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Has Redmond finally accepted that open source should be embraced, or are the company's recent partnerships with community-developed software providers simply another way to crack the competition?

[O.k., the article opens with a blatent lie from Microsoft's UK Technology Officer. The only 'interoperability they ever cared about is between different versions of Microsoft software. - dcparris]

The Free Software Foundation yesterday released the second draft of the GNU General Public Licence version 3 which incorporates many of the 1000 community-suggested changes received since the first draft in January. The FSF says it is still on track to release the final version early in 2007.

With its acquisition of Suse Linux in 2003, Novell set itself up as the chief commercial competitor to Red Hat Linux for the enterprise Linux market. Last week Red Hat struck back, this time bringing the competition to Novell's home court.

[I like this author's question - where do you draw the line? If these vendors were willing to acknowledge the moral aspect of software licensing, they would know where to draw the line - dcparris]

When open source developers gather on a panel to discuss whether "all software will go open source," you can expect the sentiment to tip that way, only with lots of arguments.

Freescale Technology Forum (FTF Americas) -- GDA Technologies, Inc., a fast-growing IP and Electronic Design Services (EDS) company, today announced the market-leading availability of its Reference Platform kit for Freescale Semiconductor's Advanced Mezzanine Card (AMC) based on the MPC8548E PowerQUICC(TM) III processor built on Power Architecture(TM) technology.

Kubuntu is a well polished Linux distribution brought out by Canonical the creators of Ubuntu but with KDE as the default desktop. The latest release of Kubuntu is as robust as Ubuntu with a lot of unique features related to KDE. This review takes a closer look at this Linux distribution.

Community members are mediating between the two competing virtualization vendors in pursuit of a joint solution for the Linux kernel.

Dubuntu is a Chinese GNU/Linux operation system based on Ubuntu Linux 6.06. The goal of this new distribution is to provide a Linux environment focused on software development, with nice desktop evironment. OSDir has some nice shots of Dubuntu 6.06 in the Dubuntu 6.06 Screenshot Tour.

AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) is acquiring ATI Technologies, one of the top two graphics processor makers, for around $5.4 billion. AMD's aim is to grow its market share in the mobility and commercial markets, according to AMD CEO Hector Ruiz. What does this mean for Linux users?

Today's star of People Behind KDE is a member of what was once described as "the younger generation of Kopete developers". This man talks Messenger and Jabber nativly but only communicated on IRC thanks to Babelfish. Learn about the trials of a Kopete developer in our interview with Olivier Goffart

Report of highly critical vulnerabilities.

PORTLAND, Ore. -- O'Reilly's eight annual Open Source Convention was in full swing yesterday. The exhibit floor opened, and there was a full schedule of talks and Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions.

When Bob Hecht joined Informa PLC as its vice president of content strategy, he dreamed of rebuilding the British technical publisher's infrastructure using Linux and open-source technologies. But with Microsoft Windows entrenched throughout the company, Hecht settled on a more pragmatic hybrid: an open-source content management server from Alfresco Software Inc., backed up by open-source applications MySQL, Apache Tomcat and JBoss -- all running on Windows Server-based hardware.

[All I can say is, ugh! -- grouch]

"We are on track to complete the process on schedule." With these words, Eben Moglen expressed his satisfaction with today's release of the second draft of the GNU Public License version 3 (GPL3). The release represents an effort to incorporate comments on the first draft made by thousands of people over the last six months via email, mail forums, and world-wide meetings, as well as the discussion of the four sub-committees involved in the writing of the draft.

The FormSpy trojan does not use any Firefox security flaws to infect computers. Instead, it is downloaded and installed automatically by a piece of Windows malware known as Downloader-AXM, which exists solely for the purpose of surreptitiously downloading and running trojan horses. Once downloaded by Downloader-AXM, FormSpy installs itself in Firefox by directly modifying Firefox user profile files, completely bypassing the standard Firefox extension installation mechanism (and warning messages).

[Emphasis added. The reports in the news, coming from McAfee, make it sound like Firefox is providing the means for this malware to attack users. As usual, the culprit is Microsoft Windows. -- grouch]

[...] Kraus estimates a Web 2.0 company can start up with an investment of around $100,000 (£50,000) - a reduction by a factor of 30! One reason? Open source software like the LAMP software stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python) now provide Web 2.0 businesses with a robust, low-cost platform to start trading - while providing built-in scalability as the business grows.

SSV Embedded Systems is shipping a tiny processor module targeting complex industrial communications applications. The ARM9-based DNP/9200 single-board computer (SBC) comes pre-installed with Linux, and is available in a Starter Kit that includes an evaluation board with a socket for a GSM/GPRS modem and SIM card.

The Fedora Legacy Group finally ends support for Red Hat 9 and Fedora Core 2, as well as the earlier versions of both popular Linux lines.

PORTLAND, Ore. -- Google is scheduled to announce hosting for open source projects on Google Code today during Greg Stein's talk at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON).

Why pick one distro instead of another? One reason is security. Not the security of the code itself, but how fast security patches get applied and published.
Therefore, all other things being equal, security managers would prefer a Linux distribution with a record of speedy publication of fixes for security issues.