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A former investor in the SCO Group has identified a Microsoft executive who, he said, worked to "backstop" a funding deal that ultimately helped SCO pursue its legal case against the Linux operating system.

Opinion -- I love free software. I use open-source programs and operating systems every day. But once in a while, I want to take some free software developers and shake them until their teeth rattle. At the moment, I'm ticked off because the Debian community's recent hissy-fit over the Mozilla Corp.'s trademarked Firefox logo has led them, and others, to forking the Firefox code to avoid the use of the logo.

When server and network management software from a proprietary software vendor costs ten times as much as an open source alternative, the decision to go the open source route might seem obvious.

Oracle has continued to stock up on acquisitions ahead of its developer fest this month by hovering up data integration firm Sunopsis. The database giant said it would use Sunopsis’ to add even more spice to its Oracle Fusion Middleware offerings, citing the target firm’s Extract Load Transform technology and its support for a wide variety of heterogeneous systems.

Without developers, no project could ever come into existence; without the users, developers would not even exist. Forget the mighty developer, and forget the demanding user. Both of them are archetypes not of any sort of tangible reality but of badly mismanaged free or proprietary I.T. projects.

I recently received a letter from a computer pro who's nearing 80. He's disgusted by "how [Microsoft] things have developed, and how most software is put out there full of errors and omissions. Help is virtually none existent. One really has to dig to find answers."

Learn about the GNU Project Debugger (GDB)macro capability that allows you to personalize and customize GDB to have just the tools you need.

If you have any doubt about the future of open source communications, consider it shattered: Amazon.com will soon be deploying 5,000 phones connected to the Pingtel ECS platform running on Linux. The relationship between Pingtel and Amazon.com (News - Alert) started about a year ago with an initial deployment of Pingtel’s SIPxchange Enterprise Communications (News - Alert) Solution (ECS) at Amazon’s headquarter in Seattle. This deployment replaced a legacy PBX (News - Alert) system.

The announcement last year that Apple was moving to Intel-based hardware might have seemed like a fatal blow to Terra Soft Solutions, a company best-known for the Yellow Dog Linux distro. However, Kai Staats, CEO of Terra Soft, says that the move may be a blessing in disguise. The company has moved on to bigger and better ventures -- including construction of the first Cell-based supercomputing cluster.

I don't make these things up. There really was a New New Internet conference held near Washington, DC, in September, and I went to it. (The conference organizers paid my travel expenses.) I listened dutifully to a number of keynotes and networked with some of the Web 2.0 entrepreneurs, wanna-be entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists who seemed to make up the bulk of the attendees. I shot a bit of video, too, so you can get a couple of glimpses of what went on. But in the end, I was left with the question, "How much of this stuff is really all that new?"

What is the PHP scripting language? Why is it so popular? How does it work? How can I start using it? What's the latest version? These are all questions that the newbie Web professional (and others) ask, especially as PHP becomes the de facto standard rivaling ASP and JSP.

Secure By Design: How Guardian Digital Secures EnGarde Secure Linux ...

A library switches from Linux…To more Linux,
ODF is the way to go say the French,
the Amarok Project announces it is Rocktober!
Then we discuss openSUSE 10.2 dropping RiserFS as it’s default file system and
we give a tip of the hat to Slackware 11.
PLUS we interview the Vice President of REAL Software about their Desktop Linux Strategies.

Linux distributor Mandriva SA has acquired Linux management and services firm LinboxFAS for up to $2.1m.

Marten Mickos, CEO of open-source database vendor MySQL AB, in Uppsala, Sweden, says that he’s confident that the wrangling over the current draft of the GNU general public license Version 3 (GPLv3) will help his company in the long run. The MySQL database is distributed under the GPL. In an interview with the IDG News Service, Mickos also talked about other open-source issues and what lies ahead for MySQL.

Massachusetts keeps saying that it will be using the Open Document Format in government offices by 2007, but there's still no IT budget.

The Accordent Media Communications Platform Enables Professors to Easily Integrate Video, Visuals and PowerPoint Elements Into Daily Instruction

[Web-enabled solution works with any desktop environment - dcparris]

The final version of the Office Open XML 1.0 draft was posted an hour or so ago at the Ecma site. It is this specification that Microsoft hopes will be adopted, not only by Ecma, but by global standards body ISO/IEC as well, in an effort to slow the adoption of OpenDocument Format (ODF) by government users, among others.

Command-line utilities can be powerful, but it takes some doing to make a typical desktop user work in the shell. The image manipulation program ImageMagick is one command-line program that gives users a good reason to use the CLI. Now Packt Publishing has released ImageMagick Tricks, a book that covers ImageMagick from the ground up. If you've never used ImageMagick before, this book is a good starting place.

Baynote, Inc., a pioneer in content guidance software for the business web, today unveiled Baynote.org (http://www.baynote.org), a community-based website that encourages the adoption of business-ready open source search.