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Cheating is bad, but does cheating infringe on a video game publisher’s copyright? World of Warcraft-maker Blizzard, a subsidiary of Vivendi, is trying to argue in court that it does.

Discover the Simple Text Transformation Tool, an extensible, Eclipse-RCP-based tool that allows you to perform transformations to text data. Also, become familiar with the tool’s built-in features for processing text files.

Slackware Linux has stood strong for more than a decade by refusing to compromise. There was a time when people used to say, "If you want to learn Linux and learn it well, give Slackware a try." Attila Craciun, a Romanian software developer and Linux enthusiast, has ported the Slackware tree to the AMD64 architecture to create the Bluewhite64 distro. We spoke with him to find out about Bluewhite64, where it came from, and where it's going.

The OpenOffice.org Community is pleased to announce that the public beta release of OpenOffice.org 3.0 is now available. This beta release is made available to allow a broad user base to test and evaluate the next major version of OpenOffice.org, but is not recommended for production use at this stage.

Sun's VP for software says on the topic of sharing code between Solaris and Linux kernels: 'I think, in the long term, that is where we're going to end up. It's inevitable and it's a great thing.' Rich Green also talks about other Sun open source projects and its recent acquisitions of free software companies MySQL and Innotek (VirtualBox).

Ubuntu Linux 7.04 is now available for Sharp's Zaurus PDAs. The 0.1 release comes with a minimalist filesystem that can be launched in an emulator, enhanced with software from the vast Ubuntu archives, and then flashed onto a real Zaurus. The Zaurus Ubuntu project was created by "Omegamoon," a hacker who has previously worked on ports of Fedora Linux and Google's Android phone stack to the Sharp Zaurus. He suggests first trying the distro out in the free QEMU emulator, where configuration and tweaking is easier than on real hardware. Once customizations have been completed, it can be installed on Zaurus PDAs such as the SL-C3100, he says.

If Creative Commons (CC) has any say in the matter, the Web will soon have a standard machine-readable notation for licenses. Named the Creative Commons Rights Expression Language (ccREL), the notation has been under development for the last few years, partly with the cooperation of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3). It is described in a paper by four Creative Commons employees and published by Communia, a European site that explores the relationship between technology and the public domain. Creative Commons plans future presentations of ccREL, and is also actively explaining the need for it -- which is what CC's Chief Technology Officer, Nathan Yergler, was doing when Linux.com caught up with him at the recent Open Web Conference in Vancouver.

It’s rare these days that any one program gets me really excited, as I always feel like I have seen it all. Today, however, I believe I have come upon software concepts that have a lot of potential. Both are very different from one another, yet each is very strong in function in their own way.

SourceForge (NASDAQ: LNUX), the leader in community-driven media and e-commerce, today announced inclusion of the OpenID functionality in their SourceForge.net website. OpenID is an open, decentralized, framework for digital identity that eliminates the need for multiple usernames across different websites. SourceForge.net users can now log in with an OpenID and receive a corresponding SourceForge.net identity for use at other sites that support OpenID logins.

It seems that open source maven, Matt Asay, along with well-known Microsoft blogger Mary Jo Foley have come to the conclusion that Microsoft doesn't need open source. Asay contends that Microsoft's open source activity has more to do with regulators than best practices and user collaboration.

Microsoft's open-source charade is not about customers. It's about regulators. Until Microsoft can convince U.S. and European regulators that its market power is not as bad as it once was, the company will need to hide behind expressions of openness..

Browser maker Opera has released an early version of a tool to help developers debug web pages. It hopes Opera Dragonfly will assist developers in making the experience of surfing the net consistent across web-enabled mobiles, desktops, and consoles while prompting the adoption of open standards. Opera Dragonfly is designed to debug web pages, widgets, and web applications on any device. The Alpha version of the tool comes with Opera 9.5 beta 2. Opera Dragonfly includes a JavaScript Debugger, DOM and CSS Inspectors, Error Console and Command Line, among other features.

Another month, another update to the KDE 4.0 series. This time, we arepresenting KDE 4.0.4, dubbedFile-Not-Found to the audience. KDE 4.0.4 brings improvements to KHTML, Okular and various other components. We recommend that people who are already running KDE 4.0 releases update to 4.0.4. The emphasis of this release lies, as usual in stabilising, bugfixing, performance improvements and updated translations -- no new features. The developers have again squashed quite some bugs which you can find some of in thechangelog. With this release, the KDE community continues to support the KDE 4.0 series that has been released for brave users earlier this year. KDE 4.1, to be released this summer (in the northern-hemisphere) will bring new features and applications.

Every major operating system has more than one media center solution for users who can't spend a day without watching a movie or listening to music. In Linux we're all familiar with MythTV and Freevo, two media center applications that are so appreciated they even have got their own distributions. Freevo is highly configurable, and Freevo 2 SNV builds look promising. MythTV has everything a personal video recorder needs, from scheduled recordings to weather plugins. The thing is, many people need a media center application just to watch Xvid files, listen to their favorite music, and watch family pictures on their television. If this is the case for you, give Entertainer a try.

Sun first announced OpenSolaris in 2005 but they keep finding ways to announce 'first releases'. Yesterday was one such release. When will Sun finally give up on this fiasco and realize that Linux has won?

Any task you perform on the Web can be automated by writing a script. But you don't have to know how to use Javascript or some other scripting language to create your own custom scripts. The Chickenfoot add-on for Firefox makes it easy for nonprogrammers to devise scripts that do their bidding. Chickenfoot was developed by MIT's User Interface Design Group. It's similar to the Greasemonkey scripting extension for Firefox, but its scripts tend to be simpler and easier for nonprogrammers to customize.

It's quite characteristic of the cultural cringe that prevails in Australia that a man who works in America, Barry Vercoe, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is coming to the country next week to lobby for the local branch of the One Laptop Per Child project.

Politically, that is. We still do not enjoy certain freedoms that we deserve. A new wave of freedom movements, to achieve these freedoms, is now sweeping the world – a movement that is bound to change the way we think, the way we do things and the way we interact. It started in the United States and aims to free people from the clutches of monopoly corporations. And the role of Gandhiji is being played by an extraordinary person with long hair and a long beard; a man called Richard Mathew Stallman, who vehemently rejects any comparison with Gandhiji or Nelson Mandela.

There have been rumors since last year that Valve may be serious about porting Source games to Linux after Valve Software began seeking a senior software engineer with the responsibility of porting Windows-based games to the Linux platform. Valve Software has yet to officially announce Linux clients for any of its software, but at Phoronix we have received information confirming that Valve is indeed porting its very popular Source engine to the Linux platform.

Broadband deprivation, Vista, Linux, Telstra, Microsoft, Yahoo, iPhone, spambots, phishing, climate change ... It's all getting too much for me. Won't these technology issues ever go away! Australians are rather well-known for taking a dim opinion on people and organisations that take things too seriously. One of the best-known Australian cartoons is that penned in Smiths Weekly, 1933, by US expatriate Stan Cross: "For gorsake, stop laughing, this is serious!"

James Maguire, Datamation's managing editor, claims he has no interest in software whose source code is available for editing. "I'm not a software engineer," he says. "If I can't grab it off the shelf, I can't use it." He's half-joking, of course. But he echoes the opinion of many people outside the free and open source software (FOSS) community about what its efforts are about. Ask average computer users what FOSS is about, and, if they've even heard of it, they'll probably say something about the source code being publicly available.