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Sometimes open source ideals make for the strangest–and most wonderful–bedfellows. We met Dr. Vandana Shiva–physicist, scientist, environmentalist, and activist–several years ago. Her work saving seeds and protecting traditional knowledge in the farming industry parallels the openness, transparency, collaboration and freedom of open source ideology. Her simple, clear explanation of why knowledge should be shared–and the devastating results should it be hoarded–is part of the essential truth that makes the work we do so incredibly important. But don’t take our word for it.

Is Windows 7 the final Version? As much as Microsoft loves to grinch about Linux, they've made significant changes over the years to compete with it--and will abandon it altogether to maintain their competitive edge. Windows 7 will be the last Windows product.

For the last two and a half years, Oracle has been selling its own supported version of Linux based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). But the company claims it's not a fork. That's an important distinction for Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL), which makes billions from its products running on Linux, and is a very active player in the open source OS's ecosystem.

The devices we use to access the internet are growing smaller and smaller, with more and more users turning to mobile devices to get their web fix on the fly. Nearly everyone in the browser market is scrambling to get their own mobile offering up to snuff, and Open Source heavyweight Mozilla is no exception.

A cool collection of Google logos over the years

The Netfilter team has long been mulling over rework of firewall code in the Linux kernel. Now team lead Patrick McHardy ends months of work by announcing nftables.

If you're using KDE4 you might be disappointed by a bug that causes high latencies and or a flickering (second) display. Here's a really easy explanation how to permanently fix that right now.

As we prepare for next weeks beta release of Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope and look back at features included in the Ubuntu Jaunty alpha 6 release, Ubuntu fans can’t help but feel the excitement of another Ubuntu release right around the corner.

Everyone is writing "Foo Best Linux Application" lists all full of good Linux apps, so here are my own 7 Best Excellent Linux Apps You May Not Have Been Introduced To Yet. They are presented in no particular order or categorization, they're just good applications I've been using and enjoying, all 100% genuine Free/Open Source software and not crusted with any proprietary baggage.

Ubuntu Podcast #22 covers the Florida Linux Show, Jaunty Alpha 6 released, Ubuntu Case badges, Ubuntu Forums Beginners Team and Ubuntu Classroom Team offering sessions on securing Ubuntu, John Dvorak plugs Ubuntu, and interview with David Thomas of the New Mexico LoCo, discussing New Mexico Linux Fest and Endorphin Power Company.

Thanks to the installation script by Ignacio Valdes and the patch by Kevin Toppenburg for his GUI Configuration tool, I was able to install WorldVista on a Moka5 virtual machine based on PCLinuxOS-2007. I did this for my own interest, and I know there are other demos and virtual appliances available for VISTA, but Moka5 makes it very easy to install and run a pre-configured WorldVista server, so I thought I'd share it, in case anyone else is interested. I also have some links to a pre-configured version of the CPRSChart and GUIConfig front ends that should be able to connect to the server if run on the same machine hosting the Moka5/PCLinuxOS-2007 virtual machine.

Earlier this week Google had published their list of 2009 Summer of Code projects and FFmpeg was among them. Last week we published an interview with the FFmpeg developers where we learned more about their v0.5 release and other topics like OpenCL, Blu-ray, and multi-threading. Since running that interview, where it was found that Blu-ray wasn't actively being worked on due in part to a lack of hardware, a number of readers have stepped up and offered Blu-ray drives and media to help developers, which may result in Blu-ray support coming sooner rather than later.

For fun a few interesting screenshots of e17 rigs that readers might like. Note that the resolution is by todays standard primitive but on purpose: it shows the power and configurability of e. So enjoy this little side tripe and if well received perhaps more will come with other environments or just plain window managers.

It would be an understatement to say that Microsoft's patent suit against Dutch GPS vendor company TomTom has been closely watched. Why? Because Microsoft alleges that several of the patents at issue are infringed by TomTom's implementation of the Linux kernel. In this first month of the dispute, the most urgent question has been this: will TomTom fight or fold?

Users of the Linux operating system have been enjoying multiple desktop capabilities for many years already, and they are about to experience the next step of the multiple desktop paradigm evolution. So why are multiple desktops useful and how much do they really help?

If IBM actually were to buy Sun Microsystems Inc., the world's largest maker of Unix servers would take over the No. 2 vendor. Unix servers may not be getting as much attention as Sun's Java and MySQL technologies are in merger-speculation land, but it is the Unix market that could put the prospective deal on the radar of regulators. An acquisition of Sun would give IBM nearly two-thirds of the worldwide Unix server market, according to research firm IDC. IBM sold $6.4 billion worth of Unix servers last year, for a 37.2% market share, while Sun's sales amounted to $4.8 billion, for a 28.1% share, IDC said. Trailing behind in third place was Hewlett-Packard Co., with $4.6 billion in sales and a 26.5% market share; after HP, the rest of the vendors counted by IDC had single-digit shares at best.

I was pointed recently to Zappos as a near-perfect example of a company that brings the principles of open source to business. Its site is inventive and fancy (as you'd expect a clothing retailer to be), but not a triumph of design over utility. What's more, it's fast. I can check Web site responsiveness with some confidence, because our little apartment near Boston has 20Mb/s symmetrical service from Verizon FiOS (that's fiber, and pretty cheap, considering), and the speeds I get at the office I share at Harvard are more than twice that.

Data and personal content exists in many different silos across the Internet, amd getting them all into a single interface and sharing them is no easy task. One potential solution to the problem is set to be demonstrated next week by open source software vendor Open-Xchange with an approach that uses semantic microformats as a mechanism for sharing and publishing data in a collaborative manner.

The Netfilter development team's Patrick McHardy has released an alpha version of nftables, a new firewall implementation for the Linux kernel, with a user space tool for controlling the firewall. nftables introduces a fundamental distinction between the user space defined rules and network objects in the kernel: the kernel component works with generic data such as IP addresses, ports and protocols and provides some generic operations for comparing the values of a packet with constants or for discarding a packet.

Sun Microsystems has began the deployment of South Africa's largest supercomputer, a 27Teraflop system that runs a suite of open source software. The system is the second phase of a multi-million rand project that was awarded to Sun last year and will be housed at the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) in Cape Town.