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In 2007 a handful of countries began a treaty-making process to create a new global standard for intellectual property rights enforcement, the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). ACTA is spearheaded by the US, the EU Commission, Japan, and Switzerland — those countries with the largest intellectual property industries. Other countries invited to participate in ACTA’s negotiation process are Canada, Australia, Korea, Mexico and New Zealand. Noticeably absent from ACTA’s negotiations are leaders from developing countries.

After the multi-lateral treaty’s scope and priorities are negotiated by the few countries invited to participate in the early discussions, ACTA’s text will be “locked” and other countries who are later “invited” to sign-on to the pact will not be able to re-negotiate its one-sided terms. It is claimed that signing-on to the trade agreement will be "voluntary", but few countries will have the muscle to refuse an “invitation” to join, once the rules have been set by the select few conducting the negotiations.

[This is news because May 22th a discussion paper appeared at WikiLeaks. In March, when it was yet unknown what ACTA would look like, IP Justice published the white paper the 'Full Story" links too. It's a paper about how the rich governments try to almost forbid P2P, stifle innovation through broader 'piracy protection', colonize poor countries and create more opportunities to spy on its citizens. All that in a secret undemocratic way; taking away digital rights. However, their excuses are quite good: Stopping dangerous fake-medicines, car parts etc. - hkwint]

At least three open source software suppliers submitted tenders to Becta yesterday for the £270,000 Schools Open Source Project. The winner will spend two years building a community of schools which uses and develops its own open source alternatives to Microsoft software.

The Dutch Council of State is willing to open source its application that can centrally convert documents between open formats and proprietary formats, said Marcel Pennock, the tool's developer, Wednesday at a conference on Open Document Format (ODF) in Utrecht.

The official text of the appeal in PDF.

The Moscow regional administration will test usefulness of an Open Source desktop by migrating several hundreds of desktop PCs to Mandriva GNU/Linux and by installing OpenOffice on a thousand others.

[Hmm, yeah, news from Russia travels a bit slow to LXer it seams; or is it just I should check the migration news more often? - hkwint]

LXer Feature: 25-May-2008

In this week's Roundup we have reviews of 7 Audio Players and 42 of the best free games for Linux, the $100 laptop platform moves on, seeing Linux clearly, Chinese Linux rises 22 percent in 12 months and a great article titled Chicks Love Linux. We have lots Microsoft related articles including Microsoft blames users for Vista infections, Microsoft to make Office open to ODF format, Can Microsoft 'do' open source by 2015? and my favorite Microsoft offers cash back on searches.

The Russian Post has started testing the free software to be used in ordinary post offices. Cutting costs for software is one of the main reasons to migrate to Linux. No details are reported. However, according to some sources, the Russian Post might prefer Red Hat.

[Sunday is a good day to bring old news from a month ago, isn't it? Nonetheless, 125.000 new Linux desktop users are normally a reason for a big article, so a bit strange we missed this one. Sorry on behalf of the LXer team - hkwint]

[ Though not really 'news', this article presents an interesting overview of software patentability in Europe. It was written by two senior associates of a legal studio based in Rome - hkwint ]

About the time this site was taking shape in the very late Spring and early Summer of 2007, I was detecting a plaintive tone in the responses I was getting from a very few invited viewers. There were even complaints about the colors. Too soon I too knew that the grayish blue tone I was viewing on my main monitor did not match what others were seeing. Indeed, I needed only to move the browser to the monitor to the right of my dual monitor setup to see both the color shades and color depth differed. Not good.

The world's top handset maker Nokia Oyj expects the role of the Linux operating system in its product portfolio to increase as the role of its Internet-focused devices grows, company officials said. Linux has so far had little success on cellphones, but its role is increasing as more new Linux-based models reach the market, while Google Inc gave it a vote of confidence by using it to build its Android platform on.

A look at the difference between how, why, and when geeks and regular people get new PCs.

In this HowTo I will describe how to prepare a Debian Etch server for OpenVZ. With OpenVZ you can create multiple Virtual Private Servers (VPS) on the same hardware, similar to Xen and the Linux Vserver project. OpenVZ is the open-source branch of Virtuozzo, a commercial virtualization solution used by many providers that offer virtual servers. The OpenVZ kernel patch is licensed under the GPL license, and the user-level tools are under the QPL license.

This posting attempts to address several issues raised up during the recent discussion at Lxer.com. View:- OpenSolaris 2008/05 Live CD worked for me just now
Install on bare metal is quite simple if OpenSolaris HCL has been consulted before it began.
Create installation profile for OS200805 HVM Guest ...

So according to El Reg, it turns out ASUS is selling its Eee 900 laptops in the UK with 4400mAh batteries -- quite a bit smaller than the 5800mAh batteries that come in the US version. It's insult to injury when you consider that the larger screen necessarily sucks down more juice than on the 700 series, but ASUS explains that overseas users get a tradeoff in exchange: UK warranties last two years, supposedly longer than their US counterparts (although to be fair, we've heard of retailers listing the US Eee's warranty at two years as well). Caveat emptor, and all that.

In Novell's new SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 SP2, announced yesterday, you'll find only small, but useful, improvements, most of them for better interoperability with Microsoft protocols and formats. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10 SP2 includes support for fully virtualized Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2003. Novell claims system administrators can also migrate these Windows Server guests across physical machines in real-time. Because of the Microsoft/Novell partnership, SLES is the only third-party virtualization solution offering full Microsoft support for its Windows Server guests. In return, the Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V hypervisor, now a release candidate, also supports SLES as a virtual guest.

You know what the difference is between a professional blogger and amateurs like us? They write about the community and we are the community. We can write about things they will never be able to cover properly: our own experiences. A view from the inside. Usually, it doesn't take too much effort to write a blog entry like this, because I love writing about what I do.

The research department of Kingpin Intelligence has just published a new research report titled “Developers and Open Source”. The report concludes that based on Kingpin's research, non-Open Source respondents would prefer to use Open Source for work, but agree that existing licences and client requirements hamper migration.

Wind River is joining Intel to develop an open source Linux platform to your car and shake up the auto industry by bringing greater innovation, efficiency and development speed to the emerging in-car infotainment market. It's a radical effort to force automakers -- which tend to favor evolutionary, not revolutionary, R&D - to embrace open source as a way to speed up development. If Wind River and Intel pull it off, it would be a crucial step toward spurring innovation and cooperation in the growing but fractured in-car multimedia market.

I want to bring iTunes-loving Linux users back to reality. As you can see from the following Ubuntu Forums threads, some Ubuntu-ites are deluded about the idea of Apple porting iTunes to Linux:

Andy Updegrove has the news that South Africa has filed an official appeal, protesting the approval of OOXML, and the action means that OOXML is now in limbo until the appeal is decided. I wonder if this is why Microsoft suddenly decided to support ODF, to avoid being shut out completely pending the appeal. Might other national bodies be considering doing the same thing? Stay tuned.