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News aggregators like LXer post extracts from news sources, driving traffic back to the source, and to the ads they find there. This generates income for the journalists and publishers that produced the content to begin with. Nice system, right? Some publishers are deciding that its not sweet enough, and they're looking through the wrong end of the telescope.

The past couple of weeks saw a flurry or articles debating the future of Linux on netbooks. A report in the Taipei Times on May 9th was picked up by LinuxToday but largely ignored by the tech press and the blogosphere. Stephen Lim, the General Manager of Taiwan based Linpus Technologies, made the surprising prediction that Linux will regain 50% market share from Windows on netbooks by next year.

With U.S. Patent 7,536,726, Microsoft has been granted a patent with which they hope to make a successful business model out of a potentially severely restricted operating system.

Can Intel’s Moblin revive the ailing Linux netbook market? The Moblin v2.0 beta release is giving it a try with a very slick update.

After planning for weeks to take my main production laptop from OpenBSD 4.4 to 4.5, I sweated through the upgrade only to lose what was perfect X compatibility and subsequently pull the "kill switch," which in this case was transferring everything in my freshly rsync'd backup to my identical Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, a system I've been running for quite awhile on this and another laptop — and which has thus far proven itself to be stable enough for the pounding I give these machines in my daily work.

The second to the last planned maintenance update in the GNOME 2.26 series has been released. GNOME 2.26.2 just brings the usual assortment of bug fixes and translation updates, while all major work on this free software desktop environment is now focused on GNOME 2.28.

MyLinuxSupport Inc., signs first reseller agreements with the Bordeaux Software Group and Wine Reviews to resell pre-paid open source support cards. The pre-paid support cards will help reduce costs, complexity and improve overall productivity for businesses and individuals. With a dedicated 24/7 support channel now available business can reduce their total cost of ownership and better protect current and future investments that are in place.

From WYSIWYG Web authoring to video surveillance to audio recording to book authoring, Linux offers a wealth of featureful, capable applications. Today in part 1 Carla Schroder reviews four of her favorites.

Tired of your friends showing up with windows virus infected laptops ? Well, next time you shine some Gentoo power on them with this wonderful Gentoo based Kaspersky powered rescue CD.

InterOp 2009 Las Vegas: Good Bet or Lost Cause? InterOp 2009 is a success by anyone's measure but it's been a mixed bag for me so far. Internet access on the show floor is almost non-existent. For a major tech show like this, it's absolutely ridiculous. You'd think that Internet access would be a standard feature of any technical show--especially for perhaps the largest one of the year in North America.

One of the big changes we made in the Open XML SDK v2 April 2009 CTP was improving the Low Level DOM component to include functionality related to Office 2007 SP2. With this improvement came a difference in how some elements were interpreted as a 1st class property of a parent class/element vs. as a child element. For example, SdtProperties is no longer a property off of the SdtXXX classes, but is rather interpreted as just a child element. Scouring through the different customer feedback channels, the Open XML SDK forum, http://www.openxmldeveloper.org, and the SDK Connect site, I've noticed that this change broke some of my previous posts and code samples. In today's post, I am going to show you a workaround to this issue and I'm going to point you to April 2009 CTP complaint versions of sample code that is currently broken.

Far from being the evil monopolist, Microsoft has in many ways become the cooperative giant—and it's all thanks to intellectual property. The company's IP czar takes us inside the corporate transformation in a new book, Burning the Ships, to show us how it happened (and to take a few potshots at Richard Stallman).

Microsoft and the Linux Foundation are unusually united in a joint letterPDF to the American Law Institute. The letter asks the ALI to "delay adoption" of its Principles of the Law of Software Contracts. The companies ask for wider consultation on the "Principles", specifically with developers and distributors of software.

Companies that traffic in free open source software don't make their money selling licenses. They make it by selling support. What's that really worth? What does a company get for support fees vs. just grabbing the software and using it with no help from the developer? What kind of company should pay for support, and what kind of company can do without it?

You'll remember my recent posting about the fine work journalist Brenno de Winter has been doing in his spare time, bringing a little healing daylight into local government in The Netherlands. Brenno has been trying to get details of local government procurement published on the web, so that the resulting transparency can drive better decisions. Since most local authorities haven't wanted to do that, he's been filing bulk Freedom of Information requests (the Dutch abbreviation is apparently WOB) to get the data.

It has been a while since I have played with Apache, I will admit that. The last time I used it, version 2.0 was the norm, and version 2.2 was just coming out of beta. Today of version 2.2.11 is the current version.

In April the Openmoko Project announced that after only ten months it was discontinuing production of the Neo FreeRunner phone and after drastic staff reductions would be moving forward with a 'Plan B' product. It seems Plan B has now been revealed as Openmoko is inviting the developer community to not only tinker with the software and the casing design of the open smartphone, but it's also now releasing the hardware design of the FreeRunner (GTA02) for anyone to join in, under the codename gta02-core. The aim is to develop a modified and completely open phone hardware for the FreeRunner within the next six to twelve months.

At the OWASP AppSec Poland 2009 web security conference two Italian security experts presented a new kind of web application attack threat. The presentation slides for the method called HTTP Parameter Pollution (HPP) are now available online.

Among the biggest challenges for Linux developers — and one of the reasons we, at least, hear most often for not switching to Linux — is that Linux device support isn't as complete as some other operating systems. The reason for this, of course, has nothing to do with the abilities, inclinations, or availability of Linux developers — the reason Linux lacks support for many devices is because the device manufacturers refuse to provide the drivers, data, and design specs necessary for Linux compatibility.

Why isn't local government using more free software in the UK? Could it be that local authorities are faced by a kind of Prisoner's Dilemma that means that they don't end up with the best solution?