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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.

A guide to using version 2 of GIMP, the popular open-source digital image editor, was released this month by O'Reilly Media. GIMP 2 for Photographers is like a classroom seminar that starts with the basics, and enables students to learn as much as they want.

Medsphere Corporation, which claims to be 'the leading supplier of open source software for the healthcare industry' recentlysued its founders, the Shreeve brothers, for releasing company software as Open Source on Sourceforge. The key argument in the lawsuit is whether the Shreeves informed Medsphere CEO Ken Kizer that they intended to release code on sourceforge before doing so. I haveproof that Ken Kizer was informed of the release. Further I have confirmed that Medsphere appears to be suing anyone who downloaded the code from SourceForge for racketeering. I am releasing this information only afterEric Raymond and I have attempted to reach a peaceful resolution with Medsphere.

D-Bus 1.0 ("Blue Bird"), the Freedesktop.org inter-process messaging system has just been released. A collaborative effort between industry and open source developers, D-Bus was created to allow arbitrary applications to easily communicate with each other and exchange data. An additional system daemon allows for communication with system services. D-Bus is known to work on all Unix platforms and has also been ported to Mac OS X, while a Windows port is in progress. This makes D-Bus the ideal messaging system for KDE 4.

Last week at the Ubuntu Developer Summit the release goals for Feisty Fawn were discussed and drawn up. Ubuntu's next version is aiming for some pretty good features. There's one change that bothers me to no end though: composite by default. In order to reach this goal, they want to install and configure binary video drivers by default. That is a firm slap in the face of long term Ubuntu users everywhere though.

Jeff Jarvis is looking for better stewards of journalism's future. He explains, "I don’t see enough development going on in new news efforts — enough to save journalism from the sinking news business. And that’s what’s troubling me. The old players are proving to be quite ineffective stewards — we knew that — but there aren’t enough new stewards joining the church." Problem is, you can't make a new business out of an old business that's turned into a church. Wall Street isn't up for that, and most of the big papers work for Wall Street. The word "stewardship" alone is a boat anchor on any company's stock price.

I've been using PC-BSD for approx. 10 Months so I've had enough time to see what life throws at me with it. My first install was 1.0 Release Canadate (RC) 1 and I currently run PC-BSD 1.2 (the current release) on my laptop and have a beta version of 1.3 installed on my desktop for testing. This will cover PC-BSD 1.2 and PC-BSD in general.

This course first presents an overview of what PHP is, how PHP programs run, and why PHP is so popular. You will also see a comparison of PHP to JavaScript, CGI, Net.Data and Java Web applications.

The NetBSD project has released a complete live CD with automatic hardware detection and an option to boot into a graphical desktop with KDE. Called NetBSD Live! 2007, the CD image is available for the i386 processor architectures: "This CD-ROM contains a specially constructed version of NetBSD 4.0_BETA sporting a modified kernel based on NetBSD-CURRENT.

A new version of Mono is out, and it rocks. In response to all those haters, Novell opens its legal books to GPL pundits. Novell gets $350 million dollars of love from MS, Java is going to be released under the GPL, and Adobe donates a heck of a lot of code to the Mozilla foundation. Not to be outdone, Google commits to an annual donation of cold hard cash to the Samba project.

Microsoft Windows is heavily relying on Linux for their high traffic services.

A recent interview with Izumi Kawanishi, head of the Software Platform division of SCEI, shed some new details on the PlayStation 3.

Many organisations use methods to keep a standard look and feel to their computer desktops, with branding, logos, default company websites as home pages and various rights and privilege settings. These "manageable computer desktops" have always been fairly easy to roll-out company-wide, and if any changes were made in a session, they are wiped when the next user logs on.

There are those in the Linux world who think Microsoft's long-term plan is to keep tabs on and control of a strong competitor -- Suse's Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 is seriously good. Linux Web forums have been awash with outraged users denouncing Novell for making a deal with the devil.

Today I read Andy McCue's post on,"Why the Linux desktop dream is over" and "Stephen O'Grady's "Do Operating Systems Matter: Part 1 " and Jonathan Schwartz's post on Network Clients and it becomes clear to me the eventual direction of desktop computing.

An updated version of Ubuntu Christian Edition has been released: "We have just released Ubuntu CE v1.5! With this release we focused on the fixing some issues with the live CD installer. We have also made a subtle, but very important change to the Ubuntu CE installer, upgrade_me script, Convert_me script, Web Content Filtering Only script, and the DansGuardian GUI Only script. The Configure Parental Controls GUI has been updated to include a few new features.

Version 0.9.25 of Wine got released. It contains the usual bugfixes and a number of improvements. For players of WoW the most noticeable one is that they won't need special OpenGL patches anymore for running it correctly in OpenGL mode. The game should work correctly out of the box.