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The Linux Foundation, on behalf of its members, would like to register its serious objections to the current BBC/OFCOM proposal, which would impose content management controls on new free-to-air high definition channels. The plan, which involves restrictively licensing the Huffman codes used in the electronic programme guide, would have a negative effect on open source applications and would distort the markets which have built up around those applications.

Red Hat has pushed out another rev of its Linux variant. With Enterprise Linux 5.5, support for the latest processors from Advanced Micro Devices, Intel, and IBM has been back-ported to the Linux 2.6.18 at the heart of the RHEL 5 stack.

British organization Public-i has made its ePetitions software publicly available under European Public License (EUPL) on the Forge page of the Open Source Observatory and Repository Europe (OSOR) information service.

Google and Adobe have announced that they are to collaborate on development of the Adobe's Flash plug-in. As a first step, Google's Chrome web browser is to have Adobe's Flash built in. Google have updated the Chrome developer channel with a new version which includes the integrated Flash Player and a basic plug-in manager. Google will also work with Adobe to enhance Chrome's sandbox technology to include plug-ins like Flash Player.

Open source software champions have been influential in excluding software from the scope of patents in the new Patents Bill. Clause 15 of the draft Bill, as reported back from the Commerce Select Committee, lists a number of classes of invention which should not be patentable and includes the sub-clause "a computer program is not a patentable invention." ...Christie and other supporters acknowledge the battle is not won yet. The Bill now goes back to the full Parliament for its second reading.

Linux was a resounding failure on netbooks, so what makes this French start-up firm think it can succeed with an Ubuntu Linux derivative?

Does motivation matter? Open source contributors are increasingly people who are paid to work on open source. GNOME contributor Lucas Rocha asks how this impacts communities over the long term. This is not a new question by any stretch. People worried about the influence of commercial interests in open source in the early days before Red Hat was a public company and when Slackware was still considered a major Linux distribution. I suspect people will still be asking this question for years to come.

A federal jury has decided that UNIX is owned by Novell - not SCO. But no, this does not mark the end of SCO's epic legal battle against the Linux industry. On Tuesday, the AP reports, after a trial in Salt Lake City, Utah, a jury ruled that Novell still controls the copyrights to UNIX despite a 15-year-old deal that transfered certain other UNIX rights to an earlier incarnation of the Utah-based SCO.

I was in the Peace Corps in Cape Verde as an ICT volunteer from 2006 to 2008, and while I was there, the One Laptop Per Child project came on my radar and I became pretty enamored of the prospect of bringing some XOs to the country, or at least raising awareness of the idea within the government. However, after considering all the obstacles with some fellow volunteers and local educators, including a Ministry of Education delegate, I kept running into the same issue: So we get the laptops, and then what? We discussed the potential of OLPC endlessly, but eventually came to the conclusion that the program was a mess, especially after the departure of some of their best minds and the insistence that the hardware is the only thing to supply. But if OLPC itself won't supply the rest of the framework, somebody must.

The concept of open IT standards, which is central to the European Interoperability Framework (EIF), is to be watered down to such a degree that it will fade into insignificance. At least that's the impression given by a current EIF 2 release leaked to the Free Software Foundation Europe.

Solaris 10, the official stable version of Sun's UNIX operating system, is no longer available to users at no cost. Oracle has adjusted the terms of the license, which now requires users to purchase a service contract in order to use the software. Sun's policy was that anyone could use Solaris 10 for free without official support. Users could get a license entitling them to perpetual commercial use by filling out a simple survey and giving their e-mail address to Sun. Oracle is discontinuing this practice, and is repositioning the free version as a limited-duration trial.

In a previous MTE article, you learned how to create a unified desktop using the KDE 4 Oxygen themes for KDE, GTK, and Firefox. Oxygen is clean, simple, and visually pleasing, but some people want a little more flexibility. QtCurve is a theming system that gives you the configuring power to have varieties of themes, from downright plain to shiny eye candy.

Hacker Geohot claims he has a plan to permit PlayStation 3 (PS3) users to continue running Linux on the gaming system, despite Sony's announcement that it will block alternate operating system installs. On Sunday, Sony announced that a 3.21 update due on April 1 will prohibit the installation of alternate installations, due to security concerns. Sony's upcoming April Fool's Day update, which prohibits alternate OS installations on systems prior to the new "Slim" models launched in September, is no laughing matter to Linux hackers who have enjoyed a four-year run of loading distributions such as Yellow Dog Linux on the gaming box. Yet the last laugh may be on Sony if well-known hacker Geohot (George Hotz) gets his way.

IBM and Indian company Simmtronics are marketing their 10" netbook at a cost under $200. The Simmbook netbook with a 10.1" screen at 1024 x 600 pixels (VSVGA) works with the Atom N270 processor (1.6 GHz and 533 MHz FSB), a GByte of DDR2 RAM (maximum 2 GBytes with a slot) and a 160-GByte SATA hard drive.

According to the peekabot project's Web site: "peekabot is a distributed real-time 3-D visualization tool for robotics researchers and developers, written in C++. Its purpose is to simplify the visualization needs faced by a roboticist daily—using visualization as a debugging aid or making fancy slides for a presentation, for example.

Open-source enterprise software company Red Hat has updated its virtualization platform, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (REV), to include support for desktop virtualization, the company announced on Monday. The beta version of REV 2.2 will include a number of new programs that will allows customers to run a virtualized desktop infrastructure (VDI). "It will allow you to deploy a RHEL [Red Hat Enterprise Linux] desktop, or Windows XP, or Windows 7, on a secure high-performance hypervisor platform," said Andrew Cathrow, who is a Red Hat senior product marketing manager. "By using a VDI, you are moving the [operating system] from the end user's device into the data center, where it is easier to manage and maintain."

Security expert Andreas Bogk warns that, despite recent PHP improvements, the session IDs of users who are logged into PHP applications remain guessable. Upon close examination, the alleged improvements display frightening weaknesses.

I work on a project on which I regularly want to grep the directory tree for a particular word but without including the cvs/ and doc/ directories. Happily, grep has an exclude-dir option to do just this..

Larry Ellison likes to buzz rotten fruit off some corporate type’s head. Over the years Microsoft, PeopleSoft, BEA Systems, SAP, and Red Hat have lined up to be been duly pelted during calls with Wall St or during Ellison's company's mega OpenWorld customer and partner conference.

Hello again to all the KDE people. We are here with a third interview. Last time we had Tobias König, a KDE PIM developer. Today it’s the turn of Aleix Pol, a contributor to KDE EDU and KDevelop. As usual, there is also the original interview in Italian if you prefer to read that.