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Simon Phipps defends the open-source roots of Sun and the GPL-ization of Java.

Open source advocate David Skoll launched Roaring Penguin Software in 1999 because he was restless in his job as R&D project leader at Chipworks, Inc. Roaring Penguin started strictly as a consultancy, but the next year, after Skoll was commissioned to create software to help London's Royal College of Physicians stem the tide of email viruses and spam to its servers, he decided the world needed a better email filter. Skoll wrote the now ubiquitous MIMEDefang email filter, released it to the community, and proceeded to build a successful business on top of GPL software.

Check out any technology related site and you will find at least one or two articles which praise Ubuntu Linux - a distribution which has grown in popularity by leaps and bounds over the rest of the brood. This author had a different experience with the latest version of Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn which prompts him to question whether there is some over hype involved as far as the brand name Ubuntu is concerned....

Every now and then something comes along that makes you say "whatever for?". The latest news from Microsoft's Indian research arm is one of those.

Mono project lead developer Miguel de Icaza says that the Mono development community plans to have an experimental Linux-based Silverlight browser plug-in ready for testing by the end of the year. Silverlight, Microsoft's new .NET-based technology for rapid development of interactive rich media applications, is currently only supported on Windows and Mac OS X.

You have a variety of advanced Web search engine features to use in such cases. In this tip I'll present a variety of techniques and gotchas to help you in your quest.

South Africa-developed Impi Linux, a local version of the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system, today announced its latest release. With this release Impi Linux, is hoping to extends its existing public sector foothold and grab a little more of the enterprise sector.

One of the great features of the current version of OpenOffice.org is the support for extensions, which allow you to add to the office suite's functionality. Every day this week we'll look some of the most useful OOo extensions available. Today, we'll look at ways you can improve the way the office suite handles templates and AutoText.

Most Firefox users are familiar with the Greasemonkey extension, a powerful tool that lets you enhance your browsing experience by rewriting HTML pages and JavaScript on the client side. The Stylish extension gives you that same level of control over Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Unlike JavaScript, altering a page's CSS cannot change its functionality -- but it can greatly enrich its usability.

Used to be, Linux was easy to champion but hard to use. That was before Ubuntu. The free open source operating system is elegant, secure, and intuitive. For that, we can thank South African tech entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth.

Last week, the Linux Foundation's announced that it has established a travel fund for open source developers. The idea behind the fund is that while open source software is created globally and virtually, there's just no substitute sometimes for face-to-face collaboration.

Adding more fuel to the Linux versus Windows fire, a US research firm this week released a survey that noted only eight percent of Linux developers had ever seen a virus infect their systems. Does that mean Linux is a more secure OS? Nicholas Petreley, Evans Data's Linux analyst, certainly thinks so.

Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker has spoken on a number of interesting topics, including putting Firefox on mobile phones, trademark stoushes with Linux distributions, how Firefox is earning $US55million a year

Is there really the level of competition in the open source world that we see in the closed source world? This is something that has been stuck in my mind lately as I have been told so many times by closed source developers that by opening the code you are creating your own competition. Today, I’m here to explore this theory and hopefully prove why it’s false.

The 2.6 Linux kernel has been one amazing roller-coaster ride of excellent new features and changes coming faster than you can say "git along now, little patchies." Hardware detection and management, and removable media management are probably the most obvious changes to users.

Building a local DNS cache will speed up your internet connection since the time for the translation job (converting domain names into IP addresses) will become negligible with the assumption that the DNS cache gets the information from the parent DNS.

Geared for the Linux pro or UNIX administrator, Linux System Administration was written to provide advice to manage a complete range of systems and servers. The authors were amazed at how many Linux users, for example, could not write a configuration file. Thinking there were many people who might want to learn of the extensive capabilities of Linux as an application platform, they wrote this book.

Sometimes, I just don't understand what the marketing departments at various companies are thinking. Take Microsoft's Silverlight project, for instance. From what they are saying, it is going to take Flash by the ears and shake the daylights out of it. Fantastic, and from the looks of the promo video, am I to also assume that we will be using translucent touchscreen computers that look like something from iRobot? Perhaps this is a video that is targeting the social and technology climate for its release date.

Information Week has a full comparison of Vista and Ubuntu though they don’t really declare a winner; I’ll do it for them, Vista.

[My FUD of the week submission. It has choice quotes like "didn’t it occur to the Ubuntu team that maybe, just maybe I want my graphics card to have all its modes supported out of the installation", "I do not use Ubuntu on a regular basis" and "besides, PhotoShop doesn’t run on Linux". Hehehe — Sander]

Welcome to this year's 19th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! The biggest news of the past week was the joint announcement by Dell and Canonical which promises to usher in a new era in the way we choose our systems in online computer stores - a brief analysis of the announcement and what it means for us follows. In other news, the Fedora project finally merges its two package repositories, Ian Murdock announces the end of Progeny, and NimbleX offers a never-seen-before web-based way of generating a custom Slackware-based live CD. Also in this issue: a featured article that presents two excellent resources for those who are interested in becoming more proficient in Linux and open source software. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the recipient of the April 2007 DistroWatch donation is the LyX project. Happy reading!