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Short patent timeline:

16 May, 1991: "If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today." - Bill Gates, Challenges and Strategy Memo

Aug, 2004: OSDL releases a study saying Linux may infringe 283 patents; Ballmer leaves away the word "may"

May, 2007: Brad Smith claims Linux potentially infringes 235 patents

Oct, 2007: Ballmer claims

Linux potentially infringes 153 patents

Conclusion: Number of Microsoft patents filed at USPTO grows, but number of MS patents Linux potentially infringes on is declining.

There is still hope for users of PowerPC-based Macs out there even though Apple has left us. PowerPC-based LInux distribution is our hope even though Gnash, the open source flash is still almost a hit-or-miss application.

"Finally. Yeah, it got delayed, not because of any huge issues, but because of various bugfixes trickling in and causing me to reset my 'release clock' all the time. But it's out there now, and hopefully better for the wait,"

While the industry is distracted by the ongoing tussle between Microsoft and OpenOffice.org over document formats, the KDE project is quietly preparing the next generation of its own office suite, KOffice, for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. KOffice 2.0, to be released sometime in the first half of 2008, will be cross platform like many other applications in the KDE suite built with the Qt4 GUI toolkit.

While in Britain last week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer took a swipe at just about everything - from one of the world's largest Linux vendors to a social networking company he may end up buying. He insisted that Red Hat violates MS patents. He compared Facebook to GeoCities. He even accused Google of reading your email.

The Fedora development team have release Fedora 8 Test 3, the last test release before the development freezes in advance of the distro's general release on November 8.

The GIMP image editor is preparing for the start of a new development cycle, and you can have your say in the way the next version looks by submitting a mock-up to the GIMP UI Brainstorm blog. User interface designer Peter Sikking spoke with us about the project and how it fits into the larger work of creating the GIMP's UI.

Do you spend most of your day struggling to organise your Firefox tabs? Then you're a candidate for Tabs Open Relative. Read on for a really cool extension for serious Internet users.

I thought Microsoft stuck to monitoring Vista systems but XP could be under surveillance too. If you have read my previous articles this should come as no surprise.

Ralf Baechle posted the Linux/MIPS architecture merge plans for the upcoming 2.6.24 kernel. The diffstat for all changes showed, "435 files changed, 14274 insertions(+), 10196 deletions(-)", about which Ralf noted, "the number of patch lines and files is inflated by two large whitespace cleanup patches."

At the Recent Ohio (GNU)LinuxFest, I talked about the importance of promoting your FOSS projects, covering some of the tasks project teams need to engage in, working with the press, and handling negative publicity. This is the first in a series of articles aimed at helping project teams by going into more details. Here we consider how your home page figures into your marketing process.

We look at the newly released Mandriva Linux 2008 Free i586 from Mandriva! Short image tour plus a video showing the os in action. We loaded the KDE desktop for this quick look at Mandriva 2008 Free!

Watch out, parents - close the windows, and protect your kids. Ballmer is on the move again, this time to put the final nail into his own coffin.

Launched by Guardian Digital with: brand new daemon control functionality, improved password shadowing, load balancing improvements and much more. EnGarde Secure Linux is a fully-functional platform engineered from the ground up for high levels of security explicitly for server operations.

Uli Drepper is a Red Hat developer and the lead contributor and maintainer of the GNU C Library (glibc). Watch the first , second , and third videos in this series as well.

When Seiko Instruments said it is now offering Linux drivers for its Smart Label Printer 450 and offered to send me one to test, I was happy to hear it, because it seemed like an example of how Linux is being recognized for even non-mass-market hardware devices. While the printer does work as advertised, it is clear that Linux support is a work in progress.

Our growth to almost 30,000 users has put some strain on our aging systems, though. For over a year, we've been planning and executing a migration to new hardware and software, the goal of which is a more reliable and stable platform on which to grow. We're moving away from commercial packages, in favor of open-source applications, to help reduce costs and standardizing our hardware and software so the systems are easier to maintain.

[I encourage everyone to donate and make this effort very successful. Go Army. - Abe]

Sun's magic with UltraSPARC T2 is Chip MultiThreading (CMT), allowing a single-socket server or blade to outperform competing solutions, even scoring a win in SPEC''s demanding floating point benchmarks.

Urging public administrations to use Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) and open standards is one thing. Getting them to really take the jump is quite another. In the Netherlands, the OSOSS programme is helping ministries and municipalities to make their IT strategies more open. Its goal is to create a level playing field for FLOSS solutions, and to boost the local economy and the Netherlands' capability for IT innovation.

[Interesting read, the 'federal' Dutch government seems to have ignored open source a lot, but at the same time it is used more and more at the municipal level, thanks to OSSOS amongst others. - hkwint ]

We’re proud to announce that Mandriva Linux 2008 is now available for download on the official site, and on the network of public mirror servers. The result of six months of heavy development and testing, 2008 includes all the latest software and many enhancements over previous Mandriva Linux releases. You will find KDE 3.5.7 and the new GNOME 2.20 already integrated, a solid kernel 2.6.22.9 with fair scheduling support, OpenOffice.org 2.2.1, cutting-edge 3D-accelerated desktop courtesy of Compiz Fusion 0.5.2, Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.6, and everything else you’ve come to expect from the latest Mandriva Linux release.