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Although their strikes against the tightly stretched drum head are much more graceful and powerful than the strokes of the keyboard, taiko players of North America have battled some of the same issues as open source software developers, including patents and the desire to share their innovations.

The Linux operating system, when combined with available personal productivity software, packaged application software, and development tools, has reached a level of capability that arguably positions it to be an acceptable alternative client operating environment (COE) solution for many users of personal computers. Making a leap from being an acceptable alternative to capturing the role of a mainstream solution is the chasm that Linux must cross today. We see opportunities for Linux to make inroads in the COE market in the following ways...

Linux founder defends his protection of the trademark and insists that sublicensing is a loss-making operation.

The K Desktop Environment was pleased to see its users recently at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo. Users were excited to learn about KDE 4.0, some of the hot new stuff in KDE 3.5, and thousands of Linux users got out of the house for a change!

Welcome to this year's 34th issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The long awaited KNOPPIX 4.0 live DVD was finally released last week - with a large collection of great software, but also with a few nasty bugs. In the meanwhile, the openSUSE project continues its fast-paced beta testing process of SUSE Linux 10.0 with more great software and an easy way to upgrade to the latest version. Our featured project of the week is aLinux - a distribution with amazing eye candy, unparallelled multimedia support, and many bleeding edge software packages. Happy reading!

The global momentum behind open source is now unstoppable and SA could be at the front of this trend, Mark Shuttleworth told journalists on Friday, ahead of the Go Open Source Task Team Conference taking place in Johannesburg today and tomorrow.

Recently, some media have reported on licensing fees that are charged to companies using the Linux brand name, which belongs to Linux creator Linus Torvalds. Those reports originated from Australia, where new licensing terms were announced and a lawyer sent out letters to users of the trademark. Subsequently, open-source activists in various parts of the world raised the question whether one could simultaneously oppose software patents and enforce trademarks.

Last week we looked at the at command, which will run a set of commands once and once only. For more complex regular scheduling, get to know your crontab file.

Profiting from open source software is foremost on Mark Shuttleworth's mind and this time he is looking at how the country can make its mark as a global open source software leader. He is doing this by spearheading a gathering of business, government and technology minds in the hope of building an open source action plan for the country which he will present later this year to South Africa's president Thabo Mbeki.

Two non-profit organisations have denounced Microsoft over the name of its forthcoming Windows Vista operating system. WorldVistA and the Vista Software Alliance both back the VistA application suite, which was originally developed by the US Veteran's Administration. The software brings electronic health records and hospital automation to institutions that take care of veterans, but its use over the years has expanded to other areas of the healthcare industry. VistA is in the public domain, meaning that it is not governed by any licence. This makes its use even less restricted than it would be under an open source licence. Earlier this week the two organisations sent out a press release with unusually harsh language about Microsoft's naming decision. WorldVistA is particularly upset about the timing of Microsoft's announcemen

Despite the European Parliament’s recent rejection of a controversial software patent regulation – which saw small, independent software developers breathe a collective sigh of relief – there could be more such regulations on the horizon. “If the community patent directive is passed, then software will be affected, and software patents will come into existence,” warned Péter Balsai, president of the Association of Hungarian Linux Users. Balsai argued that the EU directive on software patents, which the European Parliament rejected on July 6, will be replaced by a broader common patent directive that will incorporate computer-implemented inventions.

In keeping with its On Demand model, IBM is positioning itself as a problem-solver for customers, even if that means installing other companies' products. After six months and some 300 customer engagements, trying out a new sales and services approach that concentrates on industry-specific solution sets, IBM has decided to realign its global Linux-related sales and marketing teams around this model. The Linux teams are now concentrating on selling and marketing 17 solution sets that address IT and customer business problems, rather than focusing on selling specific products.

Sun weighing in on the fractious issue of protecting copyrighted digital content, on Sunday announced a project it calls the Open Media Commons initiative aimed at creating an open-source, royalty-free digital-rights management standard.

Oracle is taking the lid off a list of new technologies which engineers at the company say will boost the appeal of Linux for mission-critical enterprise applications. Earlier this month Oracle released its Oracle Cluster File System (OCFS 2) to general availability under an Open Source license. OCFS 2 is slated to be bundled with both leading Linux distributions.

"10 days? Well that hardly sounds hard enough! Sure, it doesn't sound so hard but take in account that over 500 million of us use a Windows OS at least once, everyday of the week and you too will see that going cold turkey from XP to KDE might be harder or more limiting than first thought."

"Vancouver" has gotten a very specific meaning in the Debian community: one of a visionary proposal[1] that received quite its share of flames from many Debian contributors, including myself. Since it appeared to many of us that the intentional result of this proposal would have been to essentially kill off many of our architectures, many of us weren't too happy with the proposal.

In the old days, Microsoft Corp. executives scoffed at Linux, the upstart operating system some businesses were beginning to try out. Microsoft’s technology was obviously superior, they reasoned. But as Linux has grown more popular, Microsoft has changed its attitude.

Released GoblinX Mini LiveCD. GoblinX Mini Edition is a small version of GoblinX, a livecd based on Slackware, and contains only XFCE as windows manager and GTK/GTK2 based applications. The edition is indicated for those users whose want to remaster the distro and also those with difficulties to download more than three hundreds of megabytes, original size of GoblinX Main distro. The GoblinX Mini Edition will have newer versions released faster and it will be used also for tests and for system and hardware support improvements.

The Quake III Arena "engine" has been released as GPL free software code, continuing id Software's tradition of releasing their older software to the public for free (as in libre) use. Why is this interesting? Because what they're doing isn't giving away an old game that nobody would buy, they're giving away a toolkit for virtual environments that is much more sophisticated than casual observers might expect.

VMware, in light of increasing competition for Microsoft and XenSource, last week announced at LinuxWorld that it is opening up its source code to independent software and hardware vendors. The move is intended to create an open virtualization platform and make VMware the center of it. The company announced it is working with AMD, BEA Systems, BMC, Dell, Emulex, HP, iBM, Mellanox, Novell and Red Hat, among others. VMware will provide its partners access to its ESX Server source code through a program called VMware Community Source, which will allow them to collaboratively develop ESX Server. The VMware Community Source program is intended to accelerate the development of virtualization software, expand its interoperability and supportability by creating standard interfaces and make virtualization technologies more widely available. The virtualization vendors stirred the pot at LinuxWorld in San Francisco last week.