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The Free Software Foundation is seeking to counter recent claims of prominent Linux programmers who have argued vehemently against new features in an update of the widely used General Public License.

Red Hat was grilled by Wall Street today on plans its for JBoss after profits took a nose-dive in Q2. Chief executive Matthew Szulik fielded question after question on finances, business and technical tactics for the recently acquired company by an analyst crowd clearly trying to figure out its impact on Red Hat.

A new version of the PCLinuxOS-based SAM Linux Desktop was released on Sept. 25. SAM 2006-3 includes a 2.6.16.27 kernel and the XFce 4.3.90.2 desktop, and comes as a combination live and installation CD.

Red Hat has shared the proceedings of their recently held Knowledge Symposium titled, " Owning the Future: Ideas and their role in the digital age". The event organized jointly by IIT Delhi and Red Hat was held in New Delhi and was supported by the Software Freedom Law Center, CII and Creative Commons.

In a move that some may have sensed was coming, Eric S. Raymond -- one of the co-founders of the open-source movement -- will become the newest member of the Freespire Leadership Board on Sept. 27.

Earlier this month we learned via an AP story that the southern Indian state of Kerela is in the process of migrating all computers in its 12,500 high schools from Windows to Linux. Today, DesktopLinux.com learned what distribution they plan to use: a homegrown, Debian-offshoot dubbed "IT@School GNU/Linux."

The PostgreSQL project released the first beta for PostgreSQL 8.2 for widespread testing on Monday. According to PostgreSQL core team member Josh Berkus, the 8.2 beta includes a number of new features, better support for the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) SQL:2003 standard, and numerous performance improvements.

Welcome to this year's 39th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Jeroen van Wolffelaar announced a bug squashing party to be held in Utrecht, The Netherlands, from September 29th to October 1st. Manoj Srivastava announced that the general resolution on asset handling has passed. As Debian experiments with funding, the author of DWN is going to experiment with spending less time on Debian. Please understand that due to this there may be no future issues of DWN in the current form or that they will only be released less frequently.

Microsoft's lobbying of the Bush Administration to intervene on its behalf in its antitrust battle with the EU, is bearing fruit. Yesterday, European competition commissioner Neelie Kroes said that representatives of the US government contacted her before she fined Microsoft $357.3m in July for non-compliance with the EU's landmark 2004 antitrust ruling. The unnamed officials, from the US embassy in Brussels, asked Kroes to be "nicer" to Microsoft.

The rise of always-on, high speed Internet connections represents new teaching opportunities for high school and college instructors, many of whom daily face classrooms full of Web-savvy students. But with schools strapped for resources, it’s frequently difficult to scrape together funds to first buy the right hardware and software and then find teachers with the right skills to make the most of the technology.

Linksys makes some fine wireless broadband routers, but one of the best things about these devices is that their firmware is based on Linux and can be replaced with third-party software, allowing anyone to have the functionality of an expensive, professional-grade router for less than $100. The GPL-licensed DD-WRT package offers lots of enhancements over the stock Linksys firmware and supports a wide range of hardware, including models from Buffalo, Belkin, and other vendors.

For those who followed Jason's PHP tutorials earlier this year it is fairly obvious that he is a PHP fan at heart. But now he has started to learn Python and is fast becoming a fan as it opens up new an unimagined possibilities. Here he outlines why he finds Python so compelling.

South Africa-developed KnowledgeTree, an open source document management application, is now available in two additional versions catering to enterprise and small business users.

The Free Software Foundation has moved to clarify what it says is inaccurate information being presented about the second discussion draft of the next version of the GNU General Public License.

While the release of the new open source Scalix 11 Community Edition messaging server is still a few months away, the binaries have been brought out in a preview package that is, according to the license that comes with it, "pre-release software with known issues and is not suitable for production use." We tried it out, just to see where Scalix is heading. The good news -- it's heading in the right direction for small and medium-sized businesses.

Notes from the aKadamy 2006 Conference.

The Kurumin Linux project, which produces a Knoppix-based distribution, released a stripped-down, live CD edition of Kurumin Linux 6.1 on Sept. 24. It features a 2.6.17.6 kernel and the KDE desktop. Key features include excellent hardware auto-detection, support for Brazilian Portuguese, and small size, according to the team.

Uversa has recently opened a testing tool (with a very punny name)limtus test. The system is designed to help provide a way for ClearHealth community members to contribute to the testing of releases in a systematic way. This is really smart and should take the code quality of ClearHealth to another level. I think they are the first EHR project to do this. The tool seems to be integrated with theMantis bug tracking tool.Fred Trotter

The City of Munich has finally started to migrate to Linux on the desktop, a year later than planned. The local government in the German city has transferred 100 users in the Lord Mayor's department to a Debian configuration, and it intends to migrate 80 percent of its PCs by mid-2009.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds posted an email titled, "An Ode to GPLv2" examining why he feels the GPLv2 is such a great license as an alternative way to look at the GPLv3 debate [story]. "This post is kind of another way to look at the whole GPLv3 issues," Linus explains, "not caring so much about why the GPLv3 is worse, but a much more positive 'Why the GPLv2 is _better_'."