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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?

Isn’t it ironic: Microsoft (the king of independent software vendor relations) is mulling the fate of Response Point VoIP for small business. Meanwhile, Digium (the upstart known for Asterisk) is building an online community for ISVs and partners that want to write unified communication applications. Here's the scoop.

Shawn Hardin, President and Chief Executive Officer of Flock, has announced the release of version 2.5 of the Flock social web browser based on Firefox 3. Flock automatically manages updates and media from several popular social services, including MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Digg, YouTube and Twitter. According to Hardin, Flock is "designed to be the essential browser for the most active 25 per cent of users".

Microsoft Office SP2 claims to have a fully compliant version of ODF, and that’s probably true, as defined by the specification. It’s just completely useless at inter-operating with other vendors’ products. This is not interoperability, it’s an attack on the very concept.

When I began triaging the machines to get them ready for our kids, I ran across two of the Acers that had what seemed to be a bios password on them. Not a problem, either flash the bios or pull the battery for some amount of time and problem solved. Uh...no. Not here. Not for these. What I ran into was something that I have ranted about in the past to the point where I almost bored myself. Trusted Computing.

Dell takes the new 10" 2100 netbook out of its Latitude business series to target students, but it also serves as a mobile business device. Ubuntu 8.10 runs on it.

Now, some of you — free/open-source software enthusiasts — may have seen such posts back and forth between Bryan Lunduke — from “The Linux Action Show” — and the “Linux Hater” — from his lame blog (in his own words) — let me analyze this for a second.

Open source software (OSS) is not impenetrable, and will likely be an increasing target of hackers if it grows in adoption, said a security expert. Speaking at a briefing Wednesday, Rohit Dhamankar, director of security research, DVLabs at TippingPoint, said computer criminals tend to work for profit gain and will attack widely-deployed software to gain access to more terminals easily. But he noted that OSS is a harder target to attack, because of the speed at which bugs get patched. The visibility of code and mass participative nature of open source development helps bugs get discovered faster.

[You smell what I smell? - Scott]

The vast of amount of data being stored in this day and age, naturally leads to files sitting unused for longer and longer periods of time. A new app, agedu, can quickly tell you what data on your filesystem is lying fallow.

I had the chance to use a DAT device (an old HP SuperStore DAT24) to make copy on tapes. I didn't want to install any new software to manage that task. This guide can be considered a first step to know how the thing can work. Then, everybody can customize it according to the personal needs.

For those of you who are regular visitors, you may already know that before I started playing with GNU/Linux (2001/2) I was using FreeBSD. And while I continue to use GNU/Linux, I still hold an emotional tie to BSD-based operating systems. It was not until recently that I had decided to give the latest version of PC-BSD a try. This is version 7.1: Galileo Edition. A side note: PC-BSD is a desktop oriented version of FreeBSD intended to be extremely user friendly, primarily because of their implementation of their PBI package management system along with other features.

According to the New Media & Technology Law Blog, the FSF legal action against Cisco, filed in December 2008 has been settled. The case was brought against Cisco for distributing GPL licensed code while, according to the FSF, failing to comply with the requirement of making the code available in source form.