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Royalties charged by Microsoft on Windows APIs and protocols are the next hurdle the company must clear in its wooing of open source developers. Leading open source figures have questioned charges Microsoft makes on its protocols and APIs, with a call to clarify whether Windows server, client and application APIs and protocols that Microsoft has pledged to "open" will come free of charge, and how payments - if levied - would be collected.

It's been an open secret that controversial SCO CEO Darl McBride was being forced out. Now, in an interview with the Salt Lake City Tribune, McBride admits that his days at SCO are numbered. In the interview, McBride said, "Clearly when we draw up a battle plan for what we've been working for the last several years, trying to get SCO's intellectual rights fought through in the courts and the marketplace, the endgame didn't have this sort of outcome for me personally."

How do two former Microsoft employees end up heading an open source company? In the case of Aaron Fulkerson and Steve Bjork of MindTouch, the decision was based on the wish for independence and to work more closely with customers, according to Fulkerson. The two partners suffered some initial criticism because of their past employment, but have largely survived it by learning how to interact with the free software community.

The Software Freedom Law Center and High-Gain Antennas jointly announced March 6 that High-Gain will conform to the General Public License and that as a result the SFLC will dismiss its GPL lawsuit. The suit began when the developers of BusyBox, a set of embedded Unix utilities licensed under the GPLv2, asked High-Gain to provide access to its source code, which used BusyBox code. The company didn't respond, so BusyBox brought the licensing disagreement to the SFLC's attention.

It's important to know what happens to file ownership in AIX once you make a UID or GID change. If you don't understand the results of altering a UID or GID, you could cause serious issues to your server and environment.

Earlier this week we previewed the Quadro FX1700, which is one of NVIDIA's mid-range workstation graphics cards that is based upon the G84GL core that in turn is derived from the consumer-class GeForce 8600 series. This PCI Express graphics card offers 512MB of video memory with two dual-link DVI connections and support for OpenGL 2.1 while maintaining a maximum power consumption of just 42 Watts. As we mentioned in the preview article, we would be looking at this graphics card's performance not only under Linux but also testing this workstation solution in both Microsoft Windows and Sun's Solaris. In this article today, we are doing just that as we test the NVIDIA Quadro FX1700 512MB with each of these operating systems and their respective binary display drivers.

With the fantastic success of the iPod and iTunes, the successful launch of the tectonically innovative iPhone and the rejuvenation of Mac sales, Steve Jobs seems about to prove himself an exception to the rule that "There are no second acts in American lives." But will he in fact pull it off, leading Apple to dominate the mobile platform of the future after losing the PC to his rivals? Given yesterday's announcements of yesterday, I'm afraid not.

And you thought all Microsoft ever did was roll out endless iterations of Windows and Office in between buying some competitors and threatening to sue the rest -- but there's something going on up in Redmond, Wash., that looks like genuine innovation. Yep, Microsoft has been working on a new operating system -- one they say is unencumbered by four decades of computing history -- called Singularity. They've been hacking away at the thing since 2003, but this week saw the first public release of the code. I can barely understand what they're talking about, but it looks as if installing the thing gives you a very Unix-like command line.

Spicebird is a cross-platform email and collaboration client derived from Mozilla Thunderbird. If you are a fan of Thunderbird, but need more from it than the standard build provides, you may want to give this new bird a try.

I’ve been long interested in the differences and similarities between Debian and Ubuntu. Many Ubuntu developers are current/former Debian developers and users but I think at this point probably a majority have “grown up” in Ubuntu like I have. Because Ubuntu is so heavily dependent on Debian, it behooves us developers to understand Debian processes, policies, and yes, even politics. I thought I’d just randomly share some thoughts on Debian from my Ubuntu-biased perspective.

[Despite the less-than-inviting title, the topic here is important -- Steven]

When I started my tenure as marketing lead for the Haiku project in 2006, my highest priority was to renovate the project's Web site. Haiku had been using a custom-coded site which was showing its shortcomings as the project and the community grew in size. The admins wanted a new site that was easy to add content to and maintain, preferably based on an open source content management system (CMS) with a proven track record. The Web team chose Drupal 4.7 for the task. After working with the web team and a few other contributors for a few months, I built Haiku a new Web site that included not only more content, but most importantly more participation from the community

One of the great blessings of PHP5 is its excellent support to manipulate XML. PHP5 comes bundled with new XML extensions for processing XML easily. You have a whole new SimpleXML API to read XML documents in a pure object-oriented way. Also, you have the DOMDocument object to parse and create XML documents. In this article we will learn these APIs and learn how to successfully process XML with PHP.

Welcome to Hardy Heron Alpha-6, which will in time become Ubuntu 8.04. X.Org 7.3 with a new screen resolution utility that allows users to dynamically configure the resolution, refresh rate, and rotation of a second monitor; kernel based on 2.6.24.3 bringing in significant enhancements and fixes that have been merged in the last few months into the mainline kernel.. Screenshots at The Coding Studio

Microsoft yesterday announced a beta of its Microsoft Office Live Workspace beta, an online platform were users can store documents and share them with others. Reviews of Microsoft Office Live Workspace have been varied but if you’re running Linux you won’t get to use the Live Workspace at all.

To gain a greater understanding of concept of SOA applications, BPEL processes and JBI applications, and to enable us to develop enterprise level SOA applications, we need to understand JBI in further depth, and how JBI components can be linked together. This article by Frank Jennings and David Salter will show the JBI Service Engine is supported within the NetBeans Enterprise Pack.

In August 1993, Ian Murdock founded the Debian project and nurtured the free open source operating system into one of the most popular Linux distributions, supported by an established community of developers. Today, Debian is used by thousands of individuals and various large and small businesses worldwide, though no concrete numbers are available since users are not required to register.

For most computer literate children, a request from mom to get her set up on “this web thing” is met with panic and a feeling of drudgery. Are you about to expose your sweet mother to spam, phishing, viruses, or worse? Or perhaps more frightening, sign your life away as a 24/7 tech support center? Perhaps, but there’s a better way. By setting your mom up on a Linux machine, you can give her a safe, lean computing experience that will let her do all of the things she wants to do without giving you a nervous breakdown.

Microsoft has committed to becoming a mixed ASP.NET and PHP shop for the "foreseeable" future should its proposed Yahoo! acquisition succeed, rather than convert popular services like Yahoo! mail to Microsoft's .NET architecture. Chief executive Steve Ballmer confirmed, though, that overlapping online properties would be axed. Ballmer did not say what Microsoft ASP.NET or Yahoo! services based on the open source PHP Microsoft would keep, kill or merge, but he highlighted overlap in search, ad serving and mail.

San Jose-based startup DeviceVM made waves last year when it unveiled Splashtop, a nearly instant-on Linux environment stored in the flash memory usually reserved for motherboard BIOS. The company previewed an upcoming revision to Splashtop at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in January, then gave us the chance to take a hands-on look at this intriguing system software.

You probably don’t lose any sleep worrying that your word processor is saving files in the wrong format. You may have some old files that don’t open correctly, or someone might have sent you a spreadsheet that doesn’t work in anything but Excel, but you probably found some way to work around the problem.