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The Objective Observer wrote what appeared to be a logical argument from which he drew what he claims is a reasonable comparison... Open Source is like Terrorism. Riiiiight. Well, I decided to respectfully respond to his commentary with some specific examples of how his conclusions are inaccurate. I'm assuming he got hit with a lot of flames but I didn't want to add to it.

Microsoft has broken from its past and is supporting the Eclipse Foundation. In a speech at the EclipseCon 2008 conference here March 19, Sam Ramji, Microsoft’s chief open-source advocate, delivered a morning keynote and said that Microsoft will support two key Eclipse technologies, and he hinted that there may be more to come. Ramji is the director of platform technology strategy at Microsoft.

Since purchasing Suse Linux from its German parent in 2004, Novell has engineered an amazing turn-around in its business model. Prior to 2004, the world expected this proprietary networking company to slowly evolve its flagship NetWare product and equally slowly disappear into the murk of Microsoft’s marketing might.

I get sent a lot of material on OOXML by people around the world, and I presume I’m not the only recipient. A lot of it is, frankly, rather funny, since it assumes that the people reading it won’t ever double check what they’re being told or compare it to methods of past disinformation campaigns. As I’ve said before, the whole OOXML story will probably make several wonderful business school case studies and maybe even one or two from law schools. Anyway, the phrase that caught my eye last night in one of the presentations I was sent was “No IPR problems!”.

For Linux distribution vendors, right now is proving to be an awkward time for them as they decide which ATI driver will ship as the default choice in their spring distribution refresh. The problem used to be whether to ship a binary-only driver in the distribution in order to provide "out of the box" support for all available graphics hardware, but on the ATI/AMD side the software distributors are now facing the challenge of which open-source driver they should call the de facto standard. In this article we are briefly looking at the matter of the xf86-video-ati vs. xf86-video-radeonhd drivers, the highly political issue of AtomBIOS, and what some of the popular Linux distributions are deciding to use this spring.

Anyterm allows you to have secure terminal access to a server without needing any special software on a client machine beyond a Web browser. For example, with Anyterm you can open a terminal into your server from an Internet cafe. Because Anyterm uses a pseudo-terminal for communication with the shell, you can run most command-line tools from an Anyterm terminal running inside a Web browser.

The problem with vacation auto responders like 'vacation' for sendmail is that spammers often fake the From: address. Auto responding to these addresses can get your mail server blacklisted. To avoid this you can setup your autoresponder with procmail and, if you are running a spam filter on your machine, you can tell procmail to auto respond only if the X Spam Status header is 'No.'

I would have liked to have been able to tell you in great detail exactly what desktops and laptops will soon be coming from Hewlett-Packard equipped with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10. I'd like to tell you, but HP is still holding its Linux desktop cards close to its chest and not revealing any details. This is very annoying.

The quest to get GNU/Linux to run well on a laptop has been a long running challenge. In this piece, Ed looks at his success with OpenSUSE on a Dell Latitude laptop.

Ubuntu Linux is moooovin’ on up in the Linux server neighborhood. When Sun announced a major open source initiative targeting small and midsize businesses this week, a lot of people failed to realize that Sun would include servers certified for Ubuntu. Here’s the scoop.

After the success of Ubuntu 8.04 on my Asus EEE PC it was brought to my attention by Klopus there are interesting happenings going on over at Mandriva. I was directed to a thread on the EEE PC User Forum discussing Mandriva on the EEE PC. After reading through the thread I was convinced I would give Mandriva a try. A swift download/burn/format/install later Mandriva was installed on my EEE PC.

"Grok" is a word that you may not know, but it has been in use since the 1960's. It is commonly taken to mean "understand" but it is so much more than that. Do you grok open source? The word is the key to understanding why talented developers give of their time.

Novell and SAP have announced that they will customize SAP's enterprise applications to work even more efficiently with SUSE Linux Enterprise and its associated virtualization and identity management technologies. According to the press release, Novell and SAP will optimize SUSE Linux Enterprise for SAP's data center applications, further promote SAP's SUSE Linux-based Business All-in-One solutions and work within the SAP Enterprise Services Community program on behalf of customers in ways related to SAP's GRC (governance, risk and compliance) practices.

The developers of the TrueCrypt open source encryption tool are considering submitting a complaint against Microsoft to the EU Commission if Microsoft is not prepared to lay open the Windows hibernation API. From version 5.1 TrueCrypt supports hibernation for encrypted system partitions. Potential vulnerabilities that could allow the hibernation file to be written to the disk in unencrypted form have been reported in this version in recent weeks. This would allow attackers to read the key and thus decrypt the partition or container. However, [the TrueCrypt developers] see this as a problem for all vendors of drive encryption systems, as no documentation is available for the hibernation API and it is therefore necessary to adapt Windows components

Last month, Stephen Norris, head of the Stephen Norris Capital Partners that is bidding to buy majority interest in the Lindon-based SCO Group, said he hoped the planned investment would spur settlement of the SCO-Novell lawsuit. But Ryan Richards, Novell's acting general counsel, said Monday at the company's BrainShare conference in Salt Lake City that there had been no contact with Norris, and Novell had yet to see details of the proposed takeover. However, Novell President and CEO Ronald Hovsepian indicated his company might be open to a settlement.

lIf you are a developer working at a major corporation or a small company and you want to use Linux and open source tools to create Java applications, there is very little possibility that your company is going to let you do that without getting tech support for the Linux and tools that you use. But in many cases, even after paying for support, you end up doing a lot of the work yourself anyway. Which kinda defeats the purpose of paying someone else to do the support work and hold your hand.

Very strange article in which an InfoWorld Blogger seems to have taken the red pill and awakened to the truth about bot nets and the email spam they produce.

[Another funny article- Scott]

Gnash, the free software Flash player, has released its first beta. The new release is a milestone for both the project and the GNU/Linux desktop, which remains dependent on the proprietary Adobe player for handling Flash files (.swf). Although Flash support is not complete in version 0.8.2, Gnash has now reached the point where it is usable for the most common everyday purposes, such as watching videos on YouTube -- a point that Gnash was exaggeratedly reported as having reached last June. However, in many other ordinary circumstances, Gnash's success remains hit or miss.

Forgive The VAR Guy if he says “I told you so.” Earlier this month he predicted that Asterisk — the open source IP PBX — would win a global distribution deal. He was right. Specific details about the news, involving Digium — one of the top Asterisk companies — emerged today. Here’s the scoop.

In order to carry samples of my audio and video work to tradeshows, I need to be able to play a wider variety of audio and video formats than is available on any of the pocket devices out there. Fortunately, the open source Rockbox operating system doesn't require sacrificing nifty features like FM tuning and recording or voice recording and playback. And format compatibility is not the only reason one might want to install Rockbox. In fact, Rockbox was developed primarily with another purpose in mind: improving sound quality.