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The Copyright Office of the US Library of Congress has formally announced an open comment period to solicit evidence from "interested parties" regarding whether the prohibition on circumvention clause of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has an adverse effect on legal, non-infringing use of copyrighted works. Anyone may submit comments via forms on the Copyright Office Web site between November 2 and December 1. All comments will be made public.

A Durban-based music mixer has won the Yfm and Creative Commons "Mad Half Hour Open Source Mixes" competition by adding his own creative mix commons-licensed music. [What Red Hat, Novell, and others do with GNU/Linux distributions, Nathan Redpath does with music. Libre software will flourish in a libre culture. Or is that vice-versa? -Ed]

With Breezy Badger out the door, the next version of Ubuntu, titled Dapper Drake, went into production today. Top of the high-level goals for Dapper is for it to be a 'polished' distribution.

Beyond the numbers. Customers flock to Linux because it works. By Jeffrey S. Smith, IBM Software Group Vice President, Linux Middleware.

Here is a short article explaining some basics about file systems. This is an area in which many people, even full time computer users, lack much understanding. Its kind of important!

SteelEye Technology, Inc., the leading provider of data and application availability management solutions for business continuity and disaster recovery on Linux and Windows, today announced its membership in the MySQL Network Certified Partner program. As a member of this program, SteelEye and MySQL will work together to facilitate the integration of MySQL into the current IT networks of enterprise customers and to ensure full availability against downtime for these environments.

Journyx is a closed-source, proprietary software vendor with a business model that embraces -- albeit at arm's length -- open source. How can that be? The paradox results from a unique business model that attempts to provide a free-as-in-beer product for the majority of users, support and use open source software projects, and still turn a profit. I recently spoke to Journyx founder and CEO Curt Finch to learn more about that business model, and about TimeSheet, the software Journyx produces and (mostly) gives away.

Writing programs that generate other programs may seem esoteric, but once you learn why metaprogramming is so powerful, it's a skill you'll want to cultivate. This article explains why you might consider metaprogramming and looks at some of the components of this art.

Victoria, British Columbia -- Companies from around the world have joined forces to fund performance improvements to the PostgreSQL open source database. By pooling resources, the contributing companies have saved money while gaining important new database features for their businesses. Now, Refractions Research is pleased to report the completion of this collaborative effort to bring important concurrency improvements to the PostgreSQL GiST indexing subsystem.

The appeal of open source to software developers is that it allows them to improve, modify, or adopt according to their own needs, saving time that might be wasted on the paths traditionally used by commercial developers. Some products are so well known that computer users do not associate them with open-source technology.

Sita is keeping mum on likely open source spend over the next three years, but says winning bids for the government open source tender will be announced as early as mid-November.

A couple months after announcing support of its recent Gluecode acquisition, IBM Corp says its new product is now ready for the WebSphere Community Edition moniker.

Slackware is old-school Linux. Back in the day -- before Red Hat seized the throne -- Pat Volkerding's Linux distribution was the undisputed king of the hill. Many still use it today. By the time I started playing with Linux in 1995, or running my Web server with it in 1996, Slackware's slump in market share had already begun. I've tried a lot of different Linux distributions during the years since then, but until recently I had never tried Slackware. Here's what I've learned about Slackware while installing and using the recently released Slackware 10.2.

The WebSphere Application Server Community Edition (WAS CE) is a lightweight J2EE application server built on Apache Geronimo, the open source application server project of the Apache Software Foundation. WAS CE is the follow-on product for Gluecode SE that the Gluecode company always envisioned. Find out what this new Community Edition app server, which is 90% Apache Geronimo, means to the open source Apache Geronimo development community.

Fault-tolerant server specialist Stratus Technologies Inc has confirmed that it will introduce a new line of Linux-based general-purpose fault-tolerant servers in January running Red Hat Inc's Enterprise Linux.

The Plone Foundation recently released the 2.1 version of Plone, the leading Content Management System for the award-winning Zope application server. Supported by thousands of developers from around the world, it is one of the most sophisticated, popular, and easy-to-use content management systems available today.

Google Inc. donated $350,000 to two Oregon universities Tuesday as part of the company's efforts to back open-source software development. The grant to Oregon State University and Portland State University is Google's first academic donation specifically directed toward supporting open-source development, Google said.

Tom Sanders writes: "Sun Microsystems plans to make its Java Desktop System (JSD) available for any Linux distribution through the new JDS Partner Programme, Sun executive vice president for software John Loiacono said at a town hall meeting in Sun's San Francisco office...

"The move will make the application available on any Linux distribution including Red Hat, Red Flag, Gentoo, Yellow Dog, and Linspire, Loiacono said. It also enables PC makers to start selling Linux systems that come bundled with the JDS suite and use the Java and JDS logos.

"The move is called for because there currently is no standard desktop Linux distribution, he said. This has lead many countries to create local distributions of the open source operating system. While the abundance of distributions is good for customer choice, it makes it hard for Sun to pick a single version to support."

[People who have worked with Sun over the past three years on the JDS desktop might suggest that you not hold your breath waiting. They promised an update of JDS 3 for February 2005. In December 2003, they also announced that they had sold 200 million copies of JDS to the Chinese Standard Software Company. Don't fein surprise if this never happens...you know the old thing about history repeating itself. -ED]

The company is providing royalty-free access to its patent portfolio for some healthcare and education software specifications built around Web services, electronic forms, and open document formats.

In answering a question on the Linux metaforum here at Lxer, bstadil wrote a splendid comment about how to figure out the optimial size of a new disk drive. He wrote: the optimal replacement size of a disk drive is e = 2.7 times what you have.

Related to: http://lxer.com/module/forums/t/18462/">Why do people switch to Linux