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Facebook's latest moves to control the heart of the Web are worrying many people. Luckily, Mozilla has just announced a new Firefox project to manage identity that may be just what we need: a free software alternative to Facebook's plans. Will the next big battle between open and closed be fought between Firefox and Facebook?

SCO has filed its "renewed" motion for judgment "as a matter of law", with its supporting memorandum. They ask the judge to rule over the heads of the jury and decide that the jury "simply got it wrong" when it ruled that SCO didn't get the copyrights in 1995 from Novell. In the alternative, they'd like a new trial. See, this is the problem with loaning money to SCO. They don't ever want this dance to end. The rest of the world gets it. SCO lost, by judge (Dale Kimball) and now by jury. They'd like this to be over. And us, the musicians, so to speak, at the dance? We're tired and we want SCO to stop already so we can pack up and go home and get some sleep. And no, this isn't normal, stretching a case that was hopeless from day one into what looks to become a more than decade-long event. And can you imagine the international outcry if the judge were to grant a request like this?

HTC has agreed to pay Microsoft a royalty when it sells a mobile phone running Google's Android operating system. But why does Microsoft make money from Google's software? Android is based on open source software - and Microsoft has long raised fears that aspects of Linux may infringe on its patents.

The Mono team is proud to bring you a preview of C# 5.0 a few years before our friends in Building 41 do. A snapshot of the code is available in the demo-repl.zip file. This contains the csharp.exe C# REPL shell and the Mono.CSharp.dll compiler-as-a-service assembly.

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) – Crashing machines, slow boot times, and agony dealing with technical support have Digital Age people suffering from Computer Stress Syndrome, a study available online Tuesday found. "Today's digitally-dependent consumers are increasingly overwhelmed and upset with technical glitches and problems in their daily lives," a communications industry think tank said in a report entitled "Combating Computer Stress Syndrome." The report identified sources of peoples' pain as "frustrating, complex computers and devices, technical failures, viral infections, and long waits to resolve support issues."

[I know my computer related stress has gone down permanently since switching to Linux and becoming my own tech support.. - Scott]

Andy Updegrove may have cracked the code on Oracle's seemingly insane decision to start charging $90 for the formerly free ODF plugin for Microsoft Office. That's $90 in a minimum pack of 100, plus a 22% support fees for updates. Does Oracle really think that this will fly with companies, is Oracle trying to kill off the product entirely? The ODF plugin was developed to allow Microsoft Office users to exchange documents with OpenOffice.org users. It works for spreadsheets, presentations, and word processing docs and Sun gave it away for years. So why has Oracle so suddenly decided to charge for it? Whatever Oracle's strategy, the company isn't talking.

Few people in the open source community have touched as many projects as Leslie Hawthorn, the now-former open source program manager for Google. As one of less than ten employees in Google's open source programs office, Hawthorn was at the center of the Google Summer of Code — a project that has worked with hundreds of projects and thousands of college students since its inception in 2005. When Hawthorn announced at the end of March that she was leaving Google, we decided to catch up with her and find out what she's learned from her time at Google and what she has planned next.

Ubuntu 10.04 is just around the corner, and it's shaping up to be one of the most eagerly awaited (and controversial) releases in the distro's history. What new goodies are included? How does it tap into the ever-expanding world of social networking? And most importantly, can you move those window control buttons back to the right of the titlebar, as nature intended? Read on for the gory details...

As Ubuntu 10.04 nears its April 29 launch date, Canonical’s Linux distribution finally seems to be attracting key software partners. That’s good news for Canonical and aspiring Ubuntu channel partners. But is Ubuntu 10.04 really ready to compete with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux?

Firefox is more than just a browser, it's also a research tool on steroids. Mozilla's Firefox is a pretty good browser. But, thanks to a number of add-ons, it can also be an essential research tool for anyone working online. We look at some of the best add-ons available for improving Firefox's research capabilities.

Few days ago PCLinuxOS2010 was released, the new version comes with many new features and improvements, the Gnome version comes with a Full Gnome 2.30.0 Desktop, Kernel 2.6.32.11-bfs kernel for maximum desktop performance, Nvidia and ATI fglrx driver support..

My particular Ubuntu 10.04 LTS installation is not suffering from the Xorg memory leak. So what's my increased use of swap all about? I don't know if it's beneficial or not to have so much swapping going on, but a couple of readers have told me that Ubuntu's "swappiness" is set to a level of 60, which is optimal for servers. Desktops run better with lower "swappiness," and 10 is the suggested level. All of this "swappiness" information is available in the Ubuntu community's Swap FAQ.

Starting in December 2009, hard disk manufacturers began introducing disks that use 4096-byte sectors rather than the more common 512-byte sectors. Although this change is masked by firmware that breaks the 4096-byte physical sectors into 512-byte logical sectors for the benefit of the operating system, the use of larger physical sectors has implications for disk layout and system performance. This article examines these implications, including benchmark tests illustrating the likely real-world effects on some common Linux® file systems. As disks with 4096-byte sectors become more common throughout 2010 and beyond, strategies for coping with these new disks will become increasingly important.

Making custom Linux distributions can be an arduous task. Luckily, there are companies out there that are looking to make the process more friendly. Previously, I reviewed the Reconstructor Web UI, a web-based Debian/Ubuntu customization utility, and today, I'd like to present you with a SUSE-based alternative called SUSE Studio. Although SUSE Studio does have some offline components (such as SUSE Studio Onsite and the rest of the SUSE Appliance Toolkit), this review will focus on the online components which are freely available at susestudio.com. For those that are following along at home, I'll assume that you already have an account with SUSE Studio.

Mark Shuttleworth announced today that Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition will come with a global menu. He also states that ONLY the Ubuntu Netbook Edition will get the Global Menu.

Today it is hard to think of a phone without a camera. In fact we are just as likely to take a picture with our phone as we are to make a call. And once we take a photo, we are quite likely to send it as a message to someone else, but that is a topic for another day! In this column we are going to write a simple Android application which demonstrates taking a photo and displaying it to the screen of your phone.

TROY, Mich., April 27 - DisklessWorkstations.com, a leading supplier of thin client hardware and solutions for open source thin client environments announces Bundled LTSP Support. Bundled support is included as part of LTSP Thin Client purchases for use with the Ubuntu operating system (versions 9.10 and later). Bundled support incidents are awarded based upon the quantity of thin client devices purchased and are provided at no additional cost.

Netbook desktops in free and open source software (FOSS) are in a state of rapid development. Should a netbook be treated as more as a mobile device than as a laptop? Should developers assume that netbooks are used for light computing such as social networking, rather than for productivity? These are just two of the questions whose answers affect the design of any netbook desktop.

Six Japanese technology firms have announced they are developing a new application platform for mobile phones that will be compatible with Linux, Symbian, and possibly Android. Developed by NTT DoCoMo, Renesas, Fujitsu, NEC, Panasonic, and Sharp, the unnamed, multimedia-focused mobile platform is scheduled for arrival in phones in early 2012, say the partners.

As reported by Computerworld (from the recent Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit 2010), Google plans to assign two developers to work on integrating enhancements developed for the Android Linux kernel into the official Linux development tree maintained by Linus Torvalds.