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To begin with, one myth that has to be exposed is that a division exists between open-source and commercial software. This isn’t true because some open software can be sold on a commercial basis, and services connected to open software can be sold as well. In this context, “free” doesn’t necessarily mean that open software is free of charge, but rather that it supports creative freedom. So it’s much better to categorize software as open and proprietary, rather than free-of-charge and commercial. The biggest difference is in fact, that open software can be “freely” distributed and modified, while proprietary software is under strict control of its author.

Podcatchers, the programs that download and aggregate your favorite podcasts, are popular on all platforms. Many are available for Linux, including iPodder and Podget. But the truth is that you don't need all that fancy stuff to harvest podcasts with Linux. BashPodder is a quick CLI-based GPLed podcatching client. It's one of the oldest ones out there, and may still be the best. It's hands-on, no-frills -- and a perfect example of how a few command-line statements can work together to do a powerful job.

Mozilla Firefox is a graphical web browser developed by the Mozilla Corporation. Started as a fork of the browser component (Navigator) of the Mozilla Application Suite, Firefox has replaced the Mozilla Suite as the flagship product of the Mozilla project, stewarded by the Mozilla Foundation and a large community of external contributors.

Solution providers searching "Mark Spencer" on YouTube will find not only a bizarre clip about a homemade cake and humorous downloads regarding British department store Marks & Spencer, but a sure-fire way to increase sales in the lucrative IP PBX and VoIP market courtesy of Asterisk open-source PBX creator Mark Spencer.

According to reports, developers have completed the first phase of a Microsoft-sponsored open source project to create software that can convert Microsoft Word documents between Open XML and OpenDocument Format (ODF) for Office Applications file formats.

[I can just see someone thinking that they now have an Open Source copy of MS Word because they got the Open Source ODF/OOXML converter. Good thing there are plenty of lawyers to help out the poor sods who misunderstand the title of this one. - dcparris]

There are 139,834 open source projects under way on SourceForge, the popular open source hosting site. Five years from now, only a handful of those projects will be remembered for making lasting contributions--most will remain in niches, unnoticed by the rest of the world. For every Linux, Apache, or MySQL, dozens of other open source efforts fizzle out.

Malware blocking credentials questioned

Windows Vista has only just left the starting blocks but security watchers have wasted no time in challenging claims that it provides improved security defences.…

THE Free Software Foundation is reviewing Novell's right to sell new versions of Linux after the open source community criticised the company for teaming up with Microsoft.

Welcome to this year's 6th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! As usual, this week's issue focuses on a variety of distributions and topics. We'll start with a frightening financial analysis of Mandriva Corporation whose most recent financial results were published last week. The news section then looks at the release process of the Fedora Project whose latest -- and incomplete -- test release came, once again, without any release notes or other useful information. Also in the news: Ubuntu has quietly scrapped the idea of including the 3D desktop in Feisty Fawn, openSUSE and Linspire brace for surprise announcements, Red Hat's Matthew Szulik has kind words to say about Linus Torvalds, and Nexenta announces plans to produce more frequent development releases. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the DistroWatch January 2007 donation has been awarded to the GQview and Kaffeine projects. Happy reading!

The official Netscape Blog has announced that Netscape 9 is under development. Like the current Netscape Browser 8, this release will presumably be based on Mozilla Firefox. According to the announcement, Netscape 9 will be a standalone browser (lacking components like a mail client or Web page editor) and will have tight integration with the Netscape.com website, which was relaunched as a Digg-style user-driven news and current events portal last year. A subsequent post revealed that Netscape 9 will be released simultaneously for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Netscape Browser 8 is only available for Windows.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Work begins on Amarok 2.0. KBlackBox becomes the latest games application to take the step into the scalable graphics arena. KTTT, a tic-tac-toe game, is ported to KDE 4. Further progress made on the knewstuff2 framework. Software RAID monitoring, along with other improvements in KSysGuard. Mailody gets support for printing HTML emails. Improved support for custom emoticons in Kopete. The sublime-integration user interface branch is merged back into the main KDevelop source tree..

Distrowatch takes a first look at Foresight Linux 1.0.

Fully updated introduction to networking on Linux now covers firewalls, including the use of ipchains and iptables (netfilter), masquerading, and accounting. Other new topics include Novell (NCP/IPX) support and INN (news administration). Original material on serial connections, UUCP, routing and DNS, mail and News, SLIP and PPP, NFS, and NIS has been thoroughly updated.

Tech-heads yearning for Google to challenge Microsoft's domination of the desktop shouldn't hold their breaths, says Chris DiBona, the search giant's open source program manager.

XMLReader operates in streaming mode, that is, it reads the document from start to finish. This makes it very fast, and very efficient.

Freeware on trial is a software consultancy service with the objective of making the user aware about available free software products and internet services. The team of consultants at freeware on trial write quality influential articles. They decipher truth from myth when it comes to developers and publishers claims about their goods. While there are quality product creators who try to make a living out of what they do best, often there are those who don't charge for their goods, or offer free versions of their products.

Encourages Development and Distribution of Thousands of Web and Desktop Widgets Enabling Myriad Applications

This article shows how to set up a Postfix virtual mailserver with Courier-IMAP, Maildrop and the PostfixAdmin web interface. We will secure our mailserver with Mailscanner and ClamAV as anti-virus and SpamAssassin as anti-spam. The setup is based on CentOS 4.4.

In this podcast interview with multidimensional adventurers Nearthwort Obtain, Richard Stallman, founder of the free software movement and the man who put the GNU into GNU/Linux, introduces the concept of free software, before offering some trenchant criticism of "amoral" Linus Torvalds and "evil" Steve Jobs. The interview continues with a discussion of the impact of free software on the evolution of human consciousness, and concludes with Stallman's reasons for his combative approach.

Inland Revenue has eschewed Microsoft Vista and will instead upgrade to Windows XP, while continuing to evaluate the merits of a switch to open source rival Linux.