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Microsoft did a lot of work in the last few weeks to influence votes, stuff the ballots and manipulate participants in the various country ISO committees to enforce favorable decisions for themselves: ... [....] ...So the cartoon shown in this post, directly from the No-OOXML website, summarizes MS's efforts rather nicely (and may be not so funnily)...

Be on guard against alleged representatives of Linux Corporation offering to buy your photos -- it's a scam. That's the message that Indian models and photographers should take to heart, if the experiences of Rohan Patwari and Praveen Toshniwal are any indication. They tell a story that, indirectly, shows both how well-known Linux has become and how mysterious it is to people outside the free software community.

Since I wasn't yet as clear as I'd like to be on what can we consider to be free (as in freedom) among works which are not software and not functional and wasn't yet sure what exactly was Richard Stallman's view on this issue I decided to ask him directly. Here is the resulting email conversation.

Mandriva Benelux NV (Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg) was launched on August 16th 2007 as the sole Benelux partner for Mandriva S.A, offering Mandriva Linux operating systems. Our target areas are corporate applications and solutions to individuals, educational institutions, public and private organizations, ISVs and OEMs all over the Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg region.

On September 2, the comment and voting period will close on ISO/IEC DIS 29500, the draft specification based upon Microsoft’s Office Open XML formats (OOXML). The Linux Foundation (LF) has received questions from outside its membership regarding its position on adoption of OOXML in its current form as a global standard. In sum, the Linux Foundation calls upon those National Bodies that have not yet cast their votes to vote “No, with comments.”

Roelof Temmingh has written a cool new application which provides individuals with the ability to do data mining of publicly available information. It's a cross-platform Java application called Evolution, currently in its second beta, and available as a free download.

ITerating, the wiki-based software guide for open source and commercial software, has announced the availability of a free service providing up-to-date information about more than 17 000 software products.

Expedited Real-Time Task Graphs (XRTGs) are a way to program real-time applications in a slightly restricted subset of Java in order to achieve time portability and low scheduling latency. This technology runs on Linux, but development can be done on any platform that supports Java 5.0 and Eclipse.

Open-source software and the licenses that govern it suffered a serious setback in a San Francisco District Court earlier this month, following a preliminary decision that could effectively deprive open source licensors from being able to get a court injunction to stop the violation of the terms of their license going forward.

I have been playing around with phphGroupware (version 0.9.16.011) for a little while, trying to get a feel for it. On the surface, it is fairly simple to use. And yet, it is also a fairly complex and flexible system. The question is, just how useful is it?

The popular open source RAW converter UFRaw recently gained new functionality when it was bumped up to revision 0.12. The new release integrates new core image-processing functions and new user interface features to simplify photo editing.

For some time I have been looking for a good way to let my computer discover the Windows network and mount shares on demand. After trying the kioslaves in the desktop of my choice (KDE) and the FUSE programs Fusesmb and SmbNetFs, I was not really satisfied. There had to be a way to let my computer discover all the workgroups/domains, the hosts and the shares, and mount a share on a hosts on demand.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) appears to be polishing up its legal sabers over possible violations of the General Public License (GPL) by Microsoft.

Sometime by mistakes all package file permissions get changed and you need to restore file permission. For example a shell script or some sort of corruption could change the permissions for packages (installed files), it may be necessary to reset them. For example a long time ago my shell script run chmod and chown commands on /usr and changed the permission. Luckily rpm command can reset package permission. Sun Solaris pkg command and IBM can also reset permissions. How to: Linux reset the permissions of the installed rpm packages

Conglomerate aims to be an XML editor that everyone can use. Conglomerate is perfect open source tool for XML manipulation and editing. It is suitable for fast DocBook XML creating from text files. Great tool for everyday office and home work.

Around 560,000 German students plus thousands of staff at 33 German universities will now be supported by Linux systems from Novell. The Federal State of North Rhine Westphalia has selected Novell to support the critical IT infrastructure systems at the universities in its region.

ASIC vendor Micronas has introduced a hardware/software development kit for a small camera claimed capable of streaming D1 (DVD) resolution video over IP (Internet protocol) networks. The "Mini-IP Camera" kit is based on Micronas's Cypher ESN7108A SoC (system-on-chip), and runs Linux on the SoC's MIPS core. The Mini-IP camera design targets surveillance and other types of monitoring applications. It is said to accept audio and video input from attached sensors, compress it in real time, and send it out using single- or multi-cast Internet protocols such as RTSP.

Leapfrog Enterprises, maker of children's learning toys and electronics, is in the process of ramping up its Internet operations to serve a new series of Web-aware educational products. At the same time, the company's best-of-breed infrastructure planning strategies are leading the company in the direction of open-source software.

This week on Open News: The Desktop Linux Survey Results, Gates Picks Up The Red Phone For OOXML, No More Get The FUD, Palm Foleo Is Delayed, Goobuntu Is Confirmed, and Windows As A Punishment.

It seems like just yesterday that the GNOME Project got its start, but actually it was a decade ago that Miguel de Icaza got the ball rolling. While de Icaza has largely focused his time on Mono recently, the GNOME community has kept making progress. To get some perspective on GNOME's history, I spoke to de Icaza and longtime GNOME contributor and GNOME Foundation board member Jeff Waugh.