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There is a lot of confusing information about the GNU/Linux operating system, open source and free software, and related issues in the press today. Many of these technologies and concepts are difficult to understand because they deviate from the standard historical traditions of the software industry. There are also a number of sponsored reports and other corporate propaganda published around the Web that smear the image of Linux and free software. In the interest of making a few basic concepts clear, this article will bring light to the darkness perpetuated by uninformed journalists, campaigning CEOs, and misleading advertisements.

COCC is a technology cooperative based in Connecticut that develops and supports software and systems for community banks and credit unions. Each month, COCC services 7,000 workstations and 500 ATMs, and processes more than seven million check images. The software that provides reporting, databases, and financial information used to run on the AIX platform, but COCC made the switch to Linux and saved 40% on hardware costs alone.

NOTE: ZNet has begun to explore the possibility of converting to free software. If you would like to help in this effort, please go to the Free ZNet Project forums, register, and introduce yourself.

Richard Stallman is one of the founders of the Free Software Movement and lead developer of the GNU Operating System. His book is 'Free Software, Free Society'. I caught up with him by phone on December 1/05.

Following, you will find Gary's Email and Thread to the OpenDocument Adoption Technical Committee as forwarded.

Mozilla's Firefox browser is now ahead of the Internet Explorer in terms of usage on European computers. A study by technology company AdTech says that the popularity of the open-source browser has grown by 40 percent over the last six months.

Microsoft will cut off IE support for Mac users this month, with availability ending early next year

Wind River will host a pair of half-day seminars on migrating device software to Linux this January, in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. and Bethesda, MD. The seminars target engineers, project managers, and systems professionals, and will be led by embedded pundit Bill Weinberg.

Welcome to this year's very last issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The renewed GNOME versus KDE flame war and Xen virtualisation are the two leading topics in this issue; these are followed by a few interesting links, including a timeline of Perl, which celebrated 18 years of age on Sunday. Has Ubuntu Linux been dumbed down? With omission of some of the vital utilities from the latest release, Robert Storey wonders where this increasingly popular distribution is heading. Also in this issue: an interview with Robert Tolu of the GenieOS project, an update on FreeBSD release schedule for 2006, and a handful of interesting new distributions. Happy reading! Join us at irc.freenode.net #distrowatch

Should companies that use free and open source software (FOSS) insure themselves possible patent or copyright violations? That question has no easy answer, say James Gatto, a partner at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman specializing in intellectual property and FOSS issues, and Karen Hiser, director of compliance services at Open Source Risk Management.

At first it would seem strange to talk about Philips, fiercely protective of its patents and seemingly equally ferocious in its levying of patent licensing fees, in relation to the concept of free royalties.

But, although you are still more likely to see the company hitting the headlines for enforcing its patent fees rather than waiving them, when it comes to the Linux operating system (OS), that is exactly what the company has done.

Philips believes that dropping some patent royalties will stimulate the development and use of the Linux software.

Granted, it's not exactly the Dayton Peace Accords. But Microsoft's Internet Explorer group and the rival Firefox browser team surprised the technology world last week with a small token of cooperation. To be precise, it was a tiny orange icon. Microsoft worked out an arrangement to use the same symbol that Firefox does to alert people when a Web page makes extra streams of information available for subscription.

[Ed: This is the Seattle P-I's take on the Microsoft-Mozilla sharing an icon story. I agree it's not the Dayton Peace Accords - and the use of a mere icon is hardly worth analysis, imo. Microsoft agreeing to include Firefox with all Windows installations would be something to talk about - dcparris]

Welcome to this year's very last issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The renewed GNOME versus KDE flame war and Xen virtualisation are the two leading topics in this issue; these are followed by a few interesting links, including a timeline of Perl, which celebrated 18 years of age on Sunday. Has Ubuntu Linux been dumbed down? With omission of some of the vital utilities from the latest release, Robert Storey wonders where this increasingly popular distribution is heading. Also in this issue: an interview with Robert Tolu of the GenieOS project, an update on FreeBSD release schedule for 2006, and a handful of interesting new distributions. Happy reading! Join us at irc.freenode.net #distrowatch

Open-source software vendor Novell has started work with the U.K. National Health Service (NHS) on a £21.8 million (US$38.6 million), three-year contract to improve its IT systems, a spokeswoman for the health agency said Friday.

The agreement is with Connecting for Health, a program under the Department of Health started in April to modernize the health service's IT systems. Connecting for Health has 12 other system-upgrade contracts, according to the NHS.

According to the Economic News, a quantity of Linux based notebooks made by Quanta will be shipped before the end of 2005 and distributed to Nigeria, Argentina, China, Brazil and India.

[ED- We really need to pay more attention to this. Negroponte was on the Charlie Rose show Thursday, and the numbers that they are shooting for is much larger than the press has mentioned. They are talking about 100-200M units following the initial 7MU first deployment. Current WW notebook sales is 46MU so Linux will be #1 if this works out PS. MS offered to make a windows version as did Apple, both turend down for not being open source. They expect a huge indigenous developement effort-bstadil]

Australian companies are not only lagging behind the United States and Asia when deploying Linux and open source software (OSS), they are also reluctant to contribute developer time back into the OSS community, according to a report by analyst group Forrester.

Seems like everyone got tired of clawing at reach other and instead decided to get down to work last week. Moreover, not only was the acrimony factor way down, but also the helpful factor was way up. What a change!

As its name suggests, Aaron Swartz's GPL-licensed rss2email utility converts RSS subscriptions into email messages and sends them to whatever address you specify. Despite the name, it handles Atom feeds as well, so you should be able to use it with just about any feed you like.

Taiwan's Quanta Computer has been selected to produce $100 Linux laptops developed at MIT, for eventual distribution to children in developing countries. Between five and 15 million units are expected to be provided to children in China, India, Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, Nigeria, Thailand, and other countries, the Lab said.

[Ed: Quanta also builds Thinkpads -tadelste]

I purchased the student edition of Microsoft Office 2003 back at the beginning of this year. I found that Wine and Crossover Office 4.2 would not run this version of MS Office. So I've been waiting for about ten months for the new version of Crossover Office.

For those who don't already know this, Wine and Crossover Office are products that enable you to run Microsoft platform applications on a Linux machine. Wine is available from winehq.org and Crossover Office is available at codeweavers.com. The two products are created in cooperation with each other in the same way that Sun Microsystems works on it's Star Office product and cooperates with OpenOffice.org. There's another enabler for MS software on Linux made by Transgaming Technology called Cedega. It is available from transgaming.com.

Today I downloaded the 30 day trial version of Crossover Office 5.0 from codeweavers.com. Once I installed it I tried to install Microsoft Office 2003. After one false start where in invoked the wine excutable to install Office, and one false error message during the installation, the software was finally installed.

(Newsbytes)Author Robin Miller was online Friday, Dec. 16th to discuss the OpenOffice.org suite of office productivity software and his new book "Point and Click: OpenOffice.org."

Miller introduces readers to OpenOffice.org 2.0, an alternative to Microsoft Office's perceived hassles, upgrades and cost. OpenOffice.org 2.0 runs through Windows or Linux and offers word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, drawing and databases. What's more, it's free. In his new book, Miller provides software and instruction for the basics of OpenOffice.org, as well as Firefox and Thunderbird.