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The jury verdict last Friday in favor of Red Hat and Novell in a case based on bad software patents owned by "non-practicing entities" is an important victory for the open source community. Those in the business of acquiring bad software patents to coerce payments or bring lawsuits should be worried. Two such businesses were plaintiffs in our case, and they did their best to confuse the jury in one of their favorite locales, eastern Texas. But it didn't work. The jury unanimously found that the patents were not infringed, and, even worse for the plaintiffs, that the patents were invalid.

Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) faces a class action lawsuit following a recent an update to its PlayStation 3 console that removes the ability to put alternate operating systems on the console. The late March update for the PlayStation 3 restricts the installation of an alternative operating system to the console's native OS. The feature, called 'Install Other OS,' has been removed, three years after the console's introduction, "due to security concerns," the company said in a blog post.

Firefox is the most popular and widely used free software application and boasts more than a billion downloads and more than 350 million users. The H discusses its history, present and future with Mitchell Baker, chair of the Mozilla Foundation.

There has been some debate about which platform represents the sweet spot for Android? Is it best suited as a smart-phone? Can Android dominate the netbook market? Maybe it can excel in the mid-market as a flexible and capable touch-tablet?

The RadeonHD Linux driver that came about in 2007 following the announcement of AMD's open-source driver strategy has had an interesting history. This driver was developed by Novell's developers, but now they are even dropping it from their openSUSE distribution.

At a US federal court in Marshall, Texas, Red Hat and Novell have won a legal victory in a dispute that started in 2007 about intellectual property rights. The jury found that several of the charges brought against the two Linux distributors by patent licensing firms were unfounded. As Red Hat announced on Friday, the patents were found to be "invalid and worthless." The jury found that the three patents were not "important inventions" as had been claimed.

Android is fairly unique in the ways it allows multiple applications to run at the same time. Developers coming from a different platform may find the way it operates surprising. Understanding its behavior is important for designing applications that will work well and integrate seamlessly with the rest of the Android platform. This article covers the reasons for Android's multitasking design, its impact on how applications work, and how you can best take advantage of Android's unique features.

The Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) announced a call for papers for the next Embedded Linux Conference Europe (ELCE), scheduled for Oct. 27-28 in Cambridge, UK. CELF is looking for a variety of technical presentations focused on the use of embedded Linux in consumer electronics products.

Virtual Linux is accomplished through many techniques, ranging from emulation to platform to OS virtualization. Indeed, Linux is a unique operating system in its breadth of virtualization solutions that are available. In this article, we'll explore the various ways that virtualization is achieved and then review the various solutions provided through virtual Linux. When we talk about virtualization solutions, we tend to talk about specific products offered by specific companies. But when we talk about virtualization solutions with Linux, we instead talk about a rich and diverse open source ecosystem.

On Saturday, April 10th, I was in Austin Texas for the inaugural Texas Linux Fest (TXLF), a community-run FLOSS conference. The idea to stage the show arose last August during OSCON, picked up steam in the fall, and in the end a little under 400 people turned out — including speakers and volunteers — which most considered a successful number for a first year event.

..ECMA CLI would have given the web both strongly typed and loosely typed programming languages. It would have given developers a choice between performance and scriptability. A programming language choice (use the right tool for the right job) and would have in general made web pages faster just by moving performance sensitive code to strongly typed languages.

Virtually all of Chrome's April expansion came at the expense of Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer, which dropped 0.7 percentage points to finish the month at 59.95%, the first time that IE has fallen under the 60% mark.... Mozilla Corp.'s open-source Firefox, on the other hand, was up last month, albeit by only 0.07 percentage points to 24.6%. April was the second month in a row that Firefox trended up, a victory of sorts in light of the fact that it had lost ground for four straight months starting in November 2009.

Understanding the fundamentals of Linux is the basis for being productive as a system administrator. Coupling each of the tools available, and knowing which tool to use at the right time, is the key to effectively managing complex administration projects. Mark Sobell has again compiled a great collection of applications and utilities in A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, and his experience shows in this second edition.

Sys-V init has long been the standard solution for booting. It's kind of easy to work with, it kind of works and everybody kind of knows it. However, being open minded, let's look at an alternative approach. There are quite a few alternatives. All of them focus on improving boot times. This is accomplished by starting and running different processes simultaneously and asynchronously. Doing type of boot attempts to use all (more) parts of the hardware simultaneously and avoid having to wait for slow hardware.

LXer Feature: 03-May-2010

The big news this week was Ubuntu 10.04 being released and all the hoopla surrounding it, but not to be missed was HTC's settlement with Microsoft over a Android patent deal, the challenges of Linux netbook design, Sony starts to feel the heat for blocking Linux installs on its PS3 and put windows to its most appropriate use, make a bootable Linux USB stick with it. Enjoy!

The Linux and the open source community doesn't just create great desktop and server solutions. They also create worthy router solutions, many which are open, free, and/or Linux-based. You'll find firmware replacements for open Wi-Fi routers that you flash or upload to the router. Additionally, there are Linux-based distributions that install onto generic Intel/AMD PCs or run as LiveCDs. Plus there are options for embedded systems, servers, and appliances.

If you know a thing or two about Android, and a free trip to the next TED conference is your kind of thing, then the app developers at Snaptic may have just the contest that you've been looking for. The competition in question, Snaptic's "Move Your Apps" developer challenge, calls on Android developers to create new applications that move users to move. Co-sponsored by the non-profit HopeLab — which works to improve the quality of life for young people with chronic illness — the challenge will reward coders who come up with unique ways of promoting activity via Android apps.

Your editor has just returned from the Linux Foundation's annual Collaboration Summit, held in San Francisco. LFCS is a unique event; despite becoming more developer-heavy over the years, it still pulls together an interesting combination of people from the wider Linux ecosystem. The following article is not intended to be a comprehensive report from the summit; it is, instead, a look at a few of the more interesting thoughts that came from there.

Less than two weeks ago we reported on the Mac OS X Steam client confirming the existence of a Linux client and then found more Linux references too. We then found the unreleased Steam Linux binaries that were under active development. Some still didn't believe the existence of a Steam client for Linux with Source Engine support, but it's something we have said for nearly two years based upon our sources and then the emergence of these binaries.

Is Steve Jobs at it again? Just days after reaffirming Apple's decision to ban Adobe's Flash from the iPhone, the company's CEO is reportedly pointing the finger at another multimedia technology he sees struggling with major shortcomings -- echoing similar comments, as it turns out, from Apple's longtime archrival, Microsoft.