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Earlier this week Monty Widenius, original developer of the MySQL database, announced that he was leaving Sun Microsystems, the current owner of MySQL. Widenius originally announced his intention to leave Sun last year following a dispute with the company over the MySQL 5.1 release. Schalk Neethling of Open Source Release Feed spoke to Widenius and asked him what exactly happened.

Passwords are the basis for much of the security on the Internet. Over the years intruders have exposed thousands of account passwords on various sites. Analysis of these passwords reveal that users have a very bad understanding of their importance. This article explains how to create strong passwords, manage them, and keep them secure.

Each time I try a new Ubuntu release I notice nagging issues related to product quality. I wonder: Will Canonical need to change its approach and use a development schedule more like Microsoft's? Here's why I'm concerned

The European Commission (EC) has granted Mozilla, the open-source collaboration behind the Firefox Web browser, the right to join its antitrust case against Microsoft, a spokesman said Monday. The Commission, Europe's top antitrust authority, charged Microsoft last month with distorting competition in the market for Web browsers by bundling in its Internet Explorer (IE) browser with the Windows operating system. If the charges stick, then Microsoft could be forced to change the way it distributes IE, as well as pay a fine for monopoly abuse.

Linux, a mere tool? Blasphemy! Someone commented on one of my posts the other day, stating that Linux is a tool and not a religion. Can this be true? I would hate to think that for the past 15 years that I've invested in Linux, it would turn out that Linux is merely a tool, a--dare I say it--a monkey wrench?

The next version of the LiMo Linux-based mobile platform is getting closer to launch, and a number of operators are promising handsets during 2009, the LiMo Foundation said today. All the components that make up Release 2 have been delivered on time by the contributing members, according to the foundation. The new version will provide better multimedia support, location-based services, device management and enhanced security.

One of the distinctive — and perhaps, most successful — aspects of the One Laptop Per Child Program is the level to which individuals have been able to effect change on a global scale. The project's Open Source offerings are, of course, a prime example of this, but so too are the financial offerings that have put the program's product in the hands of some half-million users. The era of individual-based change is coming to an end, however, as an email leaked last week has revealed the end of the program's small-scale giving, known — ironically enough — as "Change the World."

Buried deep inside a recent interview with Linus Torvalds was the revelation that he had moved away from KDE and back to GNOME—which he famously abandoned in 2005. The cause of that switch was the problems he had with KDE 4.0, which seems to be a popular reaction to that release. Various media outlets, Slashdot in particular, elevated Torvalds's switch to the headline of the interview. That led, of course, to some loud complaints from the KDE community, but also a much more thoughtful response from KDE project lead Aaron Seigo. While it is somewhat interesting to know Torvalds's choice for his desktop, there are other, more important issues that stem from the controversy.

Welcome to this year's second issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include a release update, Debian Summer of Code 08: Where are they now? Dedicating Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 "Lenny" to Thiemo "ths" Seufer, Open Source study conducted by Heise Open and much more.

Free and Open Source software can save you money. Whether you're running a business or are a computer user, FOSS software is high-quality software that can be quite inexpensive. Smart organizations know that, and they come to SCALE.

At FOSDEM 2009 in Keith Packard's talk on the rebuilt Linux desktop, he shared the progress made in composited 3D, monitor auto-plugging, 2D/3D/media shared objects, kernel mode-setting, and kernel-based 2D drawing. Allowing these problems to be addressed was the Graphics Execution Manager for kernel memory management. The Graphics Execution Manager was used instead of TTM (which we talked about several times before at Phoronix) and it allows for persistent objects, global name, and pageable contents.

Red Hat has announced that it has begun shipping the second rev and the first fully functional version of its Enterprise MRG real-time Linux. The Fedora Project, which is sponsored by Red Hat, has also put the alpha of its Fedora 11 development release in the field on time.

MEPIS Founder Warren Woodford wrote to let us know that the third release candidate for SimplyMEPIS 8.0 is now available for download. Woodford notes, "MEPIS 8.0 is in good shape, but I'd prefer to declare it final when Debian Lenny is released."

Birmingham has become the first English city to be completely remapped by its own citizens. Maps of the city are freely editable and available at OpenStreetMap (OSM). The OpenStreetMap project, run by the OpenStreetMap Foundation, is an open source project that is building free online maps, not based on any copyright or licensed map data. Birmingham is not the first city to be remapped in this way, but it is the first city in the United Kingdom. Birmingham joins the likes of Paris, Berlin, Canberra and Vienna.

I've discovered that NetBSD doesn't run so well on the Sparcstation 20 (50 MHz processor, 128 MB RAM). The install went fine, but the X configuration was less than optimal. Console messages continued to appear on the X screen, and I could tell that, among other things perhaps, the horizontal sync and/or vertical refresh might have been just a bit off. I imagine that if I take the xorg.conf information from OpenBSD and use it for NetBSD, all issues will be solved. But when NetBSD's 32-bit Sparc packages for Firefox and Seamonkey (precompiled packages, NOT ports) wouldn't install, and then the Geany package did install but ran so slowly as to be unusable, I decided to go in a different direction.

Text editors are wonderful, helpful tools for any computer user; they're not just for gurus and coders. They're essential for editing configuration files; you don't want to use a word processor because these insert all sorts of formatting codes that will mess up your files. They're great for quickly dashing off any kind of document that doesn't need all the bells and whistles of a word processor, and for coders and advanced users they contain a wealth of useful shortcuts and helpful features. Juliet Kemp introduces us to one of the better graphical text editors, Kate.

In Mystic Mine you guide a trolley through an old gold mine, switching rails at the right moment with a designated keystroke. It's the only normal thing about this new skill game from Koonsolo Games.

I wanted to view the Wikipedia article on OpenOffice recently, so I googled ‘openoffice’, correctly assuming that the link I was looking for would be near the top of the results. While doing this, I noticed that a Google query for OpenOffice also turns up a couple of paid sponsored links. But can you trust the links and associated downloads? Here are some thoughts.

Seeking to be known as more than the SUSE Linux company, Novell today shed more light on its evolving partner program — which blankets the company’s complete product portfolio. Here's the scoop.

Over the weekend the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) took place in Brussels. In his keynote, Mozilla's Mark Surman hoped for Open Source's success and Debian key contributor Bdale Garbee supported its social contract. As an aside, Debian Lenny's target release date was reconfirmed.