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Remember Jeff Merkey? He's the guy who tried to buy a license to take the Linux kernel proprietary last year, among many other exploits. He has now posted a message, claiming "another Linux patent," pointing to U.S. Patent 6,862,609, granted on March 1 to a certain Jeff Merkey. The patent itself (which appears to cover a scheme for running a RAID array over an FDDI-like network) is not particularly threatening, but it is interesting to note that he has assigned the patent to the Canopy Group. Anybody who wondered who Jeff was working for need wonder no longer. [Need not be a subscriber to see this summary.]

"The Commission might end up paying dearly for its rash collusion with Microsoft" -- "Commission president apparently loves to play high-stakes poker with the EP" -- "Bill Gates is at the moment making himself ever more enemies in the EP"

SCO Group, whose stock is in danger of being de-listed from the Nasdaq Exchange, admitted Thursday that it has made a number of accounting mistakes during the past year -- so many that it announced that it will have to completely restate its numbers for the quarters ending Jan. 31, 2004, April 30, 2004 and July 31, 2004. SCO did say, however, that "the impact of the anticipated corrections does not impact the Company's previously reported net loss or its earnings per share for the fiscal year ended October 31, 2004."

Almost 200 Linux professionals write more than 300 Linux Professional Institute exams - in just one day - squashing the previous record held by Hong Kong.

A great reference for new Linux users who want quick tips for using various command-line features.

Authors slam Sun's open source strategy

The idea is to *compute* our computing liberties as they were the past month time and as they are now. This means that we will review and comment major free software related events happening last month and their impact on our computing freedoms, that is, mainly our software freedoms.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds started a lengthy discussion on the lkml regarding release numbering for the Linux kernel. Some have complained about kernel stability with the new development model discussed back in mid-2004 in which active development occurs in the "stable" 2.6 kernel.

Graphics software giant Adobe Systems has released some components of its commercial products as open-source software, a move intended to help others ease a tedious but important part of programming.

In response to whether or not he had any objections to merging FUSE into the mainline kernel, Andrew Morton offered some insight into what new features were slated for the upcoming 2.6.12 kernel. Andrew began, "I was planning on sending FUSE onto Linus in a week or two," going on to add "that and cpusets are the notable features which are 2.6.12 candidates."

Mandrakesoft today announced an agreement with the French Ministry of Education and Research which allows the distribution of its line of products and services to Higher Education institutions, including universities and research laboratories, throughout France. The agreement also makes it easy for students and workers from these institutions to purchase Mandrakesoft products for their private use. All information is available in the press-release below.

Symbio Technologies, an innovator in server-centric diskless thin client computer systems, said today that it grew its VAR network from a single outpost in Canada to 27 value-added resellers worldwide in 2004.

Linux-based computing grids are becoming the default setup at Penn State University's High Performance Computing department, thanks in part to the Emerging Technologies (ET) group at the college.

Who has the best enterprise operating system? That depends on who you talk to. IBM, Red Hat and Sun are taking the gloves off and maneuvering for x86 desktops.

It's quiet, it's small, it's powerful enough for everyday desktop use and versatile enough to be a set-top media device or small home server. It takes PCMCIA cards, IDE drives, DDR memory, and a standard ATX power supply, yet it's smaller than a laptop computer. It has a built-in DVD decoder (no more DeCSS!) and with its built-in RSA chip it can encrypt and decrypt data faster than the most powerful Athlon 64 system. The question isn't, "What can you do with the Epia MII-12000?" The question is, "What can't you do with the Epia MII-12000?"

There are a number of different open source cookbook-related applications currently under active development in the community; a few of them even actually deal with food. If you're hungry for some open source code that will help feed you, Gourmet Recipe Manager and PHPRecipeBook are two applications that can help satiate your appetite.

W. McDonald Buck, retired CTO of World Bank, finishes his four part essay on the subject of why Corporate Desktop Linux is an unrealistic goal in the short term for Linux advocates. "The hard truth is that the benefits that are most important to individual technical people are simply not important to those lacking technical skills. When you couple this with the relatively meager hard dollar cost savings, the prospect of some extra costs of migration, and the large risks of such a move, is it any wonder few corporate customers are making the transition?"

What exactly is the value of software such as GNU/Linux? This article takes a look at the value of freedom in software, how it relates to open source software and Linux in particular, and why it is something we should all take note of.

Thinking of changing an old laptop's OS from Windows to Linux? Don't do it until you read this. The benefits, the pains, the arguments, and the results. It's possible, but will everybody like it?

BURLINGAME, Calif. -- Software industry dignitaries at the EclipseCon 2005 conference here Tuesday pondered a burning question: How do you make money in open source software when the software is free?