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Bruce Perens has posted an open letter to Novell regarding its patent agreement with Microsoft. I likewise find it troubling that Novell may lobby in favor of software patents while claiming to have the interests of the Linux and FOSS communities in mind.

Some Linux distributions have longer lives than others. After two years of supported life, Novell is discontinuing support for SUSE Linux 9.2, effective yesterday. Its closest competitor, Red Hat's Fedora Core 3, which was released at roughly the same time as SUSE Linux 9.2, remains supported. "With today's release of "pam_ldap" we discontinue the security support for SUSE Linux 9.2," SUSE developer Marcus Meissner wrote in a mailing list posting.

Raw Therapee is a free RAW photo converter application developed single-handedly by Gábor Horváth. It has been available on Windows for some time, but on October 11, Horváth released the first build for Linux. If you are familiar with other graphical RAW converters, such as UFRaw, you will feel quite at home using Raw Therapee.

[Program is gratis, not sure about libre. - dcparris]

Having formed last year to provide Linux with intellectual property (IP) protection, the Open Invention Network has declared itself ready to respond to Microsoft Corp's 'baseless' claims that Linux contains its IP.

A few years back, Eric S. Raymond (or, as everyone else calls him, ESR), wrote a lengthy paper about this community. Entitled The Cathedral and the Bazaar, he wrote about how the Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) community does what it wants when it wants to.

GRISOFT, the developer of AVG security software, announced several new versions of its antivirus offerings for GNU/Linux and FreeBSD open source platforms. The products include AVG Email Server Edition 7.5 for Linux/FreeBSD now with integrated anti-spam as well as new products for the GNU/Linux platform – AVG Anti-Virus Professional Edition 7.5 for Linux/FreeBSD and AVG File Server Edition 7.5 for Linux/Free BSD.

I am glad to announce a new edition of MCNLive, code name Cherbourg, a portable live Linux system based on and 100% compatible with Mandriva Linux 2007. Highlights: 2.6.17 kernel; 3D desktop (AIGLX) with the free X.Org drivers for Intel and ATI video cards; desktop environment: KDE 3.5.4; office suite: KOffice; Opera 9.02; music, video and image applications with most common codecs; Internet and networking applications for all your needs; NTFS read-write support. All this on less than 360 MB.

It must be the season for big announcements, because they seem to be flying right now. I'd like to point out two of them from the Ruby community.

SOA (service oriented architecture) is a big deal, I like it. But it isn't the be all and end all of computing. Here are ten things you need to know about SOA.

Gaming equipment startup Bigfoot Networks is shipping a Linux-powered NIC (network interface card) aimed at improving network gaming performance. The Killer Network Interface Card has a 400MHz processor and hardware UDP/IP acceleration, to offload network processing. A contest for other Killer NIC apps is underway.

Deputies elected to the French National Assembly in the next legislative session will find open-source software on their desktop PCs. The use of free software will result in substantial cost savings, despite the cost of migration and training, the Assembly said.

X-Evian, a Linux distribution in English and Spanish that draws from Ubuntu and Knoppix code, last month released a live CD -- version 0.7 -- that features a 2.6.17 kernel and the XFce desktop environment. X-Evian is a compilation which has been carefully chosen and configured for activist users, for liberated cultural, technological and social production, the Spain-based project team said. It is the team's first new release since 2003 -- it was originally built upon Debian GNU/Linux and Knoppix, the team said.

LXer Feature: 24-Nov-2006 No one knows better than this community what Linux Distro is best. The problem is, there may be as many different answers as there are different distros. As a means to assemble a database, we've come to the Linux Community to pose this simple question.

We at nUbuntu are proud to announce the release of our x86 version nUbuntu built on Ubuntu 'Edgy Eft' 6.10. The main goal of nUbuntu is to create a distribution which is derived from the Ubuntu distribution, and add packages related to security testing... to create a new distribution for the learning experience.

Release managers are not mentioned in the Debian Constitution, yet few positions in Debian are more influential, especially in the final stages of preparation for a release. Recently, Andreas Barth, who shares the release manager position with Steve Langasek, took time from his efforts coordinating the Etch release -- tentatively scheduled for early December -- to talk about the stages in the release process, the goals for the upcoming release, and the short- and long-range problems that he faces in his role.

Japan's Vine Linux project team, whose distribution features an integrated Japanese or English environment for desktop PCs and notebooks, today released its version 4.0 for i386 and PowerPC processors. The distro features a 2.6.16 kernel and the GNOME 2.14.2 desktop environment.

This is Steve Shreeve, Medsphere's founding CEO and a current member of its Board of Directors. In my capacity as a Director of the company, and as the largest individual shareholder in the company, I am compelled to respond to a recent article that was published by Medsphere's current CEO, Kenneth W. Kizer, regarding Medsphere's open source stance, which is available at the following link:http://www.medsphere.com/press/20061121

[ - Note: Indeed, this doesn't have anything to do with Linux or Free Software, except for the fuzz about Intellectual Property. Therefore, this story is just added for your reading pleasure - hkwint ]

SANTIAGO, Chile (Reuters) - Mapuche Indians in Chile are trying to take global software giant Microsoft to court in a legal battle which raises the question of whether anyone can ever "own" the language they speak.

The DSL Mall is a free market place for merchants. Basically, we are giving away store fronts to merchants who we feel may be a good match with the DSL community. Who should consider joining? Anybody that has nice merchandise to sell and is interested in having his/her items viewed by the DSL community. There is absolutely no cost to you for this store front, and you are likely to get over 2k impressions a day if the products are a good match for our community.

This is one post in a series, describing challenges we need to overcome to make free software ubiquitous on the desktop. I have this weird relationship with the words “it’s not supported”.