is, or soon will be in, Novells hands, and its a safe bet that it will contain more than demand for a license fee and a copy of a certified check.

In theory, free and open source software (FOSS) should have a direct appeal to those concerned with ethics and social issues. Yet, in practice, it rarely does. Although the FOSS and activist communities frequently share ethical positions and social interests ranging from freedom of expression and cooperative organization to consumer rights, privacy, and anti-trust legislation, mostly the two groups remain unaware of each other. Why? Those comfortable in both the FOSS and activist arenas see several problems that must be overcome before activists can accept FOSS. These problems include the FOSS community's insularity, its failure to deliver the right message to the activists' technophobia, and a failure to make connections. In the end, it may be only by seeing the values that underlie both FOSS and other causes that any connection can be made

The Congressional attempt to update the nation's 1996 Telecommunications Act died with the pounding of the gavel that recently ended the 109th Congress.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) finally published the Open Document Format (ODF) as an official standard last week after approving it as an international standard last May. The ODF file format—the XML-based open format for text, spreadsheet, database, and presentation files—is now published under the standard name of ISO/IEC 26300:2006.

The RIAA is a true champion of fair use. That's what RIAA president Cary Sherman wants you to believe. In an op-ed piece published by Cnet, Sherman champions the RIAA's unique understanding of fair use while taking digs at those who do not share the record industry's vision—like the Consumer Electronics Association.

Since the announcement of the Novell-Microsoft agreement on November 2, we have been flooded with questions from the open source community about what this deal means to the Linux, the open source community, and even what this deal means for Novell. We will use this page to answer as many of those questions as possible.

Novell has partnered with the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) to ensure that its partnership with Microsoft does not violate any terms of the General Public Licence.

The Software Freedom Law Center's CTO Bradley Kuhn has issued a statement regarding the Novell-Microsoft agreements and how they will impact FOSS developers. They have analyzed in particular Microsoft's Patent Pledge for Non-Compensated Developers and see little value and in fact say it's worse than useless, because it creates an illusion of safety and because it limits severely what that developer is allowed to do with his work:

It's entirely possible that Novell is about to get fleeced, and that GNU/Linux will take a hit in the process, and Microsoft has a history of playing the Big Bad. But are we really being smart to always assume that Microsoft will win every battle it enters?

Microsoft Corp has denied that its patent deal with Novell Inc is in breach of the GNU General Public License or will automatically spread Microsoft's patent protection to other Linux distributions.

Debian-based live CD distribution Knoppix is widely known as a distro with excellent hardware detection. The latest 5.0.1 version, released in June, builds upon its legacy and continues to improve.

Citing limited adoption of XHTML, Internet innovator and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) ringleader Tim Berners-Lee says HTML must be reinvented through a process of incremental change that will build on the existing standard.

I have a 64-bit Athlon machine and I run SUSE 10.1 64 bit. Recently someone bought be a copy of Windows XP Professional x64 Edition and I thought I would give it a try. This is what happened.

It is not often that a relatively technical telecommunications policy issue receives as much attention as “network neutrality.” The central question is whether broadband network providers—for example, cable and telephone companies—can prioritize the data they transmit to give an advantage to the most important or most profitable traffic

At a press conference here, more than a dozen representatives from companies like Corning, Tyco and Motorola urged the U.S. Senate to pass a massive communications bill--attacked by Net neutrality fans for failing to ensure nondiscriminatory treatment of Internet content--as soon as possible.

Daniel Robbins, the founder and former chief architect of Gentoo Linux who recently ended an eight-month stint working for Microsoft, has quietly rejoined the Gentoo development team.

This is a collection of methods and strategies to make income from an Open Source project while keeping it thriving and freely available.

A group of Princeton computer scientists has published a study that examines flaws and vulnerabilities in Diebold's AccuVote-TS voting machines.Complete with a video that demonstrates the ease with which the electronic voting machine can be compromised, the study provides chilling insight into the serious risk of election tampering and fraud created by modern voting technology.

Because the litigants believed that the case was nearing a resolution before Larry's passing, it wants to move on with the proceedings rather than drop the case, and will request depositions from his heirs after the 60-day grieving period.

In a change of heart, Novell has ceased distributing proprietary software modules such as 3D video drivers that plug into the Linux kernel.

[I looove it! Now if Novell will start banning its own non-free repertoire, or more accurately, freeing it up... - dcparris]