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The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has just come out with a scathing analysis of Microsoft's Open Specification Promise(OSP). In short, the SFLC concludes that the OSP still leaves developers with the potential for patent risk.

The organisers of Akademy 2008 are looking for sponsorship. Akademy is the KDE World Summit, this year taking place in Sint-Katelijne-Waver, Belgium in August. Sponsorship is an opportunity to promote your company or product to the developers, users, deployers and consultants who will attend the conference from around the world.

Three developers are in the running for the post of Debian project leader (DPL) this year, after nominations closed on March 9. The current leader, Sam Hocevar , is not among the three. Steve McIntyre is the seniormost of the three, having joined in 1996; he contested in 2006 and 2007 as well. Raphael Hertzog, who also ran in 2002 and 2007, has been part of the project since 1998 while Marc Brockschmidt, the youngest of the three, joined Debian in 2004.

After the Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) of the International Standards Organisation (ISO) failed to resolve the differences around Microsoft's proposed OOXML standard, what happens next?

AjaXplorer presents a browser-based file explorer interface to your Web server using AJAX. It comes in handy when you want to allow non-technical people to also access your file server, possibly over the Internet. Most non-techies are familiar with the file explorer interface, so having one inside a browser window is easy to get used to.

Postfix is an attempt to provide an alternative to the widely-used Sendmail program. Postfix attempts to be fast, easy to administer, and hopefully secure, while at the same time being sendmail compatible enough to not upset your users.

Contrary to Sam Varghese, the OLPC is not a doomed effort, destined to spread computer viruses on a worldwide scale. I didn't intend for OLPC to become one of my favourite topics, I just happen to notice a lot going on about it in the press, and sadly a lot of it is just plain wrong.

EZblue Software touts EZblue Business Server as "a fully integrated [L]inux server. It has a built-in file server, print server, Web server, mail server, and a whole lot more" -- just like many other distributions, of course. One place where EZblue attempts to distinguish itself for its target market of small and medium businesses (SMB) running Windows on their desktops and laptops is by offering the proprietary Magellan Desktop application for Windows, which "enables Windows XP, 2000, and 98SE users to have fast and easy access to their files and folders stored on the EZblue server."

Sure Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is a stable distribution, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't change and improve - even inside of release cycles. Case in point is Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 (RHEL) now available as a Beta.

Services like Flickr and Picasa seems like an obvious way to share your photos with the world. But if you are the do-it-yourself type and prefer to share your photos from the convenience of your own server, give Pixelpost a try. This MySQL/PHP-based application allows you to publish a photoblog and tweak it any way you like. Better yet, you can extend Pixelpost's functionality via addons, so you can turn your basic photoblog into a powerful photo publishing platform.

I am weighing that possibility now against consuming copious amounts of alcohol on a regular basis...I don't know, maybe even a venture into the darker side of pharmaceuticals. Realizing any of the choices can be destructive, I am now calculating which will be the most numbing venture.

The main idea behind this project is to reflect the enormous activity Ubuntu has on all fronts. We parse every data source we think is interesting to show you how much the community is working and display it in an easy-to-read format.

The almost-but-not-quite-final beta of Firefox 3 (FF3 beta 4) is now available for download. The most noticeable improvement is speed. In some tests, it’s three times faster than Firefox 2 (meaning the test completes in 1/3 the time), and a whopping five times faster than IE 7.

Last month we had measured Ubuntu's boot performance via the open-source Bootchart utility and had done this on all Ubuntu releases between Ubuntu 6.06 LTS and the latest development build at the time for Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. From this testing we had found the boot time to decrease with each official release and the maximum disk throughput increasing. With Fedora 9 Sulphur due out next month, we have done this same boot performance testing on the Fedora side with Core 4, Core 5, Core 6, 7, 8, and 9 Rawhide.

Here begins the lesson on Embrace, Extend and Extinguish (EEE). Classically, this technique is used to perpetuate vendor lock-in by introducing small incompatibilities into a standard interface, in order to prevent effective interoperability, or (shudder) even substitutability of competing products based on that interface. This EEE strategy has worked well so far for Microsoft, with the web browser, with Java, with Kerberos, etc. It is interesting to note that this technique can work equally well with Microsoft's own standards, like OOXML.

One of the advantages Ubuntu /Linux has over OS X is that it’s possible to run Windows applications. With Wine, Linux users are able to run thousands of Windows games and applications. A couple of hours ago Louis Lenders managed to install and run Adobe Photoshop CS3. He used the latest available source of wine (from git) which will be released in under two weeks as wine version 0.9.57.

Linux has outpaced Windows and Unix in corporate adoption rates, according to research firm IDC’s 2007 server market numbers. The pace of Linux’s future adoption could partly depend upon whether certain people choose early retirement, another researcher says. With all the momentum behind Linux, an interesting question emerges: Why isn’t every shop that is able from a workload standpoint to migrate to Linux doing so?

It's taken a remarkably short time for the One Laptop Per Child project to change from positioning itself as the saviour of children in developing countries to becoming a toady for Microsoft. In an interview with Business Week recently, Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the project, is quoted as saying that the organisation now needs to be managed "more like Microsoft."

[Well, there goes another great idea down the drain. - Scott]

We all have strong opinions about Windows XP on the XO laptop, and soon according to Laptop Mag, our greatest fears or hopes will be realized: Negroponte says that a Windows operating system is in the process of being fine-tuned on the XO as we speak. “Microsoft and OLPC are in discussion on how to release it, as well as how to announce,” he said. Negroponte added that the Windows operating system should be available on the XO in less than 60 days.

Firmware company General Software announced that it is selling customized, quick-booting versions of its Linux-compatible BIOS firmware to the medical device industry. The company says its "Embedded BIOS with StrongFrame Technology" can boot to lilo (Linux loader) in less than a second. Fast boot times are key in the medical device market, where products compete on "time to waveform" (TTW), General Software said. Yet, most BIOSes available for x86 chipsets were built for the desktop market, and thus have not been optimized in this area, according to Steve Jones, General Software CTO.