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A few months back on Kairosnews, we had a long discussion with Michael Bruton, a representative of Turnitin, a commercial "plagiarism detection and prevention service." In short, the question was whether it was ethical for teachers to use the service, since it involves uploading students' essays into turnitin.com's database, where they will ostensibly be encrypted and then used to guard against its being used illicitly in the future. Students at various schools across the country have protested the software as well, arguing that (a) the service is very expensive, and student's don't want to pay for it, and (b) they feel it violates their "intellectual property rights."

Linux Mint is an Ubuntu-based distribution whose goal is to provide a more complete out-of-the-box experience by including browser plugins, media codecs, support for DVD playback, Java, and other components. Linux Mint 2.0, code name "Barbara", was released yesterday: This release is based on Ubuntu 6.10 and uses the Ubuntu installer. The desktop is GNOME 2.16.1 and the kernel is 2.6.17. Barbara comes with the following plugins: Macromedia Flash 9 beta, Sun Java 1.5 Update 9, RealPlayer 10. Support for MP3, Windows and various codecs, encrypted DVDs is installed by default. Barbara comes with Amarok 1.4.4 instead of Rhythmbox.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: KTorrent supports the creation of trackerless torrents, with work beginning on a web-based management GUI. Support for browsing the SHOUTcast webradio listings in Amarok. Work starts on a new Planner Summary plugin for Kontact. KDissert is renamed Semantik. Maps of more countries added to KGeography. Version 2 of Kallery, a web image gallery creator, is imported into KDE SVN. Qt3 and KDE 3 Java bindings are removed from KDE SVN, superceded by the developments of Qt Jambi.

A survey by the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering (IAO) commissioned by IBM, Novell and the Stuttgart Region Economic Development Corporation (WRS) concludes that open source is on the ascendant and is stimulating the economy. Surveys by market research companies such as IDC and Gartner have come to similar conclusions.

The Firefox open-source web browser will soon be compatible with Microsoft's CardSpace identity-management technology, since Microsoft has vowed to write the browser a software plug-in. The plug-in will be written at Microsoft's Open Source Software Lab and released eventually to the open-source community, said Hank Janssen, the lab's program manager, at the TechEd IT Forum in Barcelona yesterday.

Last week, LWN pointed at a software review claiming that Fedora Core 6 was so bad that the whole distribution should simply be shut down. The failing which led to such a dire prescription was a lack of proprietary software.

Eben Moglen has now stated that GPLv3 will be redrafted to include clear language that will make the Novell-Microsoft agreement an obvious GPL violation, and more: "GPL version 3 will be adjusted so the effect of the current deal is that Microsoft will by giving away access to the very patents Microsoft is trying to assert."

SGI today announced an order with the U.S. Government for a massive SGI(R) Altix(R) 4700 system and maintenance services. The order is the result of SGI's close collaboration with Fed Centric Technologies, a Bethesda, Md.-based company that specializes in supporting the mission-critical applications, infrastructure and professional services requirements of the Department of Defense, intelligence community, the Department of Homeland Security and federal law enforcement communities. Powered by 128 Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 9000 Series Processors, the new system features 4TB of globally shared memory running under a single instance of SUSE(R) Linux Enterprise Server 10 from Novell(R).

Racoon Roadwarrior is a client that uses unknown, dynamically assigned IP addresses to connect to a VPN gateway (in this case also firewall). This is one of the most interesting and today most needed scenarios in business environment. This tutorial shows how to configure Racoon Roadwarrior.

Entrepreneurs attending a recent forum in Germany showed how they plan to use clever open source products — commercially — to compete with proprietary software companies. The Open Source Forum gave software entrepreneurs from Europe and the US an opportunity to present their business ideas to venture capitalists and other ICT experts. Their message was loud and clear: open source is a disruptive technology that is here to stay, and it will nibble, or maybe even someday gobble, away at the customer base of big and pricey commercial software companies.

In the mythical land of "Open Source," an egalitarian, global network of software developers sacrificially contribute programming code to the greater good. But in today's real world, open source minds and corporate technology giants are finding they need each other to survive and thrive, says Bob Sutor, IBM vice president of Open Standards and Open Source.

Open-source collaboration software vendor Zimbra is adopting an intriguing approach to taking on proprietary titans like Microsoft and Google, using its channel partners as its competitive muscle. The aim is for Zimbra to step completely out of directly selling the commercial versions of its products so the startup can focus fully on software development and support, according to Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra's ebullient cofounder and chief executive officer.

With the launch of the PlayStation 3, the fate of one of the world’s best-known brands, Sony, hangs in the balance. Although the technology, and the price tag, of the new system will likely lead to it moving at least partially it into the realm of home theater enthusiasts rather than just gaming enthusiasts wanting the latest game system, presently Sony is staking much of its future on that market. For true security, it needs a complete digital ecosystem, and for that, it needs to change its PC strategy.

SugarCRM has become the latest open source vendor to simplify the installation and support of a full software stack comprising its own CRM application and other third party offerings. Thursday, the company unveiled Sugar FastStack, a service to set up and support a stack of its Sugar Professional or Enterprise product.

Advanced Micro Devices heeft onlangs nieuwe display drivers voor Linux uitgebracht. Ze hebben versienummer 8.31.5 meegegeven, kunnen hun werk doen op alle kaarten vanaf de Radeon 9500. Anders dan dat we van ATi gewend waren is er nu slechts één download, die geschikt zijn voor zowel een 32-bits als een 64-bits omgeving. De downloadgrootte daarentegen is gegroeid naar zo'n 55MB.

Bug stamp-out list for November 17, 2006

As the CEO of open source database company MySQL AB, Marten Mickos has overseen enormous growth in his company. Some even say the plucky MySQL is starting to threaten industry heavyweight Oracle, though that contest is still very much David and Goliath. At the very least, MySQL, as a major building block of the LAMP stack, earns bragging rights as the leading open source database.

"I'm not buying a new PC, not yet," said the angry NewsWireless reader. "I need a new computer, and I found one online - but it comes with Windows Vista! I don't want that!" Sadly, it seem that in their enthusiasm to be seen to be as far up on Microsoft's beautiful unique marketing as possible, several online PC stores have been advertising "With Windows Vista!" for their computers. This is, to put it gently, an exaggeration.

Nokia's Network Business Group has selected Red Hat Linux as the primary OS for its carrier-grade server platforms, Red Hat reports. Nokia will integrate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on multiple FlexiPlatform products this year, with Red Hat providing onsite consulting, support, certification, and training services.

Nuxified.org is an unique, friendly community powered Free Software support site launched at the beginning of this year as an alternative to the big players in the field of GNU/Linux help forums such as LinuxQuestions.org and LinuxForums.org. We are different in many ways.