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A software company based in Redmond, Wash. has released 20,000 lines of code under GPLv2 for three Linux device drivers. Microsoft says its first open source Linux code contribution is designed to speed the performance of the operating system when it's run in a Hyper-V virtual machine.

The mobile industry is becoming interesting. We have finally reached a point where the smartphone is actually smart and the average user can gain serious benefits from using one. How did this come about? In a word: competition. When the iPhone arrived on the scene, users scrambled to get their hands on it, and competitors scrambled to make a device that would have the same appeal. It has taken a while, but the competition has arrived. Android phones, Palm Pre, BlackBerry Bold--they are all outstanding entries into this market. But two of those entries will, in my opinion, outshine the rest for one simple reason--open source. Why is open source going to help raise these phones above the competition? Here are 10 reasons.

Last week VIA re-released their Chrome 9 DRM in hopes of pushing it into the mainline Linux kernel. However, the only user of this DRM code at present is their Linux binary graphics driver and VIA Technologies has no intentions of providing an open-source Chrome 9 3D driver. However, within a month or so, VIA claims to be releasing a new 2D driver that can use this DRM to some extent. This whole situation with VIA has reignited the discussion over what to do when a company is interested in pushing an open-source DRM driver into the mainline Linux tree, but it's really only used by closed-source user-space drivers.

Microsoft dropped a mini-bombshell on Monday, announcing that it is contributing thousands of lines of code for inclusion in Linux. But lest anyone think Microsoft suffered a massive head trauma over the weekend, the code it is releasing isn't really about helping Linux compete better with Microsoft. The drivers are really geared at making Windows a better host for Linux.

Microsoft Corp.'s move to release three of its drivers to Linux, however technically modest it may be, could put pressure on other closed-source vendors to follow suit. The uneven availability of drivers for Linux has long contributed to the open-source operating system's forbidding reputation among non-techies, and -- despite its free price tag -- to its slow growth. According to Greg Kroah-Hartman, a longtime Linux developer for Novell Inc. and the head of the Linux Driver Project, Linux today "supports hundreds of thousands of drivers."

Lately, I’ve had a tendency to make fun of the mainstream applications people use to develop websites, asserting my nerd supremacy my touting my love for superior applications. Nothing good comes out of applications like Dreamweaver and FrontPage, I say, except for buggy and ugly websites. I would post snide little comments on Reddit, making fun of bad design and telling people to use Textmate. Then, a more elite nerd than I came along and ruined it for me by suggesting I wasn’t good enough because I didn’t use Emacs.

Microsoft is embracing cancer to help ensure Windows survives server-room consolidation. The company has released 20,000 lines of Windows kernel code under version two of the GPL. Microsoft called the license it once hated "the community's preferred license". How things have changed. Back in 2001, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie described the GPL as a threat to users' intellectual property and the independent commercial software sector.

KDE announced today that the one millionth commit has been made to its Subversion-based revision control system. "This is a wonderful milestone for KDE," said Cornelius Schumacher, President of the KDE e.V. Board of Directors. "It is the result of years of hard work by a large, diverse, and talented team that has come together from all over the globe to develop one of the largest and most comprehensive software products in the world." The 500,000th commit took place on January 19th, 2006, and the 750,000th commit 23 months later on December 18th, 2007. In contrast, only nineteen more months were required to reach the 1,000,000 commit milestone.

When I took Calculus in college, my Professor would give us substantial partial credit for test problems that we got wrong for minor arithmetic errors, and rightfully so, too. Sometimes even simple-sounding problems resulted in a full page, or more, of calculations. Simply changing a -1 to a +1 early on in a problem could be completely devastating.

The open source world is cheering as Red Hat joins the S&P 500. It’s a huge vote of confidence in Red Hat. But is it a vote of confidence in the open source business model? Or more of a sign that Red Hat is miles ahead of its open source rivals on Wall Street and in the channel? Here are some clues.

Zeroshell can manage simple VPNs, and more complex bonded VPNs for higher throughput and redundancy. Follow Eric Geier as he bores secure Linux VPN tunnels through the big bad Internet.

If you are using an OS based on the Synaptic Package Manager, you must have noticed by now that when trying to install a new package through Synaptic, it draws in miscellaneous packages that are needed for the program to work. These packages are called dependencies. Yet, you might have not noticed that when removing the first-original package, Synaptic doesn’t automatically remove the dependencies that were installed with it.

Reviewing a book in its Fourth Edition is both easy and hard. It's easy in the sense that, unless the book has completely changed, it is still essentially the same as prior editions. If it has done well up until now, chances are it will still do well. Of course the idea for the publisher (assuming the book has done well) is to at least make sure that the book maintains its reputation and hopefully get even better. For me, that translates into, once a good review, always a good review...maybe. The hard part is to pick out the bits that may have changed and evaluate them as part of the current mix. If the book hasn't changed at all and assuming Ubuntu has, then my review changes and not for the better. If the book has changed, how does it stack up to Ubuntu's changes? Does the book still meet the needs of the audience?

I am always surprised by Nicholas Negroponte, he really keeps me on my toes with his pronouncements, and today is no exception. In an interview with Vivian Yeo, where he proudly trumpets his success in selling XO laptops, he also says that the Sugar Learning Platform was OLPC's biggest mistake. Let's start off with the good news. Negroponte tells us that over 900,000 laptops are in the hands of children from 31 nationalities. He claims another 230,000 are being shipped, with a backlog of 600,000 XO's. OLPC Peru is the bulk of the laptop sales, with 350,000 deployed and a commitment for 2.2 million total XO laptops.

Wikipedia’s decision to support Ogg Theora for video uploads may be the last chance to break the proprietary video monopoly embodied in H.264. Microsoft, Google and Apple have all built H.264 support into their products because it readily adapts to Digital Rights Management, without which studios and other video rights owners have been unwilling to make content available online.

In their recent Mozilla Labs "Design Challenge Summer 09" competition, Mozilla posed the question – "How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?". Out of the 128 submitted concepts, four "Best in Class" honors were chosen and a "People's Choice" award was bestowed. The peoples choice award went to Faber Ludens for his CubeZilla concept, in which sites can be arranged into equal segments on each face of a cube and rotated, in a similar way to a Rubik's Cube.

There’s no question that Ubuntu dominates the desktop-Linux world. With commanding market share and a huge user community, it’s by far the most well supported and documented open-source platform in the desktop world. On servers, however, the situation is different–and Canonical needs to address it if it wants to become a real player in the server market.

KDE and GNOME developers drafted a secret storage API designed to be a common interface for desktop applications that need to store passwords and other confidential data.

The hype over this operating system has been so heavy that failure would be a heavy blow. Google introduced Chrome OS July 7, promising a lightweight, Linux-based operating system for netbooks that will enable speedy Web applications. The move was a major shot at Microsoft, whose Windows desktop operating system Google intimated was antiquated. We at eWEEK have already provided 10 reasons why we are excited about Google's Chrome OS. But in the tradition of weighing the cons with the pros, there are some concerns about the new Chrome OS as well.

In an historic move, Microsoft Monday submitted driver source code for inclusion in the Linux kernel under a GPLv2 license. The code consists of four drivers that are part of a technology called Linux Device Driver for Virtualization. The drivers, once added to the Linux kernel, will provide the hooks for any distribution of Linux to run on Windows Server 2008 and its Hyper-V hypervisor technology. Microsoft will provide ongoing maintenance of the code.