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The open source legal profession has established the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review (IFOSSLR) to discuss topics including copyrights, licensing, software patents, open standards, case law and statutes in the open source arena. The IFOSSLR now appears in its second issue.

How many SUSE subscriptions can you get for $240 million? Today I read a thought-provoking article over at SD Times, which detailed the state of the partnership between Novell and Microsoft. According to David Worthington's missive things are going pretty good for the two competitor/partners, though if you really read the piece there seems to be a key detail missing: what Microsoft is getting out of their investment in this partnership. And what an investment it has been: an initial payment of US$348 million to Novell... with US$240 million tagged specifically for those infamous subscription certificates for SUSE Enterprise Linux to hand out or resell to interested customers. Indeed, this was the thrust of the SD Times article: that Microsoft is almost through passing these coupons out. The thought that was actually provoked came from this sentence in the article: "A total of 475 customers have used an unspecified number of coupons, according to Microsoft."

Miguel de Icaza is a polarising figure amongst licence jockeys like Richard Stallman, but there is no denying his ability to get things done. We caught up with Miguel and asked him about Mono, Gnome, and much more besides…

Kupfer 1.0 Pandora's Box had been released. Kupfer is Linux alternative to Gnome DO, which will remind you of Quicksilver for Mac and you can use it to to summon an application or document quickly by typing the first parts of its name. It can also do more than getting at something quickly: there are different plugins for accessing more objects and running custom commands. Kupfer 1.0 finally introduces some of the advanced features found Quicksilver such as commands with many objects and global hotkeys to any custom command.

Phoronix Media has announced the immediate release of Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 (codenamed "Lenvik"), as the latest update to their open-source testing framework that delivers immediate and measurable advantages to its customers. The Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 software is compatible with a greater number of operating systems, introduces support for mobile platforms, offers a new range of test profiles, and other features to further solidify its premiere position within the computer benchmarking industry.

Following the news that the iPad would not support the Flash plugin, some people have been clamoring for the death of Flash. Not so fast cowboy, that horse ain't dead yet!. Although it is true that Flash is far from perfect it is currently a necessary evil because so many web games and web application are written in Flash.

Italian law proposal to defend Net Neutrality and promote Free Software has a hole that would make impossible for Public Administrations and Universities to get rid of proprietary file formats and software, even if they wanted to do it

This guide explains how you can run virtual machines with Sun VirtualBox 3.1 on a headless Ubuntu 9.10 server. Normally you use the VirtualBox GUI to manage your virtual machines, but a server does not have a desktop environment. Fortunately, VirtualBox comes with a tool called VBoxHeadless that allows you to connect to the virtual machines over a remote desktop connection, so there's no need for the VirtualBox GUI.

I opened the desktop configuration gui and expanded the number of desktops to 8 and then started flipping between them as I opened different applications on each environment. By then, everyone at the table was trying to get into position to see the Acer. They were talking about how nice it would be to encapsulate a number of tasks and leave them in various states of completion without worrying about losing their work when they switched between them. Then I hit the shortcut for the water drop effect. Simple things capture simple minds...or so it would seem.

Video editing in Linux is never an easy stuff. While there are several top-notch video editing software available for Linux users, most of them are not meant for the faint-hearted. With the release of OpenShot, the averagae users (like you and me) now have an easy to use video editor that they can fire up, drag their photos into the time frame and quickly produce a slideshow movie. OpenShot is a non-linear video editor for Linux. It can easily combine multiple video clips, audio clips, and images into a single project, and then export the video into many common video formats. Things that you can do with OpenShot include creating photo slide shows, edit home videos, create television commercials and on-line films, or anything else you can dream up.

Diamond Systems announced that it has originated a new, mezzanine-style expansion standard for SBCs (single board computers), COMs (computer-on-modules) and other embedded products. Involving a single low-cost connector and expansion modules "three-fifths the size of a credit card," the standard will be open and support any host form factor and processor, the company says.

On Tuesday, Facebook is expected to unveil changes to PHP, the language that helped make the social networking site a success - along with millions of other web sites. SD Times has outed the planned change here. Facebook wouldn't provide details when contacted by The Reg but said it would make more details available Tuesday morning, Pacific time. The changes have been described as either a re-write of the PHP runtime or a compiler for PHP. A change to PHP would be Facebook's latest donation to the language, which has also had contributions from Microsoft and the former Sun Microsystems over the years.

ActiveState, the dynamic languages experts, today launched ActiveState Business Edition, commercial-grade language distributions for Perl, Python and Tcl providing organizations open source compliance, commercial support, and cross-platform access. A slide presentation around ActiveState Business Edition is available on Slideshare.net: http://bit.ly/ayd49J

With all of this iPad buzz stirring up the tech world over the past couple of weeks, Chrome OS has almost been forgotten. That may have something to do with the fact that Google has yet to officially release the netbook-centric operating system to the public, but still, you'd expect a company like Google to keep the details flowing about a forthcoming operating system. Today it seems we're getting exactly what you'd expect, in response to all the recent tablet fanfare.

Apple turned up the heat in the mobile market last week when it unveiled its new iPad mobile computing device. Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation, has responded to Apple's product launch with a candid appraisal of Linux's strengths and weaknesses in the mobile market relative to Apple's mobile operating system. Zemlin, one of the Linux community's most vocal advocates, speculated last year that Linux could eventually become the dominant operating system for consumer electronics products. His argument was based largely on the assertion that Linux's lack of licensing costs will make it the most practical and affordable option for hardware vendors.

For the first time, we get to see what happens when a company that has built up an immense global business empire on the basis of its proprietary software takes over some of the most important open source projects around. Does it destroy them through mutual incomprehension? Or is it *changed* by them, moving towards their approaches? That's what we're going to find out over the next few years in the Great Oracle Experiment.

Now that the Sun acquisition is a done deal, Oracle has begun picking and choosing the products that will live on and which will fade out. While CEO Larry Ellison was adamant that there would be no wholesale slaughter of products or staffing cuts, the reality is that not everything can survive or receive full Oracle investment. Most of these discussions are available online from a collection of videos made during Oracle's (NASDAQ: ORCL) Product Strategy day earlier this week.

During the last two months Marcel and I ported all tree views in digiKam from Qt3 to Qt4 and its model view concept. These changes are now included in the svn trunk. The new code still needs some serious testing and we would appreciate your help on this.

Over the years at Phoronix there have been reviews on many Tyan motherboards for desktops, servers, and workstations. The build quality of these motherboards have always been very good; after all, Tyan has been around for two decades and their workstation/server products must be very dependable if they wish to maintain their premiere position within the industry. The Linux compatibility with the motherboards has also been generally quite good due to its dominant use on their operating systems. As our first Tyan review for 2010 we are looking at the S2915 n6650W and S2927 n3600B motherboards. Both motherboards are designed for AMD's Opteron 2000 series processors and have a similar feature set, but there are a few key differences between these two high-end workstation motherboards.

Use gnuplot to dynamically generate Web pages from your system using raw data to provide graphic images. This raw data typically contains MIS-related information, on system performance, storage, or database growth.