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On May 18, the Linux Foundation announced that it had sent a joint letter to the American Law Institute protesting some provisions in the ALI's proposed principles to be applied to the law of software contracts. That was likely the first that many LWN readers had heard of this particular initiative - or, indeed, of the ALI in general. Your editor, being a masochistic sort of person, has plowed through all 305 pages of the principles (which were made official by the ALI on May 20) with an eye toward their effect on free software. What follows is a non-lawyerly summary of what he found.

Google has made some progress in porting its Chrome browser to the Linux and Mac platforms, though it acknowledged the test versions it's made available are still rough around the edges. Expanding Chrome's availability could open the door to Mac users as well as a potentially sizable population of Android-based netbook users.

ReactOS, the project to create a Windows NT-compatible operating system, has published another news update with some interesting news items. The legal position of the ReactOS Foundation has been strengthened, and now has a VeriSign certificate that might help other open source projects as well, the new ATA driver is more or less complete, and there's some progress in the area of video drivers.

Leading up to Computex, I heard a lot of hype about netbooks running Android and machines, about the size of a netbook, running an ARM-based processor like those used in most phones, rather than the traditional x86 processor used in most PCs. So, I walked around the show floor looking for such machines and came back pretty disappointed. For the most part, the PCs on display at Computex reflected a "Wintel" world. Every PC vendor showcased a wide variety of Windows machines, and most were really pushing Windows 7, following Microsoft's own push. I was looking for some Android-based netbooks but found only one, sitting in a glass box in Acer's booth. The netbook had just a static screen—and a small one at that—running on an older Aspire One netbook model, so it wasn't very impressive.

One of the points stressed at the MSC Malaysia Open Source Conference 2009 is that there need not be a battle between the open-source software (OSS) group and its proprietary-software counterpart. Gery Messer, vice-president of technology solutions in Asia Pacific and Japan for open-source Linux distribution vendor Red Hat, said the two types of software can co-exist, possibly drawing on each other’s strengths.

"You're never too old to try something new; computers are a heck of a lot of fun; and anyone can learn to do anything." I still believe that, and most of the time it's true.

A beta version of StormOS has emerged, which is a desktop distribution that is based upon the Nexenta Core Platform that in turn is derived from OpenSolaris but with an Ubuntu user-land. The StormOS project emerged out of the an OpenSolaris user being dissatisfied with the slow pace of OpenSolaris on netbooks and preferring the APT packaging system to Sun's Image Packaging System. The beta version of StormOS is shipping with an Xfce 4 desktop and -- unlike the current releases of OpenSolaris -- even ships with a word processor.

Step aside Apple and AMD, there's a new Sherriff in town: Lintel.

The Ruby on Rails developers have, in their blog, noted a security problem which can allow the circumvention of password protection of pages or content. This is related to the return value from the digest authentication code, authenticate_or_request_with_http_digest. This code should return true if the user is found and false if not. However the documentation was unclear, and it was possible for a developer to return nil from the method.

A new bi-weekly development update of Wine is now available. The release of Wine 1.1.23 is not as exciting as some of the other development updates recently that have brought cleaner Direct3D code, initial Shader Model 4.0 support, and other exciting enhancements, but there are a few changes the developers list as important for version 1.1.23.

Intel announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Wind River Systems, one of the top providers of embedded Linux distributions and tools. Intel plans to acquire Wind River for $11.50 per share in cash, or about $884 million, making it a wholly owned subsidiary.

The release of the new version 2.2 of the realtime strategy game Warzone 2100 comes with improvements in graphics and game-balance.

Russia investigates Microsoft (MSFT) for antitrust violations with Windows XP.

[ Actually, this story is not about free software but about the addiction of Russia to XP and their habit of controlling whatever company does business in Russia. It's about what happens if two monopolies collide. I find the whole case too freakin' funny to let pass unnoticed. If Microsoft stops distributing XP, at least the post will be delivered as the Russian post offices run Linux - hkwint ]

When Black and Decker trains new sales person they ask, "Why do people buy a Black and Decker Drill?"After all of the discussion about power, size, and battery live, the answer is simply, "Because they want a hole." Sugar is in the same situation. "Why would someone want Sugar?" After the discussions about tool kits, screen size, and battery life. The answer is simply, "To help their kids learn." The desktop, and even the computer become invisible as the number and quality of learning activities increases. The learning activities, remain visible and occupy a child's full attention while the rest of the system stays out of sight

Linux has a lot of great tools for recovering deleted files, including filesystem commands that aren't specifically designed for recovery, but can do it anyway. Juliet Kemp shows us how the lsof command can be used to recover deleted files.

I need at least one i386 installation here at Studio Dave because some production software is not yet 64-bit ready, and I happen to need that software. SuperCollider3 can run on a 64-bit system, but only after some tricky maneuvers; the label printing programs for my Lightscribe drive are 32-bit only; and VST/VSTi audio plugins still work best in a pure 32-bit system. My main production machine runs a pure 64-bit distribution (64 Studio), but an i386 box is still required for the complete Studio Dave.

Pygrub ZFS support for the most recent Sun Solaris Nevada and OpenSolaris images has been introduced into Xen 3.4 via change sets 19323,19322, what makes OpenSolaris 2009.06 PV DomU install pretty much straight forward vs it happened under Xen 3.3.1 Hypervisor.

Pain-free networking is the promise of Gnome's NetworkManager. For mobile laptop users NetworkManager is great, but what about desktop and server deployments? Charlie Schluting takes it for a torture-test to find out.

The Linux Driver Project (DLP), started by kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman about two and a half years ago, is a group of Linux kernel developers and project managers that focus on developing and maintaining Linux kernel drivers for device manufacturers. The group works with manufacturers to create free drivers for various hardware. The project also aims to make sure that work on new and experimental drivers, takes place publicly.

Although it has been one of Novell's success stories, the company has none-the-less remained circumspect about committing to Linux. Novell's recently released figures for the second quarter of 2009 showed an 8.5 per cent drop in sales compared to the previous year – not a big surprise in light of the much debated economic crisis. Even so, the latest figures are in line with the broad trend at Novell. Sales have been falling for years – from just shy of $300 million per quarter in late 2004 to around $216 million now.