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In late April, two weeks before Microsoft announced the biggest batch of layoffs in its history, the company experienced a lesser-noticed milestone that may have signaled even more about the state of its business. For the first time in Microsoft’s history, revenue in its Server & Tools division — which makes behind-the-scenes corporate systems and programming software — surpassed revenue in its Windows Client division, which makes the PC operating system responsible for much of the company’s past success.

Vancouver city council has endorsed the principles of making its data open and accessible to everyone where possible, adopting open standards for that data and considering open source software when replacing existing applications. "So it's great," said Andrea Reimer, the city councillor who proposed the motion that passed Thursday afternoon. "The local online community was all very, very happy, and now we just have to look forward on implementation and figuring sort of the order with which we do that."

BERLIN — Microsoft and the European Commission have canceled the only hearing planned in an antitrust investigation into the company’s Internet browser because of a dispute over the attendance of European regulators serving as advisers. As a result, the commission, which began its inquiry after a complaint by Opera, a small browser maker in Norway, will reach its decision and levy a fine based on written statements from Microsoft and its adversaries. Microsoft decided not to give oral evidence in the case after it was unable to persuade the commission to move the meeting, scheduled for June 3 through 5, so that it did not conflict with a global antitrust conference in Zurich that draws European antitrust regulators.

LWN recently posted a brief article on the GNOME Foundation's plea for support to help it get through a difficult year. Some of the comments on that news questioned the role of the foundation and its executive director. In response, the Foundation offered to make a board member - Luis Villa - available for an interview. Luis quickly answered our questions, despite being in the middle of final exams at the time; some people, it seems, will do anything to get out of studying. The result is an interesting view into the state of the GNOME project and where it is heading.

Another important bounty quota has been reached in the Power2People website, and this time the result comes from a common effort of the whole Amiga/Morphos/AROS Community. The result of this bounty being reached is that the Poseidon USB stack will be ported to AROS, and released as open source under the AROS Public License.

Installing any OS can still sometimes be a tedious task and one that scares the wits out of the average computer user. And, it’s just more fun to buy a computer with Linux already on it and not have to pay the Microsoft tax. You can find Linux servers sold all sort of places, but where can you find Linux desktops for sale? Here is a list.

Microsoft finally agreed to implement ODF support in Microsoft Office, but they didn't do it quite right, hurting both Microsoft and the ODF specification.

Regnum Online, a Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Game that has a native Linux client offered by its developers (NGD Studios), has received a major overhaul. Regnum Online is one of the very few MMORPGs that has a native Linux client, but now its own game engine got a whole lot more powerful. The game engine has been reworked greatly and is now known as NG3D2.0, but later this year they already plan to introduce another major update on top of that.

Discover the Kickfire appliance--if this isn't the ultimate Linux device, one might not exist.

More funny pictures from the "world wide interweb" - I think that's what Mr. Monk calls it ;)

Michelle Minkin, a friend of this effort and an all-around nice lady; suggested that we auction off the opportunity to destroy these computers. We were almost ready to start soliciting the community for creative ways to make them go BOOM and film it for YouTube consumption. You are right, it was a juvenile and silly idea. One I personally liked thank you very much. Sure it might have been silly. So was spending 9 hours of my life seeking the solution for a problem that took all of 1 minute to solve.

Until September 20, 2007, nobody had ever sued anybody for violating the General Public License (GPL) — not a single company, project, or individual developer in the license's then-eighteen year existence. This momentous first, settled in a mere month, was only the beginning — the beginning of a landslide of litigation large enough to make Apple's lawyers cry.

I'll keep this quick. I followed the advice of Nathan from OpenBSD101 and replaced my upgraded OpenBSD 4.5 installation with an entirely new, reinstalled system. That took all of 10 minutes. I followed the advice of my friend Denny and was able to keep my /home partition intact. And all seemed well when I booted back into my shiny, new OpenBSD 4.5 desktop.

I love to poke fun at tech vendors who continually boast of their innovation, when in fact they're scared to death of real innovation, if they could even recognize it. Today I poke fun at the anti-malware industry: Kaspersky, Trend Micro, Symantec, F-Secure, and the rest of the usual suspects. Their existence depends on Microsoft Windows and the entire leaky MS application stack never ever getting fixed. I would die of shock if any of them ever grew a spine, demonstrated some real innovation in honesty, and announced "To cure your malware problems, don't use MS Windows."

Mozilla has unfurled a new API designed to expand the worldwide population of Firefox add-on developers. The open-source house boasts that over the last four years, more than 8,000 developers have built more than 12,000 add-ons for its Firefox browser. But with its new API, dubbed Jetpack, it hopes to breed many more.

Xen.org announced release 3.4 of its widely deployed, Xen virtualization hypervisor, which is widely used in Linux environments. The open source Xen 3.4 offers device pass-through improvements using Xen Client Initiative (XCI) technology, enhanced integration with the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor, and improved reliability and power management, says the project.

With the launch of the Free Software Pact initiative the European Elections now have free software as an issue for candidates. The initiative will ask those standing for election to support free software in the UK. The Free Software Pact is a European project to bring the importance of the development of free software to the fore, especially as the European Parliament is where many discussions and decisions, regarding software patents, interoperability and net neutrality, are made.

Implementing Linux desktops is easier than IT staff expect, a new study concludes. You just need to pick the right users. A study commissioned by IBM and carried out by Freeform Dynamics found that Linux on the desktop was most easily achieved when first targeted at groups of non-technical users, such as those with moderate and predictable use of email and office tools.

Cisco is only the latest on the long list of companies that have been forced by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) to comply with the GPL. The Center uses copyright law to protect the freedoms guaranteed by the GPL. It's perhaps not surprising that makers of network-capable devices, from routers to set-top boxes, use Linux to drive them. There's all this useful open-source software lying around on the internet, ready for downloading, almost always accompanied by the source code – why reinvent the wheel and write, say, your own network operating system plus tools for a SOHO DSL router if, after all, Linux can do all that's needed and will run on virtually any hardware?

Juliet Kemp introduces us to TrueCrypt, an excellent, easy-to-use encryption tool for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. Using TrueCrypt will instantly make you smarter than all the big government agencies and companies who compromise terabytes of data when their unencrypted laptops and backup media are stolen.