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The free software community was reading the tea leaves Friday, too, and there were some distinctly worrisome parts of the deal from that perspective. Most notably, Ballmer and McNealy emphasized, as did their press release, the ``intellectual property'' element of their new arrangement. The chief threat these days to Linux and other open-source software is not a lack of quality. It's lawyers.

Sun Microsystems Inc. and Microsoft Corp. on Friday settled their bitter antitrust battles, uniting the two rivals to take on the increasingly popular Linux operating system.

CoLinux has been ported to linux. This, combined with some much needed stabilization in their 0.6.0 release means it's closing in on being a decent free VMWare clone in terms of platform support... well, if you only want to run Linux VMs.

The Committee for the Information & Knowledge Society Technology in Israel, note on it's web site, that there is a plan to spend an amount of 240,000 NIS (53,000 US$) distributing150,000 copies of OpenOffice.org. [Click the Read More link for the English translation, provided by Chen Levy.] [Originally published on LinMagazine.co.il.]

Contrary to SCO CEO Darl McBride's comments, Linus Torvalds says that he did want to see the Unix source code but couldn't—not from fear of "tainted" code, but rather because of SCO's NDA.

It took seven years, millions upon millions of shareholders' dollars, and way too many snide remarks from both sides, but Sun Microsystems and Microsoft have now stopped their Hatfield vs. McCoys feud and are apparently ready to play nicely together in the marketplace.

I was eager to get my hands on the newest version of SUSE Linux, the first version produced by the company under the Novell corporate umbrella. Like many others, I wondered how it would jell. SUSE has been a leading commercial proponent of the KDE desktop environment. Common wisdom the past few years has held that if you liked KDE, SUSE was your best bet. If Gnome was your choice, Red Hat was the best way to go. Prior to the SUSE purchase, Novell acquired Ximian, with its deep involvement with the Gnome project. Would KDE suddenly find itself a second class environment on the distro that loved it? Many feared that would be the case. What I learned with the beta should go a long way towards allaying those fears.

The fact that Mandrake 10.0 is coded with Linux kernel 2.6 means the number of unique users it can handle has increased from 65,000 to over 4 billion, with 1 billion concurrent processes on a single system. It also means it is more secure. In short, it is better equipped than the previous Mandrake distro to take a lead role in the data center.

John Gruber wrote a public response to Eric Raymond's articles regarding bad usability/UIs on many open source applications. "Good user interfaces result from long, hard work, by talented developers and designers. The distributed, collaborative nature of open source software works for developer-level software, but works against user-level software. [...] Technical documentation is also hard work, and requires talent to be done well. Writers need paychecks, too" says John. Short commentary follows.

Linux Kernel 2.6 has been in stable release for months now, which is like dog's years in kernel time. Kernel releases are exciting times for Linux geeks, because it's just plain fun to be able to replace the kernel on a system, or have several different kernels installed, and choose among them as the whim strikes. Oh yes, you want to gain improved performance and functionality, too.

A vulnerability was discovered recently in Interchange, an e-commerce and general HTTP database display system. This vulnerability can be exploited by an attacker to expose the content of arbitrary variables. An attacker may learn SQL access information for your Interchange application and use this information to read and manipulate sensitive data.

Individuals, small businesses, and even major corporations and some governments are choosing in large numbers to migrate from Windows to Linux. Recruiting and HR functions are very technology dependent. While many HR professionals know about the applications that run on their computers, they might not understand the operating systems, or “environments”, on which their software runs and how those environments can affect costs and reliability. MedZilla explores the option of using Linux, a competitor of the Microsoft Windows-based environment and asks the experts if this “free” option is too good to be true.

Our Free Software guru takes a look at new releases of Mandrake and the Gnome desktop, with an eye toward bringing one more Linux user online.

This week, Stallman told ZDNet in an e-mail that he will re-launch the boycott if Amazon.com attacks anyone over a patent granted this week for “Use of browser cookies to store structured data”.

Both companies have also agreed to pay royalties for each other's technologies with Microsoft making an up-front payment of $350 million and Sun making payments whenever it uses Microsoft's technology in its server products, it said.

Martin Taylor has worn many hats in his 11-year Microsoft career, from building channel programs in Latin America and the Washington, D.C., beltway to serving as Steve Ballmer's chief of staff. He has been a go-to guy at the Redmond, Wash., software giant, so it makes sense that he's tasked today, as general manager of platform strategy, to run the counteroffensive against Linux, the open-source phenomenon that poses perhaps the single biggest threat to the company since the U.S. Department of Justice . Taylor says he is taking a "facts-only" approach to beating back the Linux onslaught, devoting an entire Web site (dubbed www.getthefacts.com) to studies and surveys comparing Windows favorably to Linux. Can he stem the tide of developers who are flocking toward open source? Given Microsoft's might and resources behind its development community, he probably has some sway and influence here. He talked recently with VARBusiness senior writer Carolyn A. April about the Windows/Linux competition.

Hot on the heels of the release of Trustix Secure Enterprise Linux, we are proud to announce a range of pricing models engineered to suit the rapidly expanding requirement for the Trustix Secure Enterprise Linux platform.

I'm proud to announce that Custom Debian Distributions reached a new state and I want to attract the attention of the Debian community to this technique.

Most of what arrives at my mail servers is unwanted: viruses, spam, and executable garbage. Even if you're running something other than Windows on the desktop, the sudden appearance of a new virus can overwhelm your inbox. If you're an administrator, your users likely aren't as reliable about not clicking on attachments as we'd all like. Combined with the flood of spam and random garbage, putting a mail server on the Internet without filtering is like covering yourself with barbecue sauce and breaking into the Charity Home for Badgers with Rabies. Decent spam and virus protection measures can save you a lot of time and effort.

As there is so much controversy associated with the GPL - the Open Source General Public License, it makes a little sense to review the simple basic legal points involved - if for no other reason than to address the confusion caused by the SCO v IBM case.