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What's the best way to attract a pile of threatening lawyers' letters from Microsoft? Sell pirate copies of Windows? Write a DRM-busting program? Londoner Jamie Cansdale has just discovered a new approach. He had the temerity to make Redmond's software better. As a hobby, Cansdale developed an add-on for Microsoft Visual Studio. TestDriven.NET allows unit test suites to be run directly from within the Microsoft IDE. Cansdale gave away this gadget on his website, and initially received the praises of Microsoft. In fact, Microsoft was so pleased with him, it gave him a Most Valuable Professionals (MVP) award, which it says it gives to "exceptional technical community leaders from around the world who voluntarily share their high quality, real world expertise with others". However, his cherished status did not last.

Subversion is a very popular open source Software Configuration Management (SCM) tool and I've heard someone unkind say "Perforce is good too, but it's just like paying for Subversion when you do't need to".

One day I was made aware of a fine effort to give linux users with interest in clinical and nonclinical software a place to collaborate. This site used to be linuxforclinics.org One of these days that site was hacked and defaced. They restored it but it was hacked again. They restored but it was hacked again. From what I've seen different forum software was used each time. They were fed up and decided to withdraw from public engagement I was told in an email from one of their members/admins. Now wtf. The crackers succeeded in taking down a fine site which helped many people in the community. I hope one day they will resurface and be left alone. It's a sad day.

Distro developers and development teams are struggling greatly just to find the funding to purchase video cards and cheap scanners so they can test and build drivers for them. I can name three good distros that are on the brink of folding due to lack of money. Meanwhile, Microsoft is raking Linux money in with both hands like some rube on a winning streak at a gambling table.

We are proud to announce the availability of GNUmed 0.2.6.1 for GNU/Linux, MS Windows and MacOS X. The hooks framework has been extended. The bootstrapper transfers users and runs sanity checks for plausibility after upgrade. Encounter handling now allows a user to start a new encounter on demand. Simple data mining has been added. GNUmed now runs on Mac OS X and supports OsiriX DICOM viewer. Patient picture handling has been properly implemented. Debugging has been improved for better user feedback. The backend features an improved backup script and a new restore script, and now requires PG 8.1. A bug in the phrasewheel has been fixed. Details can be foundhere

Setting up a survey on your Web site can be a simple task with LimeSurvey, a flexible and easy to set up tool for conducting a survey.

Topics in the third edition of the Foresight Newsletter -- News: Foresight Linux 1.3 released * GNOME 2.18.2 Live Media * Foresight Linux 2.0 development -- Tips & Tricks: Package and software requests * Conary's rollback feature -- Package of the month: F-Spot Photo Manager -- Contributing to Foresight: Testing Cameras and Scanners -- and much more...

Companies should not fall for the temptations of purchasing a licence for Microsoft's intellectual property with their open source applications because it allows the software giant to "divide and conquer" the software market.

[includes video interview with Moglen]

While open source adoption will continue to grow, revenues will substantially lag behind the distribution of open source software, says analyst company IDC.

This tutorial describes how to install Xen 3.1.0 on a Debian Etch system (i386). Xen lets you create guest operating systems (*nix operating systems like Linux and FreeBSD), so called virtual machines or domUs, under a host operating system (dom0). Using Xen you can separate your applications into different virtual machines that are totally independent from each other (e.g. a virtual machine for a mail server, a virtual machine for a high-traffic web site, another virtual machine that serves your customers' web sites, a virtual machine for DNS, etc.), but still use the same hardware.

AWStats is a free powerful and featureful tool that generates advanced web, streaming, ftp or mail server statistics,graphically. This log analyzer works as a CGI or from command line and shows you all possible information your log contains, in few graphical web pages. It uses a partial information file to be able to process large log files, often and quickly. It can analyze log files from all major server tools like Apache log files (NCSA combined/XLF/ELF log format or common/CLF log format), WebStar, IIS (W3C log format) and a lot of other web, proxy, wap, streaming servers,mail servers and some ftp servers.

Uploading pictures to Flickr via its Web-based interface is a hassle, particularly if you have dozens of shots to upload. Linux users have a better choice, though, in the form of Kflickr, a simple application for uploading shots to Flickr that will have your family photos online in no time.

Azureus implements the BitTorrent protocol using java language and comes bundled with many invaluable features for both beginners and advanced users.Azureus offers multiple torrent downloads, queuing/priority systems (on torrents and files), start/stop seeding options and instant access to numerous pieces of information about your torrents. Azureus now features an embedded tracker easily set up and ready to use.

June 5 is World Environment Day but there is still a long way to go in the effort to make it easier for South Africans to safely dispose of their pre-loved PCs. What are you doing with your old PC?

Linux internet cafe software OutKafe 5.1.0 has been released with a number of bug fixes and improved distribution compatibility.

Government Technology News has a wide-ranging article on Free and Open Source Software in Medicine: "Doctors are fed up with the we-own-you, vendor lock-in, phone-home-to-the-mother-ship-to-do-anything status quo," he said. In addition, open source health IT applications are hitting their late teens, with more growth coming. What will be available in the next year, he said, will likely challenge anything in the proprietary world.

Novell's openSUSE project has launched a new initiative dedicated to advancing the public awareness of the popular Linux distribution in the educational community.

Part 2 of the Building Google gadgets series introduces advanced gadget features, including creating tabbed interfaces, drag and drop, MiniMessages, and gets you started creating your own. Part 1 built the foundation for gadgets, teaching you about data types and the specifics of the gadget XML file.

New hacking method goes to great lengths to avoid detection by security software and researchers by serving malicious code only once

[Not specific to GNU/Linux, but definitely of interest to our readers - dcparris]

By making "intellectual property" deals with commercially oriented distributors of Linux, Microsoft isn't alienating anybody it hasn't turned off already. So far, the two companies that have inked such deals -- Xandros and Novell -- are focused on selling server operating systems to large businesses. And while they may have community involvement, they're not community-oriented, like the Debian distro from which Xandros is derived, or even the wildly popular Ubuntu (itself a Debian derivative).