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The Microsoft Permissive License, one of two licenses the software maker submitted to the Open Source Initiative for approval as open-source licenses in August, is unlikely to be approved in its current form. There have been two principle objections to the license from the open-source community, Michael Tiemann, the president of OSI, told eWEEK in an interview here at the annual Gartner Open Source Summit on Sept. 20.

The first major update of GNOME, version 2.20, has arrived almost two and a half years after GNOME 2.10, its last big step forward. GNOME 2.20 boasts not just improvements to the desktop itself, but multiple significant improvements to GNOME's applications as well. This release also marks GNOME's 10th birthday. The project was created as an alternative to KDE in August 1997 by Miguel de Icaza, better known in recent years as the lead developer for Mono.

Moonsoon Multimedia has used embedded Linux to build a consumer DVR (digital video recorder) with remote multimedia file serving capabilities. The Hava -- recently implicated in a GPL violation court case -- aims to let the user access live and recorded TV content from broadband-connected locations.

Linux gamers love Doom and Quake, so why have they been suffering from FPS Rage aimed at id Software? John Carmack puts the record straight regarding Linux and OpenGL support for the forthcoming first person shooter.

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has filed a lawsuit against Monsoon Multimedia on behalf of two BusyBox developers. The suit alleges that Monsoon' s new product Hava, and its firmware, distribute code borrowed from BusyBox, a collection of UNIX utilities for embedded systems, but aren't making the source code available, as is required under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Daniel B. Ravicher, SFLC legal director, says, "This is the first time that either myself or anyone else that I know of in the United States has actually had to go to court to force compliance with the GPL."

IBM's recently announced embrace of the OpenOffice.org productivity suite project has already borne fruit, with the beta release of IBM's free Lotus Symphony. Does the new word processor, spreadsheet and presentation trio have what it takes to put the Lotus brand back on the office application map?

Those of you who have ever tried OpenOffice (and Linux folks probably make up the majority) have to admit that it’s nice, but not nearly as feature rich as it’s market leading cousin Microsoft Office. Not only that, it’s damn ugly in comparison (it reminds me of the old Office 6.x, the one you used to install from 30 floppies back in 1994). Well after reading an article in Computer World, I now “know why:”

From the wholly minimal to the completely ornate, the Linux desktop has never been sexier. You've already seen the Windows and Mac editions of the Desktop Show and Tell, but you haven't seen variety, inventiveness, and all-around desktop eye candy until you've taken a gander at what your fellow readers are doing with their Linux desktops. Hit the jump for a look at some of our readers' best Linux desktop submissions.

Hewlett-Packard, the world's Number 1 PC maker, will try selling pre-loaded Linux on PCs in several countries as it expands a test program -- evaluating a market that some competitors have already entered -- and moves its personal computer business into a new generation of form factors and functionality.

With Solid-State Drives (SSD) on the verge of mass consumer adoption, we're left wondering what kind of performance we're going to see from these drives. We already know SSD's require less power than drives with moving parts, but what kind of performance gains will we see? To get an idea, we took one the faster drives on the market, the OCZ Rally2, and ran it through our benchmarking process. To make things more interesting (and see how much performance we could squeeze from the technology, we're using two drives later in this article to use the drives in a RAID0 configuration.

With open source software becoming a household name, another open source movement that may one day see some fanfare is already taking shape. Open source hardware, which I once thought to be little more than a pipe dream left over from a bygone era, is proving to be a dream that it is very much alive and growing. As an example of this trend, MAKE magazine has managed to regenerate a previously static culture of do-it-yourselfers at a feverish pace.

A quick look at how and why yum replaced up2date as Red Hat Network’s package management system, as told by Bret McMillan, a supervising RHN engineer. It’s a quick study of how user need drives innovation and how community collaboration solves problems faster and more completely than individual work.

In "How to sponsor an open source project?", Dave Winer says,I want the OPML Editor to run on Linux... and floats the idea of a bounty for the job, as an open source project. Guidance: I'm looking for ideas, established practices, do's and don'ts for sponsoring an open source project, Dave says.

This four-part series demonstrates how to use the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and XForms together to create a dynamic Web application. It takes a look at some of the underpinnings of each technology, examining the common ground between them that will allow for their peaceful coexistence. This will lay the foundation for developing a Web application that uses both GWT and XForms together.

Lately, there has been a lot of attention in the industry on the current (and future) virtualization products from VMware and Microsoft. However, the latest Linux distributions from Red Hat and SUSE now also include full range of virtualization capabilities based on the Xen hypervisor. How do they compare with VMware and Microsoft's offerings?

In this video interview at OSCON 2007 we talked to Michael Tiemann - VP of Open Source for RedHat and President of the OSI.

Gentoo, formerly known as Enoch Linux is one of the pioneers among the Linux distributions. It is well-known and loved for its speed (the Gentoo species is the fastest swimming penguin), and hated for its unfriendliness with Linux newbies. Thus, many flavours of Gentoo have been created including this highly capable one named Sabayon. Every now and then, I’m searching for a perfect Operating System worthy to replace my OpenSuse 10.1. I have chosen to try out Sabayon Linux as I have already used Gentoo before and was quiet impressed with it.

The only real exchange between peers in a traditional peer-to-peer network is limited to the files being transferred. Tribler is a new P2P network that's introducing social networking concepts to facilitate better interactions between users. Using new algorithms and protocols, Tribler users will also be able to cash in on their generous uploads for faster downloads. The Tribler software is primarily developed by the researchers in the Delft University of Technology and De Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

This afternoon Intel's Chief Linux and Open-Source Technologist, Dirk Hohndel, talked about why Intel's commitment to open-source drivers creates a difference and advantage for Intel's architecture platforms. Nothing groud-breaking or too special was presented, but we have included some of Dirk's slides from this open-source driver presentation. Intel had also mentioned that AMD's (well, referenced as a "major graphics card vendor") open-source driver efforts as "good news."

I read with interest this morning a story in ComputerWorld (more like an obituary) about how SCO said in its most recent SEC filing that there is “substantial doubt” that it will survive. In addition to the meltdown of its lawsuit against IBM, the filing cites its depleted cash position and entry into Chapter 11 as its major woes. While the Net is flush with celebration and legal analysis (and am happy that SCO did not prevail), I think my take on this is a bit more sobering in the bigger picture of our great industry.