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We all know the term “FUD“, don’t we? If you haven’t heard of it, it means “Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt”, and it was created a big software monopoly, often headlined “Get the facts”. Some years ago, I got the real facts. And the real FUD.

Wired: Are you going to develop a version of Firefox for the iPhone? Lilly: No. Apple makes it too hard. They say it’s because of technical issues — they don’t want outsiders to disrupt the user experience. That’s a business argument masquerading as a technological argument. We’re focusing on more important stuff. The iPhone has been influential, but there’s not that many of them. We’re part of the LiMo Foundation — Linux on Mobile. The Razr V2 is a LiMo phone, and you’ll see more in the next year or so.

Hiring a well-known free software advocate to oversee efforts to work with the community is a good plan for any company, but for a company that has had rocky community relations, it may be essential. VIA Technologies has done just that, by contracting with Harald Welte to help guide its strategy to work more closely—and less contentiously—with the community. VIA announced a new effort aimed at cooperation with the free software world last April, but got off to a slow start that had people wondering about its commitment to fulfilling that promise. Welte will be well placed to ensure that community concerns are heard within VIA.

In a significant victory of free and open source licences the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit - which deals with IP issues - has upheld an open source licence, in particular referencing the Artistic Licence from Creative Commons.

How to avoid alias recursion loops in any Linux or Unix shell.

youtube-dl is a small free opensource command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com. youtube-dl is a platform independent tool that works on UNIX, Linux, Mac OSX and Windows. The latest version of Youtube-dl is 2008.08.09 and requires the Python interpreter, version 2.4 or later. I’ll try to keep it updated if YouTube.com changes the way you access their videos. After all, it’s a simple and short program.

Ok, more specifically, troff using the mm macros to HTML. This is another from my "rusty scripts" collection which was written for a specific task long ago. In this case, we were converting some internal documentation from troff using the mm macros into HTML. troff is a very sophisticated system so doing this right would be a lot of work. But, writing something to get rid of 90% of the grunt work of conversion is pretty easy. Paul Dunne did one for the ms macro set which you can find here but mm is different.

The communications equipment maker has bought one of its software suppliers, Pingtel, in a deal Nortel claims will help promote open source communications.

Continuing our journey, it's time to take a trip up the OSI Reference Model, and learn what this mysterious thing is all about. The network stack is of great significance, but not so much that it's the first thing you should learn. We've waited to start the "layers" discussion for good reason: Many so-called networking classes will start by teaching you to memorize the name of every layer and every protocol contained within this model. Don't do that. Do realize that layers 5 and 6 can be completely ignored, though.

Pardus is a GNU/Linux distribution funded and developed by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey. Pardus has its own unique installer, package manager, configuration wizard, and control panel. This originality, and the developers' attention to detail, make Pardus worth a look. From the beginning of my experience, Pardus showed its attention to detail. The installer is so incredibly simple that even a Microsoft fan would be hard-pressed to complain. The installer hasn't changed much since we took a look at the previous release seven months ago, so I won't reiterate the process, but it's still worth mentioning how easy to use the installer is. My only complaint is that my choice of Dvorak for keyboard layout was not available as an option.

Yahoo is helping make location more global with the launch of its new Fire Eagle platform. Fire Eagle lets users update their location in one centralized place, then have that data broadcast to a number of services. The launch opens up new possibilities for developers. Because the platform is open, any service can put the data to use -- and plenty already are.

Today those who believe in free content and free and open source software won a major victory in court. The underlying facts, and counsel, were hardly major figures on the commercial landscape: the open source software at issue had been developed for model train buffs under an infrequently used free and open source license, and the attorney was young and inexperienced.

Who says you have to give up your must-have Windows applications when you migrate to Linux? If you can't leave some crucial Windows program behind, you can run it using CodeWeavers' latest version of CrossOver Linux. Though today there are many great Linux end-user applications, some people still have "must-have" Windows applications -- Quicken instead of GnuCash, for instance, or Photoshop instead of the GIMP. That's where CrossOver Linux 7 comes in.

An important topic at Akademy is modularisation and integration. It has been the main topic of one talk but you will find it comes up in many others. It is clearly on the minds of many hackers here.

The Find command in Firefox locates the user-specified text in the body of a Web page. The command is an easy-to-use tool that works well enough for most users. Sometimes, however, a more powerful Find-like tool would make locating text easier. Learn how to build a tool that isolates relevant text in Web pages faster by detecting the presence and absence of nearby words.

Its just been made official that the State of Pahang is migrating all its productivity suites to OpenOffice.org. This succinct memo from the State Secretary of Pahang entitled "Perlaksanaan Penggunaan Perisian OpenOffice.Org Di Semua Agensi dan Pentadbiran Negeri" (translated: "Implementation of OpenOffice.org suite in all State Agencies and Administrative centres") outlines the reasons for migrating, the benefits and how to proceed.

The Polish Ministry of National Education is advising schools and universities to use Open Source software. The recommendation comes at the end of a volunteer campaign to help schools switch to Open Source. The Ministry recommended in a statement that schools and universities use OpenOffice. The application suite is sufficiently mature and advanced to be used for teaching and for office use in education and science institutes."OpenOffice can successfully substitute proprietary applications and will result in significant savings on licenses."

Greg Kurtzer from Infiscale stopped by the booth to ask how OpenVZ could potentially be used with his product to improve High Availability. Before starting Infiscale, Greg was the founder of the Caos Foundation which eventually lead to the development of CentOS. I talked to Greg about Infiscale's solutions and how they compared to Rocks Clusters.

I have been using Wine (WINE) or various implementations of it (Crossover Office and Cedega) for a few years now. What is funny is that I often had more success with Wine proper than I did with the various offshoot products. Go figure! So when I learned this issue...

Phil Whitehouse of BT has written an article with twelve guidelines to build an open source community: "Some might say that open source communities "just happen", and that they operate on intuition and unwritten social rules, but this logic overlooks the vast quantity of open source projects that fail."