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In a move that has shocked consumers, Creative Labs has ordered Daniel_K to cease providing modified drivers that offer complete functionality for many Sound Blaster audio cards under Windows Vista.

So here it is… the one week results from our previous poll on software piracy. In that short time, we’ve had nearly 500 photographers cast their votes and the outcome is quite interesting. It looks like Adobe’s high-end photo editing software packages (like Photoshop and Lightroom) are hot items in the pirated software market.

[Notice the stats on Open Source users. - Scott]

"Due to numerous signs showing how corruptible the process of standardization can be and especially if ISO finally decides to adopt OOXML as the standard despite these concerns, ISO may very well lose a chunk of respect as a standards body. Be that as it may, I wonder how much does ISO really matter here or at least just how much *should* it really matter anyway."

Internet search is the biggest battleground for Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp., but the fight is quickly spreading to a new front where the stakes may be just as big. Last year, Google introduced a package of online products that includes word processing, spreadsheet and e-mail software as an alternative to Microsoft Office, the longtime market dominator. Google's goal is to become the go-to source for an array of basic technology products.

I'm just a user and wordy blogger, and I find it fascinating to learn how bugs are dealt with in software projects like Debian. I do hope my 2.6.24 kernel-related sound problem gets resolved (even though I can just use an older kernel and have all the sound I want). The other bug that's bugging me is one in which the Epiphany browser (but not Iceweasel/Firefox) always starts in the "working offline" mode, no matter whether I have the Internet connected or not. I don't know whether or not the Debian team is going to get around to "fixing" this bug, since there's a fix out there that anybody can do. Curiously, I had to find it in another Debian bug report.

A laptop running a fully patched version of Microsoft's Vista operating system was the second and final machine to fall in a hacking contest that pitted the security of Windows, OS X and Ubuntu Linux. With both a Windows and Mac machine felled, only the Linux box remained standing following the three-day competition.

Like many I'm sure, I'm trying to keep track of the votes on OOXML as they become known. I've set up a spreadsheet where I'm recording votes as they become known.

"Software patents are evil." Ask almost any free or open source software advocate, and they'll you that software patents kill creativity and keep computer science from advancing as rapidly as it would if everyone shared their basic work with everyone else, unencumbered by patents or other restrictions. But computer science professor Fred Popowich of Simon Fraser University says this is not necessarily true. So does attorney Larry Rosen, who spent many years as legal counsel for the Open Source Initiative starting (literally) before it had a name.

So, you know, SCO has been suing various people in the Linux community for the last few years, claiming that some code in Linux was stolen from them. So, I’m willing to bet that a lot of people were wondering: what exactly is SCO UnixWare? Well. Have I got a treat for you. Thanks to this wonderful thing called the Internet, you too, can experience SCO UnixWare in it’s full glory.

The third and final day of the PWN to OWN contest at the CanSecWest security conference begins today, March 28th at 12:30pm local time (PST) in Vancouver. Yesterday, on day two of the contest, the MacBook Air was successfully compromised first and won by a team from Independent Security Evaluators, also winning $10,000 from us (the Zero Day Initiative).

The Debian project is known for its public brawls, but the truth of the matter is that the Debian developers have not lived up to that reputation in recent years. The recent outburst over the attempted "semi-hijacking" of the dpkg maintainership shows that Debian still knows how to run a flame war, though. It also raises some interesting issues on how packages should be maintained, how derivative distributions work with their upstream versions, and what moral rights, if any, a program's initial author retains years later.

Another week and another bag-full of Linux releases. Over the past week Damn Small Linux has edged closer to a 4.3 release with a release candidate, Astaro is showing off its security appliance distro, Knoppix makes big changes in 5.3.1 and Fedora issues a beta release of the forthcoming Fedora 9 release.

This week’s Open Source Business Conference was a strange meeting of Enterprise IT users, venture capitalists, and free software entrepreneurs. The opening keynote was delivered by Red Hat’s freshly minted CEO Jim Whitehurst who gave a very modest speech noting that while Red Hat has been a leading open source company they have not necessarily been an open source leader. Whitehurst’s presentation lacked anything especially insightful or noteworthy and he has the advantage of being the new guy so he’s off the hook for anything that might have happened before he took the job.

If Microsoft gets this OOXML format "approved", it will be by irregularities in the voting, it seems. Here's more on what happened in Germany and a report on what is being called a scandal in Norway. And another odd process in Croatia.

Dear Miguel, Read your post. One question immediately springs to mind.Why?

The New York Times has a great write-up of the continued rapid growth of Red Hat. Despite the looming recession, Red Hat is predicting 30 percent revenue growth in the coming year, to more than half a billion dollars. For a few years, Mike has been talking about how to make money while giving away infinite goods, and Red Hat could probably be the poster child for his argument. Despite the fact that virtually all of its "products" are available for free on the Internet, Red Hat is still convincing companies to pay it hundreds of millions of dollars.

A set of Eclipse plug-ins that allow you to develop Web 2.0 applications in EGL without JavaScript skills.

Summary: I tried to activate Windows XP Home and it didn't work. Thus began a phone saga with Microsoft support, ending in failure. Until I fixed it myself. I'm trying to activate Windows XP Home. I've just performed a clean setup, and Windows now won't let me even login until I activate. The network card has apparently not yet been configured, so I can't activate over the 'net. When I do the phone activation, the "installation ID" I'm supposed to give the Microsoft representative is blank. What do I do? That question wasn't posed by just any reader. This time it was me. And after an hour and a half on the phone, I was no further along. And yet, left to my own devices I had the machine activated in about 10 minutes. This is not good. Not at all. In fact, it's downright depressing.

The Linux kernel is a funny thing. A new kernel should mean increased functionality, but for me and my old-and-getting-older machines, I only seem to lose functionality with upgraded kernels. I hadn't updated Debian Lenny in a while on the $0 Laptop (the Gateway Solo 1450), and when I did it today, I noticed a new kernel being added to the system: 2.6.24-1. I didn't think about the new kernel when I next booted into Lenny, but when I did, I soon discovered that my sound card didn't work anymore. I looked at all the settings, tweaked a bit here and there, but still nothing.

Love it or hate it, anyone who runs Ubuntu has at least heard of Automatix. This program made it possible for any Ubuntu user to easily add a host of new programs and media codices to a desktop. Now, however, Automatix's developers are being pulled away to other projects, so they have announced that they will no longer be working on their popular software installation program.