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That would have gotten everyone’s attention. A fine of $731m USD sounds like a lot of money, but to an outfit like Microsoft, Apple, and Google, it’s chump change. If you want to send a message, make it hurt the other party at the receiving end.

Digium – which promotes Asterisk (the open source IP PBX) — has finally launched a cloud-based PBX service, aptly called SwitchVox Cloud. No doubt, there’s demand for hosted voice services. But what exactly is Digium's strategy here? Bryan Johns, a product manager at Digium, offered some insights to The VAR Guy.

In its latest sales campaign, the HumbleBundle team has released four commercial games for Android, Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. As before, prospective buyers can choose their own price for the DRM-free game package. Buyers who pay more than the average price for the "Humble Bundle with Android 5" will receive two extra games. The current average price is $6.64. All games are DRM free, but there are no plans for any of the titles to be open sourced in this round of Humble Bundle.

Linux Caixa Mágica 19 has been released. Linux Caixa Mágica is a Portuguese Linux distribution based on Ubuntu and featuring the latest GNOME 3 desktop with GNOME Shell. The most important features of this release are software updates to GNOME 3.6, LibreOffice 3.6.2, Linux kernel 3.5, Mozilla Firefox 19.0 and Google Chrome 24.0.1312.56, as well as a new version of the Portuguese citizen card software program with support for digital signatures of PDF files. Another interesting new feature is the introduction of Caixa Mágica TopApps, a one-click, web-based software installation tool. This version offers a possibility to upgrade directly from Caixa Mágica 18, while Wubi, a utility designed to install the distribution from Windows, is also available.

Here it is, KDE Software Compilation 4.10.1. A few weeks ago, KDE 4.10.0 was added to Slackware-current, along with all its updated dependencies. Essentially that was the same set of packages which I had made available on my ‘ktown‘ repository earlier, Pat Volkerding simply recompiled them using the provided KDE.SlackBuild framework.

GNOME 3 is making major progress with each and every release. Six months ago, when 3.6 was close to release, I wrote about how excited I was about the improvements that were on their way. That release was a big step up from the previous version in terms of user experience. Now we’re on the cusp of GNOME 3.8, and I find myself in exactly the same position. Testing GNOME 3.8, it is a huge improvement on 3.6. It’s more effective, satisfying and polished. Basic operations like selecting a window or launching an application have seen major improvements and the overall experience feels like yet another upgrade.

LibreOffice 4.0 is now available to install for all Ubuntu 12.10 users. This process is not very difficult, unless you are lacking copy and paste abilities. Thankfully LibreOffice 4.0 will work on Ubuntu 12.10, 12.04 and any Ubuntu derivatives using the commands found here.

gThumb is one of Gnome’s great choices when it comes to image viewers and browsers, but I admit that we have overlooked it for far too long. With version 3.1.4 getting released a few hours ago, I had the chance to test the application new features and general abilities for a typical daily use.

It would seem that Oracle is getting serious about addressing security issues in Java. Late Monday the company pushed Java 7 Update 17 that fixes two security holes that were already being exploited in the wild. The vulnerabilities addressed in Monday’s patch had been known since at least February 1 and were originally scheduled to be fixed in a scheduled security update in April, according to a security blog on the Oracle website:

... I have dozens of scripts on our support system here that had the old dyn.com domains in them for connection to the client sites when providing service each month. ...

Torment: Tides of Numenera can be seen as the follow-up of the legendary Planescape: Torment (which I started a week ago in Wine again), it's developed by inXile who are also working on their Wasteland 2 kickstarter.

The Linux Professional Institute announced an innovative partnership initiative to deliver an entry-level technology certification program to address the workforce development needs of both employers and aspiring IT professionals. The program will offer a combined training program in both LPI's Linux Essentials "Certificate of Achievement" and either the CIW's Internet Business Associate (IBA) or Network Technology Associate (NTA) certifications. This combined training and accreditation program will be delivered through CIW's Certification Testing Centers.

Many people know that Chrome OS is based on Linux. But where did Google's operating system actually come from -- and what is it made of today? Here's its story.

Server provisioning and configuration management and automation are the latest examples of where the tech industry is being driven, largely by open source software. The leading open source server and IT infrastructure automation frameworks, Opscode Chef and Puppet Labs' Puppet, sit on the leading edge of significant trends under way in enterprise IT.

Supporters of copyright reform are hoping that 2013 is the year they get some real momentum going. In the wake of Monday's news that the White House and FCC now support consumers' rights to unlock their cell phones, a new coalition called has launched an effort to repeal the section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that forbids breaking "digital locks."

When it comes to two factor authentication Yubikeys are very in vogue. They are small, they have a very small footprint on your keychain and are easy to handle as they need no driver and authentication is as easy as touching a button. This howto shows how you can use the open source LinOTP to enroll many Yubikeys to the LinOTP server.

Launchpad asked me if I wanted to continue to be an Ubuntu member. I thought about it, and have decided that I don’t. The one thing I’ll miss is being able to post to Planet Ubuntu. But I have to be honest, there isn’t an Ubuntu community any more. There’s a Canonical community, an ubuntu-users gaggle and maybe an enthusiasts posse. But no community that makes decisions, builds a consensus, advocates or educates. It’s dead now, it’s been that way for a while.

The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the March 2013 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine.

Few jargonistic terms have annoyed me as much as, "The Cloud." When the term was first coined, its meaning was ambiguous at best. For some companies, it meant shared web hosting (but with a cooler sounding name). For others it was simply, "let us host your servers in our datacenter, which we now refer to as a cloud."

This week Jono Bacon announced that Ubuntu Developer Summits will become a series of online events. Having thought about it a few days, I’m now ready to input my own opinion to the discussion. In the announcement Jono lists openness, transparency and accessibility as the major goals of the Ubuntu Developer Summits (UDS). The decision to move to an online event is supposed to improve these. In this article I will explain why I don’t think it will, and why the new format looks just another Canonical team sprint. I’ll also cover some of my concerns over the accessibility and equality of the new format and important things I think the online events will lack, but shouldn’t. I will also discuss some of my opinions on how this changes the nature of UDS and the meaningfulness to flavors as well as how this change affects the Canonical-community relations.