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IBM's moves to offer platform alternatives come at a time when rival Microsoft is developing its own real-time communications platform built around Office and Office Live Communications Server, which includes instant messaging and VoIP capabilities. IBM/Lotus has been building out its real-time platform and trying to negate any advantages Microsoft may have.

Simon Fraser University CIO Jim Cranston says software licensing fees are one impediment to using emerging technologies in areas such as e-learning.

Robert Scales of Raincity Studios, a small award-winning Drupal and Ruby development firm in Vancouver, Canada, is not your typical CEO. Grounded by a pride in the quality of the work that his team produces, Scales is so dedicated to openness in business that he publishes Raincity's finances on his blog, although the company is private and he has no legal obligation to do so. The result of such openness, in Scale's view, is a stable business capable of surviving the next economic downturn.

Forget Symbian! The "war of the OSes" in mobile phones looks rosy for Linux and Windows, according to a detailed, insightful, freely available whitepaper from ARCchart. Funded by Trolltech, the 27-page "independent" report overviews the entire cellphone software market, offering in-depth reviews of 15 software stacks.

Red Hat quietly released the first public beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for both clients and servers last Friday. Although a bit later than planned, Red Hat plans to cycle quickly through to release candidate, and ship version 5 by year end or, if need be, January 2007.

Let me be blunt: In the past, creating graphical editors within Eclipse using the Graphical Editor Framework (GEF) was slow and painful. It involved understanding a complex framework and quite a bit of redundant code. That said, GEF is an excellent framework for creating graphical editors because it is model-agnostic. On the other hand, being model-agnostic creates its own problems.

It's nice to see a yellow and black "For Dummies" book with "Linux" in the title -- namely Wiley's Linux Smart Homes for Dummies .

In Part 1 of this series you learned about Developer Workbench concepts and basic tasks. In this article learn how the Eclipse-based Developer Workbench resources, perspectives, views, editors, and wizards assist you to work with stored procedures. DWB is based on Eclipse technology, which replaces the Swing-based DB2 V8 Development Center.

This year aKademy will continue with tradition created at aKademy 2005 of awarding the people that made an outstanding contribution to KDE in the last year. The award ceremony will be on Sunday, September 24th at 17:50-18:00.

Toradex is sampling what it calls the "world's first" embedded computer module based on Intel's new Monahans XScale processor. The SODIMM-sized Colibri PXA290 comes a Windows CE 5.0 BSP pre-installed, with a Linux BSP expected in November, a company spokesperson said.

The Cape Breton Regional Police are preparing to use an open source database tool to analyze information about their investigations - starting with a murder case that's already been solved.

Asterisk 1.2.12 includes a number of bug fixes, including fixes for two regressions that occurred in the 1.2.11 release. Specifically, the AGI 'GET VARIABLE' command has now gone back to its previous behavior, and CDR records now reflect the CallerID number instead of ANI in the situations that this was the case in earlier 1.2 releases.

Just as the sun over the northern part of India gives way to the clouds and rains, comes one of the major annual conference on free software, FreeDel. Organized in the capital of the country by the local Delhi-Linux Users Group, FreeDel is a two-day event showcasing the best the Free Software world has to offer. This year the event will be held on the 16th and 17th of September, at the Bio-Informatics Center of Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Despite good intentions and an so called "apparent need," I'd say that the developers and supporters (for Ubuntu CE) are going in the wrong direction...they're trying to repackage an already great distro and re-brand it with a label and an idea. It's not working and it's taking away from what they originally set out to accomplish.

The Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) has a project to educate the US Patent Office about ideas already known ("prior art") so as to prevent issuance of "poor quality" software patents which would cover those known ideas. It works by annotating free software packages in free software repositories so that ideas in them can be found more easily. It sounds like a good thing because the problems are hidden. The GNU Project does not participate in the project, and you should think twice about it too.

The Cape IT Initiative today announced its support for free and open source software saying they see huge opportunity in FOSS and do not believe that Africa can afford to pay billions of dollars into the coffers of offshore proprietary multinationals.

You might want to be very careful before entering your username and password on any "new" services from Google. Developer Eric Farraro has uncovered a potential hole in Google's Public Search Service that allows a malicious (or mischievous) person to put up a fake Google sign-in page to collect usernames and passwords for real Google services.

The software giant on Tuesday published the Microsoft Open Specification Promise, a document that says that Microsoft will not sue anyone who creates software based on Web services technology, a set of standardized communication protocols designed by Microsoft and other vendors. Reaction to the surprise news was favorable, even from some of Microsoft's rivals.

Microsoft is reporting (at El Reg) that by releasing an operating system it will magically create $40 Billion dollars rather than simply suck money out of Europe. They've done this by positing a story similar to the theory of "broken window" economics. Let me explain...

Some bugs have an additional set of tags indicating they only apply to a particular release: O for oldstable (woody), S for stable (sarge), T for testing (etch), U for unstable (sid) or E for experimental. X indicates that the package is not in testing.