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Should European governments favor open-source software when they hold tenders for public contracts? Economists and policy makers appear to think so, but industry giants including Microsoft argue that this would be discriminatory and are considering legal action to prevent this from happening. A public consultation on a new set of guidelines regarding software interoperability in the public sector in Europe closed this week, sparking submissions from 50 lobby groups and firms from all corners of the software industry.

Seeing the Fedora Project pass its five year milestone got me thinking about the early days of the community-based Linux distribution and how far it's come. At the time of its launch, I was plenty worried. Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) was effectively killing off its namesake Linux distribution – Red Hat Linux -- and turning over the development into a community-based Linux distribution called Fedora Core. How could Red Hat do such a thing? Long-time users like me were calling it total madness and surely a recipe for disaster. History has proven me wrong.

The biggest news in the Apple-focused blogosphere this week came courtesy of the Google/HTC/T-Mobile G1 smartphone. Can it kill the iPhone? Most Apple fans don't seem overly worried, but it does have a couple of attractive features, like a slide-out keyboard. Coming back around to Apple and its iPhone App Store, the company has been cracking down with its non-disclosure agreements.

Microsoft has built a strategy around the planned early-November release of its high-performance computing server that it hopes will be the catalyst to deliver massive computing power for future applications. The strategy encompasses Microsoft applying its typical mantra of “simplifying computing” to the costly and often complex high-performance computing world in the form of its Windows HPC Server 2008 surrounded by Microsoft’s collection of applications, management wares, development tools and independent software vendor community.

Open source software (OSS) has now become a well recognised and utilised brand. A brand that, if we were to get a broad sweeping perception poll on, would generally stand for free, fair and cost effective. However, despite this growth, the battle between open source and traditional software still rages on whereby the pros and cons for each can be endlessly debated.

On September 27, 1983, Richard M. Stallman announced his intention to found the GNU project in order to build a free operating system. Now, 25 years later, the Free Software Foundation is marking the anniversary of the announcement with a month-long celebration. Looking back at the last quarter century, Stallman expresses some guarded satisfaction with the growth of the free software movement, but also some bemusement about how it has grown more complex as it has faced new challenges from within and without, and an awareness of how far it still has to go to reach its goals.

Furius ISO Mount is a tool that lets you mount and unmount ISO images on your desktop, calculate the checksums (MD5 and SHA1) of the ISO images, and burn them onto a CD or DVD (using external programs like Brasero or Nautilus). It comes with a graphical user interface and is extremely easy to use. This guide shows how to install it on an Ubuntu 8.04 desktop.

OK. You've heard of Linux. It's another operating system for a computer. But why use it when you can choose between Windows and Macs? Unless you run business-class servers, Linux isn't really something consumers really need to hear about, right? Well, if that's what you think Linux is, you couldn't be further from the truth. Look around you. Linux is everywhere, but you may not know it.

Sooner or later, we all end up installing new software on our computers. Whether it's a new version of Firefox, or a cool game, or a video editing package, there comes a time when you want to make your system do more than it can do now. Under Linux, installing new applications isn't a particularly hard task, but installations do come in several different varieties, so it's worth understanding the differences and what you'll need to know to make them work.

Yamaha has added embedded Linux to the electronic "player piano" add-on it offers with some models. With version 3.0 of the Mark IV firmware, MontaVista Linux controls the 333MHz AMD Geode-based piano, enabling new interface possibilities, acoustic recording, and interaction with Web-based services.

Security is a wide ranging topic which operates on many levels and covers many technologies. The technologies involved include networks, operating systems, database systems, and application servers as well as manual procedures. Application level security in the context of Java EE applications is provided by web and EJB containers.

While I am not always a fan of Microsoft's actions around technology in education, I do have to give them credit for hiring my friends Vital Wave Consulting to do a 5 year Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) study on introducing computers into Indian schools that focused on multiple different configurations, platforms, and even operating systems.

Linux is enjoying growth, with a contingent of devotees too large to be called a cult following at this point. Solaris, meanwhile, has thrived as a longstanding, primary Unix platform geared to enterprises. But with Linux the object of so much buzz in the industry, can Sun's rival Solaris Unix OS hang on, or is it destined to be displaced by Linux altogether?

With the Atom-based ASUS Eee PC 901 we have already delivered disk encryption benchmarks and a Linux distribution comparison of Xandros, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Mandriva. This Intel 1.6GHz Diamondville processor isn't the fastest, but it's performing quite well for a netbook. With netbooks and their users often on the go though, for those not using the suspend and resume mode the boot time can be equally important as the in-desktop performance. To look at this we are delivering boot performance benchmarks for the Eee PC 901 from Fedora 9, Fedora 10, Ubuntu 8.10, and Mandriva 2009.

When I typed on Google “Do I really need a firewall?” 695,000 results came across. And I'm pretty sure they must be saying “Hell yeah!”. In my opinion, no one would ever recommend anyone to sit naked on the internet keeping in mind the insecurity internet carries these days, unless you really know what you are doing.

The gender inequality among developers and supporters of free software is stunning. Less than 2% of us are women, according to studies conducted for the European Commission. Why? The evidence says we’re driving them away. There are even some pretty good published guidelines on how not to drive them away. What’s missing is a practical implementation strategy: here I present ten relatively simple changes in how you run your project, to make it more attractive to would-be contributors—especially women.

SRWare, a German company, has released Iron, based on Google's Chromium code. The big difference, according to the authors on their German language-only web site, is that the features which have caused people to question the privacy of Google's browser are all disabled.

You don't need a dedicated computing cluster to perform big processing jobs - you can turn your LAN into a part-time cluster with Condor. In part two of her look at this distributed computing framework, Juliet Kemp shows how to submit jobs to your running installation.

The world of computers has changed. Sub-notebooks are becoming immensely popular, mobile phones based on Google’s Android software are about to come out (T-Mobile have just announced their G1 will launch on October 22), and computers are looking increasingly like small devices that fit in our pockets. The end of 2008 might see the dawn of a new revolution in the computer industry and in people’s lives. Maybe 2009 will be remembered as the year when the “world went mobile”. What does this mean for the (free and non-free) software industry? Where will we be, technologically and (more importantly) culturally? Where will the market (and the money) be?

The GNOME project has released a major upgrade of its desktop environment that adds an instant messaging (IM) client. GNOME 2.24 also features a new task manager, screen resolution tools, and enhanced conferencing support, and spins off a new GNOME Mobile version for embedded devices.