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In Burning the Ships, an open letter from then-20-year-old Bill Gates, written in 1976, is cited. In that letter, Gates says To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software. He is talking about computer software in what was then a burgeoning computer industry, run mainly as a hobby. He goes on to say that the prevailing assumption that hardware must be paid for but software is something to share is not a model for the successful creation of quality hardware. As the Open Source community has proven, his statements are not quite validated, but I am not opposed to developers making money for their code. At the beginning of this year, several people at Linux Journal and elsewhere, took a pledge to be DRM free.

Market share, market share, what's Linux's true market share? That, in essence, has been the question du jour on the Linux blogs in recent days. It all started when NetApplications' Hitslink.com released some statistics for April indicating that Linux just passed 1 percent for the first time. Around the same time, however, W3Counter published figures for the same month indicating that it had just passed 2 percent. Many FOSS aficionados, meanwhile, argue that it could be 6 percent or higher. The result? You guesstimated it: nothing short of chaos and confusion.

Last month the plans for Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 "Sandtorg" were outlined with this next major release of our Linux (and Mac OS X, OpenSolaris, and BSD too) benchmarking software set to introduce many new features for the testing core, Phoromatic for providing remote benchmarking support, a performance and benchmarking oriented Linux distribution, and many other advancements. Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 will not be released until late July or early August, but the first alpha release has been made available this afternoon.

Get your RSS feed readers ready because here is my list of the best sites/feeds to stay in touch with the latest developments in the linux community. This is the short list — there are many personal/professional blogs/sites that should be included in a full list. But, most of them are aggregated in the following sites.

An element of Hadopi which hasn't received much or enough attention as yet, is a section which specifies steps that can be taken by computer users to ensure that they will not be found liable under the new regime. What the law intends is to set up a meeting between security software vendors, antipiracy organizations and ISPs to decide what software you need to install on your machine, so that they can be sure that you behave yourself. If you don't fancy installing their device, then you'll just have to swallow any liability consequent to someone else using your machine or accessing your connection.

[Not really FOSS related, but still of importance I think. -- Sander]

KMyMoney is a true open-source program that surprised me when I first started using it. I didn’t even know it existed until my brother told me about it and I didn’t really know what to expect from the program, but I was very pleased by it’s feature set and by it’s overall look and feel. I have not been disappointed by using the program and if you give it a try, I don't think you will be either.

The European Commission on Wednesday will fine the world's biggest computer-chip maker, Intel Corp., for breaking European antitrust rules, people familiar with the matter said Friday.... Intel's trouble with the commission dates from 2000, when chip-maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc., of Sunnyvale, Calif., filed a complaint saying Intel was blocking its access to the market.

Hadoop's Java framework will make it uncompetitive relative to Google's C++ MapReduce implementation, based on work done per watt, and will cause a lot of large-scale wasted power consumption. I believe that Hadoop should re-target C++/LLVM. Until then, Google will hold an advantage over search efficiency.

Intel and Nokia have announced a joint partnership today to develop oFono, an open-source telephony solution. The oFono software stack is GPLv2 licensed and includes a high-level D-Bus API for use by other telephony applications and a low-level API for communicating with cellular modems and other devices.

More information (along with source-code and documentation) on this new Intel open-source project can be found at oFono.org...

The artifacts produced when your Java™ application fails can help you analyse the root causes of the failure. A standard API to facilitate postmortem analysis is being developed by the Java Community process, and the Apache Kato project is under way to produce a reference implementation and tools for this API. This article, the first in a two-part series, introduces the Post mortem JVM Diagnostics API (JSR 326) and summarises the ways Kato will help you make good use of it. Part 2 will explore postmortem-diagnosis scenarios in greater depth.

Conky is a free, light-weight system monitor for X, that displays any information on your desktop. Conky is licensed under the GPL and runs on Linux and BSD. Conky has more than 250 built in objects, including support for a plethora of OS stats (uname, uptime, CPU usage, mem usage, disk usage, “top” like process stats, and network monitoring, built in support for IMAP and POP3 and many popular music players (MPD, XMMS2, BMPx, Audacious).

LXer Feature: 11-May-2009

Linuxfest Northwest is an annual free, two-day event held at Bellingham Technical College in Bellingham, Washington on the last weekend in April. It has become a hub of Linux activity in the Northwest with several of the Washington area Linux Users Groups supporting it. Visitors seem to come from all over the country especially those places that don't have a Linux conference anywhere near them.

Not so long ago I was telling you about the new version 2 of Cairo Dock which was at the time still in beta/rc and that it doesn't look at all like the old 1 branch - this new version is by far the best dock menu application I've seen for any operating system. A few days ago, version 2.0.0 full was released. Here are some of the features of the new 2.0.0 version:

Big, purple, and old, the Yahoo! bus parked outside this weekend's Open Hack Day venue in London looked like a survivor from a bygone era. So too, Yahoo!? Yahoo! remains a web giant, the second most visited web destination after Google, according to both comScore and Alexa, and second only to Google in search engine share. On the other hand, in search, Yahoo! comes second by a long way, according to Nielsen online (warning: PDF) and Net Applications. Yahoo! also struggles for attention. It might be famous for rebuffing Microsoft's proposed purchase last year, but when it comes to trendy topics like cloud computing, or the social web, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Twitter are talked about more. So why should anybody, especially developers, care about Yahoo!?

Welcome to this year's 19th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! With mobile computing being the next operating system battleground, it's hardly surprising that many industry players are focusing on these increasingly popular devices. One of the most promising among them, Moblin, has been through some major changes recently, both in terms of ownership and development goals. Read our feature story for the roundup of its recent past and probable future to learn more about the project. In the news section, Debian ditches the GNU C Library in favour of the more flexible Embedded GLIBC, Fedora finalises all features for the upcoming Leonidas release which includes delta support for RPMs, Slackware switches to packages compressed with LZMA compression mechanism, and the Ubuntu community looks to create yet another derivative based on the LXDE. Finally, don't miss our tips and trick section which provides a step-by-step guide of upgrading a stable Mandriva Linux 2009.1 to the latest Cooker, Mandriva's bleeding-edge development branch. Happy reading!

Nokia has reduced the barriers to contributing code to the Qt cross-platform framework. The Nokia-owned Qt Software has created a public repository for outsiders to contribute and monitor code and eliminated the need for filling in a faxed copyright assessment of code and manual checking by Qt Software. Instead, contributors will now be asked to grant Qt Software a non-exclusive right to re-use code as a part of Qt, the first time they submit code for inclusion.

SAN FRANCISCO - If the Obama administration is serious about more aggressively responding to antitrust complaints, some of technology's biggest companies could have to rethink their business strategies or expansion plans. The administration said Monday it has abandoned Bush-era policies that it criticized as too friendly to companies that dominate their markets. The Justice Department didn't call out any companies by name, and its shift in approach will affect all industries. But it raises the stakes for tech heavyweights whose practices have been questioned elsewhere more than in the United States.

Microsoft has warned the European Commission that planned regulations covering Windows and browsers will only increase Google's dominance of the search business. The European Commission (EC) proposes to force Microsoft to distribute other browsers with Windows as well. Firefox, Opera, and of course Chrome all automatically default to Google as their primary search engine.

Another blast from the past. Real-life PacMan pitting humans against living insects!