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A publicly funded Linux project which cost UK taxpayers half-a-million pounds has flopped.

[This is not good. What is likely the result of poor performance in the human equation will be attributed to "open source", generally. - dcparris]

Welcome to another of Free Software Magazine’s fortnightly newsletters, keeping you up to date with us, and all things free software... enjoy!

Sun Microsystems plans to release the first Java code later today under the General Public Licence (GPL).

[Sun choose the GPL for Java? Who would have guessed? It's definitely a smart move, since a copyleft license provides the best return on your investment. - dcparris]

Unfortunately, Ubuntu is becoming more and more of a disappointment lately. First they start shipping non-free software by default, then the edgy upgrade turns into a disaster and now I read about plans for including more non-free software and a 3D desktop by default in feisty (the next Ubuntu after edgy). To be honest, ever since I've seen the Feisty Fawn announcement I've been wondering what does the focus on "multimedia enablement and desktop effects" imply, the basic suspicion being will it include more non-free software by default?

Days of frustration with Edgy, the latest release of Ubuntu Linux, have driven Alastair Otter to resort to an earlier version of Ubuntu Linux. And frankly, he's quite happy there.

Fedora Weekly News Issue 66

Robert Watson on the new security event auditing systemInterview The upcoming release of FreeBSD 6.2 includes the new security event auditing system, that "permits the selective and fine-grained logging of security-relevant system events for the purposes of post-mortem analysis, intrusion detection, and run-time monitoring analysis".

My daughter recently attended a party where an artist twisted black, white and orange balloons into a penguin. When she happily showed me her prize, all I could think of was Linux. Now that the open source operating system has become so pervasive I see it symbolically everywhere.

Two plug-ins aimed at making the open-source Eclipse IDE (integrated development environment) more useful to device developers are available today for download and integration by embedded tools distributors and individual Eclipse users. Additionally, a third has achieved a milestone 0.7 release, but needs more community participation to improve Linux support.

Once upon a time, there was something new called "the Internet," and it was an unknown quantity. While some guessed what it could become, most did not. Famously, Mark Andreessen - of Mosaic, and later Netscape fame - and Tim Berners-Lee did, while Bill Gates did not. Less publicly, those that helped to create something that came to be called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers - or ICANN - did, and the standards analogue of Bill Gates - the International Telecommunications Union - or ITU - did not.

LXer Feature: 13-Nov-2006

With Christmas around the corner, you'll be glad to know that you can check out over 100 vendors around the globe who offer desktop and notebook computers with GNU/Linux pre-installed. Put another way, LXer's Pre-Installed Linux Vendor database is now available!

Red Hat, once the little company that could, for years could do no wrong. It rode the rising popularity of Linux to become a $280 million-a-year company with a market cap as high as $6 billion, claiming 80% of the market for Linux-based enterprise servers. Other Linux-friendly vendors loved Red Hat, since it gave them and their customers a viable alternative to Windows. Even Microsoft, while openly anti-Linux, didn't treat Red Hat as too much of a threat.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) Compliance Lab unveiled its updated web which provides information on the licences they publish, such as the General Public Licence (GPL).

The Friendly Interactive Shell (fish) is an alternative command line that is designed to be easy to learn and use. fish turns on by default options that are available in shells such as Bash or tcsh and develops them far beyond other shells. The result is a command line that can go a long way toward curing the phobia that many GNU/Linux users nurse from their experience with the DOS command line.

Sun Microsystems is today expected to give-in to years of pushing and open source major elements of Java while hinting at changes to the way Java is certified and tested for compatibility.

Welcome to this year's 46th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! As Novell continues to endure the wrath of the open source developer and user community, many people are wondering whether they should boycott Novell's products. In the meantime, openSUSE continues its 10.2 development process unabated and on target for the early December release. Also in the news: a war of words erupts between Fedora and Ubuntu, Feisty Fawn's new features attract fresh controversy, Debian prepares a new set of kernels for "etch", and Slackware introduces modern features into its "current" tree. We'll bring you the results of our Mandriva Linux 2007 PowerPack competition and continue our discussion on DistroWatch's Page Hit Ranking statistics. Happy reading!

After years of requests and debates, Sun is set to release Java source code under a Linux-friendly license.

At the third and by far the biggest VMware's annual VMworld convention last week, we grabbed the chance to speak to the company's virtualisation visionary and co-founder, Mendel Rosenblum. Where does he see the company taking this fast-evolving technology?

The Samba Team disapproves strongly of the actions taken by Novell on November 2nd. One of the fundamental differences between the proprietary software world and the free software world is that the proprietary software world divides users by forcing them to agree to coercive licensing agreements which restrict their rights to share with each other, whereas the free software world encourages users to unite and share the benefits of the software.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: KViewShell is renamed Ligature. Okular gets support for Text and Line annotations. KSame and Konquest start their conversion to SVG graphics. Marble gets enhanced support for presenting and displaying geographical data interactively, and showing national flags. Mailody, the alternative email client, continues to develop at a rapid pace. Telepathy support in Kopete starts to emerge from experiment towards a usable implementation. Kile gets scripting support, with improvements to scripting across KOffice. KPresenter receives export to text document (OpenDocument) functionality. Improvements in the Magnatune music store facility in Amarok.