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Okay, I’ve watched a few of these articles floating about that apparently don’t speak any new information, but do try to come across as authoritative. It’s basically a waste of BLOG time and space. I always have to look with a critical eye when it appears the “chicken” is telling the “fox” everything is “okay” for them, and bad for that old “fox.” There is an interesting reality that is not captured by financial analysts, Gartner, or Microsoft.

Zonbu has sweetened the pie for Linux enthusiasts wishing to purchase its low-cost, silent, eco-friendly, PC outright -- without committing to an ongoing service contract. The $250 Zonbox PC now includes OS upgrades, 2GB of free online storage, automatic backup services, and root access. Zonbu launched the Zonbox in July, priced as low as $100 when purchased with an ongoing service contract with monthly fees.

Iyou ask a Linux (or BSD, or *nix) user what their favorite window manager is, there is a strong chance that they will tell you that they use KDE. The good people at KDE are set to release their next major version - KDE 4.0 - currently slated to drop on October 23, 2007. I spoke with Wade Olson, the North American contact for the KDE project about what we can expect. Wade has been in the software industry for 14 years as a programmer in C, COBOL, SAS, shell scripting, Java, and PERL.

In a recent series of patches posted to the Linux Kernel mailing list, it was proposed that some imported Atheros wireless device drivers be re-licensed, some from a dual-BSD/GPL license, others from a modified BSD license, all to a pure GPLv2 license. Christoph Hellwig asked,"is this really a good idea? Most of the reverse-engineering was done by the OpenBSD folks, and it would certainly be helpful to work together with them on new hardware revisions, etc.." Luis Rodriguez suggested that there was no choice,"technically the best we can do is to leave the license as dual licensed, but keep in that technically that means nothing and is just for show, the GPL is what would apply as its derivative work and is the most restrictive license."

As anyone who ever tried to set up an Apache2 web server may know, this can be an insanely complicated task, because the thingie can use multiple configuration files at once, which are included and nested into each other with (you guessed it?), Include directives. Kochizz makes that job much easier now... [....] ...you get Linux, Windows as well as Mac OS X versions... for free. Not least because the license is GPL v2...

North Rhine-Westphalia has selected Novell for the supply of its IT infrastructure. Novell already supports 300,000 students in the states of Bavaria and Thuringia; the new deal will add another 560,000 students and thousands of employees. It's not clear how many of the students actually will use the desktop Linux software. Forty percent of all German students now use Linux systems, according to Novell. The company said the universities chose its Linux offerings to deliver cost savings and flexibility, while avoiding vendor lock-in.

Need a virtual office? You can try phpGroupware, which is an official GNU Project. If you're not sure how to install it, just follow along with Don Parris as he installs the latest phpGroupware on a hosted Debian GNU/Linux System.

The Free Software Foundation released a statement on Tuesday saying that Microsoft is not exempt from the requirements of the latest version of the Gnu General Public Licence, version 3.

The Society for Sustainable Mobility, formerly known as the Open Source Green Vehicle project, is one of the official teams registered for the Automotive X-Prize competition. The X-Prize Foundation got a lot of press in 2004 when it awarded $10 million to the first private team that built and launched a vehicle carrying three people 100 km above the earth. This year, the foundation has been working to get the funding for the Automotive X-Prize: another $10 million to the team that can build a marketable 100 MPG vehicle. Will open source win the prize?

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.