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You would have to be a little gullible to believe that the agreement announced on Friday between Novell and Microsoft has much, if anything, to do with open source software.

It turns out that the world's premier web based commercial open source vendor, SugarCRM, has published their software under modified terms, which are not OSI approved, and will probably never be. Should they be de-listed from Sourceforge?

[Note to readers: LXer has not yet verified the claims made in this story. So read carefully and, as always, judge for yourself the merits of the author's claims. - dcparris]

An open source-based enterprise solutions for small manufacturers and distributors, OpenMFG, has unveiled version 2.0 of its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. Major enhancements include multi-currency capabilities, a new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) module, as well as new functionality in the solution's Manufacturing and Scheduling module, the company said.

"There's been quite a flurry in the blogosphere in the last couple of days over this and it's clear that a lot of people aren't really looking at this from the right angle."

Last week we learned how to set up MaraDNS as an authoritative DNS server. Today we'll use MaraDNS for local name services, and for a local caching resolver. We'll also cover doing zone transfers between primary and secondary servers. You can speed up Web surfing and other online services noticeably by using a local DNS cache. With MaraDNS it's as easy as falling over

"There's a tendency to think of the community as being entirely volunteers somehow working for free in their basements, but invariably they're in government or research," said Red Hat's Rick Carr. "For the commercial products, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, where the customer base is Wall Street or wherever, the large majority of development is done by commercial IT companies."

Virtualisation slashes development timesOne of the oft-quoted advantages of virtualisation is the re-use of existing server resources, a capability which need not just apply to servers working in a production environment.

With Firefox 2.0 out the door last week, Mozilla is turning its attention to version 3.0, with a goal to deliver the new browser about this time next year. Among the features Mozilla wants for Firefox 3.0 is Places, the revamped bookmark tool that was dropped from 2.0 development in April. "We definitely didn't want to add [Places] until it was ready for prime time," says Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's director of engineering

The Cape IT Initiative (CITI) are launching their latest new business acceleration initiative, VeloCITI. The idea is to select IT businesses with innovative and sustainable ideas and provide the support to get the companies up and running.

And so, last week, “Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc. ... announced a set of broad business and technical collaboration agreements to build, market and support a series of new solutions to make Novell and Microsoft products work better together. The two companies also announced an agreement to provide each other’s customers with patent coverage for their respective products. These agreements will be in place until at least 2012”. I doubt it's as simple as that.

Sound eXchange (SoX) is a command-line sound sample translator. This Swiss Army knife of sound tools can be used to convert file formats of your audio files, and to apply sound effects such as echo, fade-in/out, and chorus to jazz up your music with just a few keystrokes.

Fighting fragmentationThe biggest obstacle in Java's path to becoming the dominant software architecture for mobile phones has been its fragmentation - both in terms of technical features and the various licensing schemes adopted by its early exponents. The past two years have seen the handset makers and large operators increasingly taking the steering wheel of the mobile Java movement, seeking to create unified platforms and work around the confusion caused by Sun's halfhearted open source approach.

The Beta sessions of the first South African LPI level 3 exams will be taking place in early December in Joburg and Cape Town. The exams can be written free of charge and registration is open to anyone with an LPI level 1 certification.

Much too often, we take things for granted, and don’t think about them. They just work, especially if you are using Debian with its outstanding dpkg and apt package management tools. But one thing which amazes me every now and then again is apt-proxy.

The beta version of the future Flash 9 is included; update from X.Org 7.0 to 7.1; Intel wireless firmware updates for the ipw2x00 models of wireless cards; Torus trooper, an amazing game made by Kenta Cho, with a retro-futuristic style; Transmission, a small basic BitTorrent client; E16 fonts - fixed problem with characters on the E16 menus and messages; E16 sounds - helpful sounds added to the 'Elive look' of E16 (a nice girl's voice explaining the available options); Java was again added to the development versions; Evidence no longer be in the dock, replaced by Thunar; Thunar media tags and archiver plugins have been added to Elive; Gaim updated to the latest version.

I spotted a couple of strange things in today's distrowatch.com news column.

Welcome to this year's 45th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! Novell drops a bombshell on the Linux community. Signing an exclusive patent-protection agreement with Microsoft, a company that has been trying to discredit Linux at every opportunity, Novell claims that the deal is great for its customers. The community, however, is not impressed. In the meantime, CentOS, a project that provides a free clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, voices its concerns over the recently launched Oracle Enterprise Linux. In other news: find out how the Fedora code names are generated, check out the 100% "libre" gNewSense distribution, and install a bunch of scientific applications on your Ubuntu box with just one command. In our web log feature, we revisit Mandriva Linux 2007 and give away four boxes of its PowerPack edition. Finally, reader's input is sought for a dilemma about the increasingly aggressive linking of several Linux distributions to DistroWatch. Happy reading!

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Work on porting kdegames applications to SVG and other general improvements continues at a fast pace. Work continues on video support in KPhotoAlbum. Krita gets a new star shape tool. Okular gets support for freehand ink overlays in presentation mode. Kate gets syntax highlighting support for ActionScript and RapidQ code. Mailody continues to mature as an alternative email client. Strigi refactors to allow searching within multiple simultaneous indexes, with preliminary interoperability with Akonadi on the horizon.

NetBSD 3.1 has been released: "The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that version 3.1 of the NetBSD operating system is now available in both source and binary form. NetBSD is a general-purpose Open Source operating system that provides interfaces for running a wide range of applications on a big number of different hardware platforms, all from one source tree. NetBSD 3.1 contains many bug fixes, security updates, new drivers and new features like support for Xen3 DomU."

Dell gets honest about its support for the Linux Desktop, A new trendy Linux-based Smartphone is on the way, then we get all excited about the new version of Amarok and talk the heck out of Novell and Microsoft’s new partnership. THEN!..We interview one of the guys from TVease and talk about their awesome Linux based Media center, follow that up with a listener question and so much MORE!