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The technical debate around whether OOXML (ECMA 376) should be approved as an ISO standard (fast track or otherwise) has been raging for a while. Numerous organizations and individuals have expressed technical and legal concerns. The latest summary of the objections I noticed is from the New Zealand Open Source Society. Vikram weighed in with his objections to an Indian approval of OOXML. The last two months however have seen reports from various countries questioning the basis on which their votes are being decided. The constitution of the committees and the manner in which the national position is decided seem to me to be flawed.

Today - after a long time without running any proprietary software - I decided to go and install Windows once more. Why? I just wanted to see our own web pages in Internet Explorer. And what did IE show me right after it started? Nothing less than Heidi Klum naked!

More than 500 people were killed when Peru was hit with by an enormous earthquake last week. When we learned that Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and author of the GPL under which the GNU/Linux operating system is licensed, was in Peru during the quake, we asked if he would share his experiences with us. Here's his report.

In this *NIXEDBLOG post, I talk about how it went when I called into The Power Hour radio broadcast to ask them if they would start talking about Linux and Free and Open Source Software in the future. Read on for more details on how it went.

Sauerbraten, the game known as "Cube 2" and being based upon the open-source Cube engine, has its 2007 summer edition out. Sauerbraten 2007-08-19 features a number of improvements to the Sauerbraten editor as well as to the Cube 2 engine.

Most Web publishing systems on the market can automatically generate RSS feeds, but there are situations where you might want to have fine-grained control over your RSS feeds. For example, you might want to provide alternative RSS item descriptions, or to manually select which RSS items to publish. While you can code an RSS feed by hand, you'd be better off using a dedicated tool like ListGarden. It can help you to not only create and manage RSS feeds, but also to do more advanced tasks like publish the feeds on a remote server, back up the feeds, generate an HTML page, and much more.

Who’s afraid of SELinux? Well, if you are, you shouldn’t be! Thanks to the introduction of new GUI tools, customizing your system’s protection by creating new policy modules is easier than ever. In this article, Dan Walsh gently walks you through the policy module creation process. A lot of people think that building a new SELinux policy is magic, but magic tricks never seem quite as difficult once you know how they’re done. This article explains how I build a policy module and gives you the step-by-step process for using the tools to build your own.

Sasi Kumar, a member of FSF India's Working Group, spoke with Blue GNU about the organization's past, present and future, and shares how they have impacted India.

Microsoft resort to more FUD in order to discredit Linux distro security, while claiming its own OS products are the most secure of all. Dig a little deeper and the argument is not just flaky but falls to pieces...

Durban's official municipal website, which runs on Plone, recently underwent a facelift and has plans to integrate some interesting open source software features which will encourage greater citizen participation.

This week on Open News Novell Isn't As Stupid As SCO, MySQL Won't Share Tarballs, and UT3 For Linux.

Jungseung Lee announced the first public release ofgitstat,"a GPL'd, web-based git statistics/monitoring system." He explains,"it retrieves a specified git tree, analyzes changesets, and shows graphical information like the number of changesets per day, the number of people who submitted changesets for a specific version(tag), etc." The link above offers a graphical view of Linus' mainline 2.6 kernel tree, with daily commit statistics, monthly commit statistics, kernel release frequency, and per-author statistics. Jungseung noted:"Gitstat was derived from kfm (kernel feature monitor) which was originally developed by Keun-Sik Lim and Sang-Bae Lee of Samsung Electronics and currently maintained and developed by Jeong-Seung Lee and Soon-Son Kwon(Shawn) of Samsung Electronics. Kfm was inspired from Jon Corbet of lwn.net when he analyzed the git tree and Greg KH when he presented similar status report at OLS2007. We thought it would be interesting information every day."read more |rsync.net - Secure Offsite Data

The Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) is a simple, standardized XML data format used by the United States Department of Homeland Security that can save many lives.

The year is 1993, and I'm at the Spencer Katt party at Fall Comdex, back when Comdex was "the" technology show of technology shows. There, I, a freelance technology journalist, meet Jim Louderback, then the director of PC Weeks Labs. We end up talking about operating systems. He rather liked Windows for Workgroups for the desktop; I sang the praises of SCO Open Desktop 2.0. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, even though we completely disagree about operating systems.

As a former course designer and academic, I used to be experienced in talking in front of people. However, one thing I hadn't done until now is appear on television. That, more than anything, is why I agreed to appear on the computer show Lab with Leo Laporte in a five-minute spot about the GNU/Linux desktop. The show is scheduled to appear October 11 on G4TechTV in Canada and the How-To Channel in Australia, with my spot being posted to Google Video on the same day. I won't know if I look savvy or imbecilic until I see how the segment is edited, but the experience taught me several points about appearing on TV in general, and evangelizing for GNU/Linux in the studio in particular.

LXer Feature: 21-Aug-2007
A Microsoft vulnerability report suggests that Microsoft wasn't able to fix more Windows flaws than the number of open software flaws fixed by the major open source companies . Red Hat, having forty times less employees than Microsoft, did the best job, by fixing and closing the most security bugs, also closing even minor bugs - where Microsoft didn't even fix one minor bug in the same period. Even Apple did a better job than Microsoft by fixing lots of flaws in Mac OS X. It should also be noted, the fixed open source flaws were in the 'base system', while the fixed Windows flaws also concerned a lot of Internet Explorer, Media Player and similar stuff.

As expected, many flaws were fixed in RHEL 5, so it seems RHEL 5 is becoming more and more secure. On the other hand, only a few Vista bugs were fixed, which left some customers asking if Microsoft even tried finding and fixing security flaws at all.

See the Microsoft vulnerability report here

[ Seriously, how comes Gentoo has a 'closed bug ranking' and the teams are proud to be on the top of the list, while at the same time Microsoft thinks closing bugs is a bad thing and is glad only a few bugs were closed? - hkwint ]

Technalign, developers of both the community and commercial Pioneer Linux operating systems, recently announced the release of Pioneer Explorer 1.0 and the Programs folder. In the past, Technalign built its Linux distributions from Ubuntu, Debian and MEPIS codebases. While this new distribution still shows its Ubuntu/Debian roots, it's now going in its own direction.

There are people who are doing their best to come up with ideas for the promotion of FOSS. I have come up with an idea, and plan on putting it in action tomorrow. I have a simple question: Will you join me?

Not too long ago I treated myself to a HP 3050 multi-function laser printer with fax, scanner, and copier. I almost went with Samsung because it makes good machines, and all of its monochrome printers have Linux drivers. But they are closed, proprietary binary drivers which are bad enough on their own: big fat pains to install and upgrade. And then the news broke about the ingenious security holes and inexplicable permissions changes on key directories introduced by the amusingly awful installer for the Samsung drivers, and that was all she wrote. HP, on the other hand, supports good-quality, well-supported genuine FOSS drivers, HPLIP, which we introduced ourselves to last week.

In my last blog post, I mentioned the work on rubinius (then at a 0.7 release and now at 0.8) and JRuby. I also promised I’d follow up on them. Here’s what’s been going on so far.