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Rumors are swirling that SAP may acquire Red Hat. But does it make sense for SAP to acquire Red Hat's Linux, JBoss Middleware and RHEV virtualization businesses? Absolutely yes. Here's why.

The introduction of long-awaited copyright reform legislation has generated considerable discussion among Canadians about whether the latest bill strikes the right balance. While concern over Bill C-32's digital lock rules has garnered the lion share of attention with expressions of concern from all opposition parties and a wide range of stakeholders, the other major issue in the bill is the extension of fair dealing -- Canada's version of fair use -- to cover education, parody, and satire.

Oracle has replaced Microsoft as the FOSS community’s number one enemy, according to Adobe System’s open source boss. David McAllister, the Flash and Photoshop maker’s open source and standards director, said in a blog post yesterday that the implosion of the OpenSolaris Governing Board highlighted how “the axis of evil has shifted south about 850 miles or so”.

Gnash 0.8.8 was released today, the announcement pointing out that 100% of the YouTube videos are now supported. Here are the CPU and memory usage for both Adobe Flash Player and Gnash:

In the course of a normal work day I take several little breaks to check the news. On my list of news sites are Slashdot, Linux Journal, and Linux Today. Frequently I see something that gives me an idea for an article. Sometimes I even find an article on a topic that I was planning to write about myself. Such was the case today when I came across this well-written piece from the Royal Pingdom Blog referenced on Linux Today. It’s about the failure of desktop Linux to break the 1% market share barrier, and I confess that it left me a little depressed. But I decided to add my two cents on the subject anyhow.

Today I will tell you how to set up a new Ubuntu 10.04 server which runs VMware server 2.0.2-x and the VMware Remote Console Plug-in. With VMware Server you can create and run guest operating systems ("virtual machines") such as Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, etc. under a host operating system. This has the benefit that you can run multiple operating systems on the same hardware which saves a lot of money, and you can move virtual machines from one VMware Server to the next one (or to a system that has the VMware Player which is also free).

Close scrutiny of the Steam port for Mac OS X led to the discovery of evidence which suggested that a Linux version might be coming soon. Sadly, Valve marketing vice president Doug Lombardi dispelled these suspicions in a recent interview during which he confirmed that the company is not actively working on Steam for Linux.

Remote file inclusion is basically a one of the most common vulnerability found in web application. This type of vulnerability allows the Hacker or attacker to add a remote file on the web server. If the attacker gets successful in performing the attack he/she will gain access to the web server and hence can execute any command on it.

Gnash 0.8.8 was released yesterday and it comes with an interesting set of features. This GNU GPLv3 open-source SWF/Flash player for Linux and BSD systems on multiple architectures now claims 100% compatibility with Flash-based YouTube videos, run-time rendering switching, run-time media handler switching, VA-API video acceleration, reduced internal dependencies, script-able plug-in support so JavaScript within the browser can work with ActionScript in Gnash, and improved input device handling.

Everyone in the Linux world remembers Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's famous comment that Linux is a "cancer" that threatened Microsoft's intellectual property. Ballmer is still CEO of Microsoft, but that comment occurred in 2001, a lifetime ago in the technology market. While Microsoft hasn't formally rescinded its declaration that Linux violates its patents, at least one Microsoft executive admits that the company’s earlier battle stance was a mistake. Microsoft wants the world to understand, whatever its issues with Linux, it no longer has any gripe toward open source.

A multi-national entertainment company, caught using Free Software, while at the same time opposing the right of their customers to use their own computers in any way they wish.

There was an announcement a while back that North Korea had come out with its own version of Linux (called Red Star OS). I dropped by the official North Korean site, and found their contact information. I sent a polite email asking for a download link for their distro, but I never heard back from anybody. This was rather rude on their part, or perhaps they just don’t have people who can read English answering their email. Anyway, I wasn’t able to get a download link…until today.

Last month we reported that the OpenSolaris Governing Board may kill itself if Oracle would not appoint a liaison to the OpenSolaris community to interact with and communicate their future plans. After that OGB death threat was announced, the Illumos project was announced, which is basically a fork of OpenSolaris. Less than two weeks ago, however, Oracle finally announced it would be killing off OpenSolaris and making other changes to how Oracle Solaris is developed and delivered. With that said, the OpenSolaris Governing Board approved the decision this morning to end itself and return control of the OpenSolaris community to Oracle.

According to Fortune, Open Source is slowly gaining acceptance in the corporate world. More and more corporates are beginning to see the merits of Open Source and have started embracing it. But all these changes didn't happened overnight. It was rather a painful journey. 'Sharing' was never a good thing for Corporates until recently. These changes were largely brought about by a string of Open Source success stories that happened over the years.

Look what I just found, SCO's Partners page from 2002, on Internet Archive, and lo and behold, it provides proof positive that SCO, then calling itself Caldera, knew that IBM was involved with Linux as far back as 1998. That's the year Santa Cruz and IBM signed the agreement regarding Project Monterey, executed in October of 1998. No one, therefore, Santa Cruz or Caldera, had any reason to be in the dark about IBM's Linux activities while IBM was also working on Project Monterey.

Bruce Steinberg was the best Linux Journal reader I ever had, qualifying on the grounds of correspondence volume alone. His letters to this one editor were always long, and always thick with good humor, good advice, and rich history. Bruce was a Unix/Linux geek of the first water, and worked for many years at SCO, long before that "brand" was shamed at the end of its life. He was also a veteran of the rock & roll world, and knew more about the band Tower of Power than most people know about life. (It mattered to us both that the band, at the time traveling under another name but using the same horn section and singer Hubert Tubbs, played at our wedding.)

Linux stalwarts who hoped, prayed, and begged for a Steam to come to the open source platform got their collective dream crushed when Valve VP of Marketing Doug Lombardi told GameIndustry.biz that there are no plans for the gaming publishing and communication platform to come to Linux.

Rumors continue to swirl around Google's efforts to challenge the Apple iPad. Last week, the AOL-owned Download Squad told the world that Google, Taiwanese hardware manufacturer HTC, and US wireless carrier Verizon will launch a Chrome OS tablet on November 26, and now, the Israel-based Haaretz claims that the so-called "gPad" will include multitouch technology from Israeli outfit N-trig, whose tech is currently used in Windows tablets from HP.

The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 2.0.8 for FreeBSD and PC-BSD today. Bordeaux 2.0.8 is a maintenance release that fixes a number of small bugs. With this release we have updated firefox to 3.6.8, Updated to the latest winetricks release and fixed desktop shortcuts.

The latest Milestone from Motorola features a remarkable 8MP camera and 720p video recording with HDMI-out. Linux User & Developer's Russell Barnes puts the XT720 through its paces…