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The K Desktop Environment (KDE) is incredibly popular in the world of GNU/Linux. Distributions such as SUSE and Mandrakelinux use it by default. KDE has some useful features that, while easily accessible, are less prominent. Just as a camera inexplicably makes a cell phone more fun to use, KDE's cool but unnoticed details may make it more attractive to prospective users. Read on to learn about a few such features may help you every day.

Industry watchers claim Sun Microsystems is playing a dangerous game with its decision to position Solaris as open source – a move which will see it go head to head with Linux

In his second visit to the country in as many years, Matthew J Szulik is a keynote speaker at Nasscom and Linux Asia events

Developers now have a choice to use the open source Python language for mobile application development on Nokia Series 60 phones, the Finnish company announced.

the OSI anticipates expanding the board to nine people, drawing many new board members from outside the US. To lead these new initiatives, the board has elected new officers. Russ Nelson will become President of the OSI, and Michael Tiemann will become Vice President. Danese Cooper will continue as Secretary / Treasurer.

The Open Source Initiative--the organization that certifies open-source licenses--says that it has reorganized in an effort to bring more structure to the open-source software movement and that co-founder Eric Raymond is stepping down from his position as president.

Firefox's success has seemed to take even Mozilla advocates by surprise. On the SpreadFirefox site's blog, it was noted that on January 29th, Firefox downloads topped the 21 million mark.

The OSI board has approved five new licenses for certification.

Andreas Brand is a sociologist researching ways of recruiting and organising teams of volunteers on the Internet. He has been studying KDE as an example of an open source project based upon collaboration without hierarchies. As part of his work he has conducted interviews with KDE developers, participated in several open source conferences, analysed the KDE home page, and distributed a questionnaire among volunteers. We asked him about his thoughts on the KDE development model.

Software Freedom Law Center to be led by noted IP lawyer and professor Eben Moglen of Columbia University - initial funding support from Open Source Development Labs

Going into 2005, Mandrakesoft is a company that has gone against everything that was predicted. It has survived the dot-com bust, become profitable and continues to frown on the idea of moving away from Free and Open Source Software development in favor of the proprietary approach advocated by many of the newer GNU/Linux distribution developers. To catch up on the changes since their last full interview, Mandrakesoft co-founder Gaël Duval recently agreed to talk with OFB’s editor-in-chief, Timothy R. Butler, about where the company is heading and the state of the industry at the present time.

At the OSDL Enterprise Linux Summit, an attorney for Black Duck Software advises enterprises using open-source software to establish policies to protect against intellectual property claims.

Moving away from a single, core LSB, the Free Standards Group has decided to break it down into modules that can be combined to build a server or a desktop standard.

Estimated 120,000 people winding up the World Social Forum meeting in Brazil. FOSS figures prominently in the agenda. " Activists at the World Social Forum, where Microsoft is viewed as a corporate bogeyman, urged developing nations yesterday to leap into the information age with free, open-source software."

Microsoft, Oracle and other conventional vendors must reinvent themselves to vie in the global marketplace where open source contends.

Ubuntu is a Debian-based distribution that is probably the most philosophical of all Linux distributions, which is saying a lot in the Open Source space. Bill von Hagen discovers the philosophy behind the code in this review.

Last year IBM took a significant step forward in cooperation with the free software community, by offering blanket licenses for 500 of its patents to all free software developers. This does not cover all of IBM's software patents, which must number in the thousands. And there are other areas where IBM does not yet cooperate with the free software community--they have not provided the necessary information to port a free BIOS to ThinkPads, for instance, and they are still pursuing Treacherous Computing. Nonetheless, this is a real step. Recently Sun made an announcement that superficially seems similar. It said that Sun had given us "free access to Sun OpenSolaris related patents under the Common Development and Distribution License." But those words do not really make sense. The CDDL is a license for the copyright on software, not a policy for licensing patents. It applies to specific code and nothing else. (Copyright and patents have essentially nothing in common in the requirements they impose on the public.)

The new Linux-based POS systems have been installed in about two-thirds of the company's 140-plus supermarkets in New England and New York. Hannaford Bros., a division of Brussels-based Delhaize Group, expects to complete the implementation of the thin-client systems by October, said CIO Bill Homa.

Damn Small Linux is a really amazing distribution and, as we noted, rather than having DSL take over the whole machine and then the PC requiring a reboot to get back to Windows, there is a version called "Embedded DSL" that can run alongside Windows in much the same way that coLinux can.

[Dell CEO] Rollins says the long-term solution to the interoperability issues faced by companies that want to deploy both Windows and Linux will involve some kind of systems-management approach that makes it easier for companies to run and manage the two environments side by side. Once that happens, he says, the differences in the two platforms will become “immaterial” to the companies that use them.