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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).

I love how Microsoft tries to blur the lines between its patent folderol and interoperability agreements (notice how it tries to obscure this in the press release, talking about Novell, Xandros, XenSource (no patent agreement), JBoss (no patent agreement), Zend (no patent agreement), etc. They talk about them all as if they're the same thing, but they're not. The smart companies are buying into interoperability, not FUD.

Andy Ritger, the Director of Unix Software at NVIDIA, talks about new features in Linux drivers, development environment, and in-company Linux use.

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 90 for the week of May 27th through June 2nd, 2007.

Last week, Microsoft sent certified letters to its OEM partners regarding Vista's anti-piracy technology -- or, more accurately, what happens if they dare ship a system with a "non-genuine" copy of Vista. The answer: The system is crippled for 30 days, then hosed entirely until you pony up for a license. This is apparently what Microsoft means when it warns of a "diminished user experience."

This week on Open News TiVo A Victim Of GPLv3, Open Source Market Worth $1.8B, and Star Office Takes Singapore Airlines For A Ride.

There's a Novell idea. Xandros has become the latest Linux distro to hop into bed with Microsoft, announcing a five-year deal for joint development.

Matt Lawton of IDC has a great job. He gets to spend his time analyzing open source business models and markets to see where it's all going. According to a research report he just released, it's going up. Way up. He has the standalone open source software market pegged to grow 26% through 2011 to hit $5.8 billion by that year. Not too shabby.

Google Map Image Cutter (GMIC) is a free software program that automatically slices up images, arranges them in tiles, and puts them into a Google Maps browser. It allows you to embed panoramas or extremely large images into Web pages, so visitors can zoom down to as much detail as they want and pan and scroll with the mouse.

Microsoft, shrugging off licensing moves to prevent it from repeating its controversial patent deal with Novell, has signed a set of broad collaboration agreements with Linux provider Xandros that include an intellectual property assurance under which Microsoft will provide patent covenants for Xandros customers.

"Microsoft, Xandros Broad Collaboration Agreement Extends Bridge Between Commercial Open Source and Microsoft Software". And so it begins again ... Xandros is looking for love (possibly in all the wrong places). A quick tour of DistroWatch for the comparative view for Xandros over the past 12, 6, 3, and one month periods shows it falling from 25th to 28th to 31st to 40th respectively.

Appro Delivers Fourth LLNL Supercomputing Cluster Powered by AMD Opteron(TM) Processors

Today Microsoft Corp. and Linux platform provider Xandros Inc. announced a broad collaboration agreement based on a set of technical, business, marketing and intellectual property commitments.

Gmail may be an excellent Web-based email application, but there is no easy way to use it with privacy tools like GnuPG. The FireGPG extension for Firefox is designed to solve this problem. It integrates nicely into Gmail's interface and allows you to sign and encrypt not only email messages but also text snippets from any Web page.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with Xen will save money without sacrificing performance

The GPL authors talk about how they addressed Microsoft/Novell, patents and other issues in the GPLv3's final draft.

[I think the MS-Xandros deal will have to be talked about as well. - Scott]

Spam has long been a problem for e-mail servers, including those running Linux. Here's how you can use SpamAssassin to stop the spam onslaught on your Linux servers.

For reasons known only to itself, Microsoft has changed the default equations editor of Word 2007 so that, unlike previous versions of Word, it is no longer compatible with the globally accepted standard for writing equations in documents, Mathematical Markup Language (MathML).

[As a former Geology and Chemistry Major I feel for the students who have to deal with this. - Scott]

U.K.-based startup TriMetrix has announced a tiny single-board computer (SBC) designed for use in devices requiring biometric scanners, including time/attendence, access control, and POS (point-of-sales) equipment. The TMX1000 has a powerful ARM9 processor, and comes with an open-source software stack based on Linux 2.6.

Since last November, there has been much discussion of the deal between Microsoft and Novell. To an extent, it has all been talk in a vacuum, since the actual text of the agreement has not been available. That has finally changed, however; the terms of the agreement have been released as part of Novell's (delayed) annual regulatory filings.