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I guess you saw the news about Microsoft submitting some licenses to OSI hoping for approval as "open source" licenses. You can watch Bill Hilf of Microsoft giving his talk at OSCON, which is where the stories emanated from. That, to me, wasn't the news, since a Microsoft license was submitted once before, although I gather not by the company. But what I'm noticing is reactions. ComputerWorld collected some truly astonishing responses, and if you follow their links, it gets worse.

Computer pioneer Kildall vindicated, from beyond the grave. An overlooked court case in Seattle has helped restore the reputation of the late computer pioneer Gary Kildall.

Learn how to use gperf for effective command-line processing in your C/C++ code. The GNU tool gperf is a "perfect" hash function that, for a given set of user-provided strings, generates C/C++ code for a hash table, a hash function, and a lookup function.

Greg Caulton has just announcedPatientOS a'healthcare information system designed to support hospitals and physician practices software needs.' It appears to be a .1 release but they already havescreenshots andvideos -Fred Trotter

PatientOS is a free healthcare information system released under GPL 3.0. This enterprise wide software is designed for healthcare facility physician, nurses, pharmacy, laboratory and other clinicians and departments. This release, version 0.1 is a proof of concept of several clinical applications built upon an extensive technical architecture. For screenshots, video demos and to download the application see http://wwww.patientos.org.

In this week, we have great announcements for Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL), 3000 Fedora 7 Installations as well as FESCo Election Results. Also we are launching a special section called 'Ask Fedora' where you can ask questions to Fedora Project.

In this Internet-connected world it is an essential skill to know how to troubleshoot network problems. High-quality software suites exist to do the job but can easily cost in excess of tens of thousands of dollars. With a handful of absolutely free open source tools you can do it yourself – on any computer anywhere in the world.

Taking a new stance to its approach to the open source community, Microsoft's Bill Helf announced that it was submitting its shared licences to the Open Source Initiative for certification as true open source licences.

Oracle is hiring too many people to simply be building Linux patches, says the Ubuntu founder, who speculates the database giant will begin offering their own version of Linux in the near future.

Building a business on open source software requires co-operation, business skills and decisions based on needs rather than politics, the Cape IT Initiative Free and Open Source Software Forum was told last week.

The Firefox browser stores not only a user's bookmarks, history, saved forms, and usernames and passwords, but frequently also several extensions and themes. When you're switching computers or distro-hopping, replicating the browser environment can be tricky and time-consuming. But with the Firefox Environment Backup Extension (FEBE), you can back up and restore everything Firefox can hold, and then some.

This tutorial describes how to edit the GRUB menu. It will also show how to add operating systems and how to add splash screens.

Welcome to this year's 30th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! The beginning of August is traditionally a month when many Linux distributions launch new development drives and outline some of the planned features for their upcoming releases. And indeed, if all goes according to the plan, we should see the first test release of Fedora 8 and the first beta release of Mandriva Linux 2008 later this week. Before that happens, we'll bring you the highlights of the past week, including updates on Debian "Lenny", the launch of the OpenBSD Foundation, an initiative to provide extra packages for Red Hat and Red Hat-derived distributions, and a coverage of the Ubuntu Live conference. Finally, don't miss our brief article featuring the Linux User Group of New Caledonia, complete with a few thoughts on the availability of bandwidth in remote parts of our planet. Happy reading!

64 Studio has released version 2.0 of the multimedia-focused GNU/Linux distribution built on Debian and available as both an install and a live CD version.

The Linux Expo of Southern California has opened theCall For Papers for the 6th AnnualSouthern California Linux Expo, to be held February 8th, 9th,& 10th, 2008

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Plasma continues to mature, with improvements to the Twitter applet (and the creation of a complementary data engine), and the adoption of a common visual style for Plasmoids, and the integration of support for SuperKaramba applets through the creation of the SuperKaramba Plasmoid. More work on the re-implementation of the Magnatune interface within the new music store framework, and integration of the recent Plasma work for Amarok 2...

Crustless peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, a way to move sideways on a swing, a technique for exercising cats using a laser pointer — these are among the inventions patented in the United States over the years. Now Congress is trying to cut down on poor-quality or downright ridiculous patents, and at the same time adapt the patent system to a high-tech era in which computers and other electronic devices may contain thousands of patentable parts.

Some people seem to have a short circuit in their minds when they try to explain why Windows has such an enormous desktop market share. Some of them have the delusion that Windows is technically better than the competition. It never was. It isn't now. And, considering how Vista is staggering along, it never will be. No, Microsoft wins because it does whatever it needs to do to win. If that means strong-arming the PC companies, so be it. If that means breaking the law, that's fine too.

Neil Horman posted an enhancement to a /proc/sys/kernel interface for redirecting core dumps, "allowing the core_pattern to contain arguments to be passed as an argv array to the userspace helper application. It also adds a format specifier, %c, which allows the RLIM_CORE value of the crashing application to be passed on the command line, since RLIMIT_CORE is reduced to zero when execing the userspace helper". Andrew Morton was skeptical at first, "this all seems to be getting a bit nutty. Who needs this feature and what will they do with it, etc?"

It has been a while since we last reviewed an ASRock motherboard, but this budget manufacturer has kept churning out new and more innovative products. The ASRock motherboard we have our hands on for this Linux and Solaris review is the ALiveNF7G-HDready, which combines NVIDIA's GeForce 7050 and nForce 630a MCP with a wealth of integrated extras such as IEEE-1394a Firewire to offer a rather good package for its low price. This motherboard is also capable of handling 720p H.264 video playback with low CPU Utilization and HDCP decoding -- with supported software.