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One of India’s leading universities, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) has launched a 6-week workshop to expose more students to the benefits of FOSS. The program aims to partner student programmers from local Delhi colleges with bio-informatics experts from JNU to come up with a complete suite of open-source software for bio-informatics.

The head of School Wide Services, Mr. Terry Wister, removed all of the linux computers from room 218 at Monarch Park Collegiate, while I was at lunch, on Wednesday, June 21, 2006. The lab had been in operation for 5 years.
[...]
Easily the best systems I have ever used in more than 35 years of using computers of all sorts. As an example, just the use of easyurpmi alone made the job of installing and selecting software a joy with just a click of a few buttons!

[I missed this interview when it came out. -- grouch]

My previous blog, Pay a little now, pay a lot later, generated a lot more traffic than I expected. Lots. As a consequence, it was seen by many people who probably aren’t as familiar with certain aspects of free software as my normal target audience. This led to several misunderstandings.

A newly launched electronic theses deposit system, the Repository Bridge allows theses produced at Welsh universities to be automatically and electronically added and stored at the National Library of Wales.

[Note that the Fedora it speaks of is not the GNU/Linux distribution. This one, the Flexible Extensible Digital Object and Repository Architecture, traces its beginnings to 1997. -- grouch]

The goal of the GNU GPL is to ensure that all users have the four essential freedoms -- (0) to run the program, (1) to study and change it, (2) to redistribute it, and (3) to distribute modified versions. Access to the source code is essential for freedom 1 and freedom 3. Thus, we designed the GNU GPL to insist that all redistributors make the source code available to their users. This requires them to do a little extra work, but that work is generally necessary for the sake of the users' freedom. Keeping source code conveniently and reliably available for the users is more important than saving distributors a little effort.

Open-source software developers that move to a closed-source licensing model to help pay their bills can create challenges, but they also offer opportunities for federal agencies, experts say. Federal users who are increasingly reliant on open-source software are paying more attention to those decisions, and they are stepping in to get the outcomes they want.

[Try to find "GPL" or "GNU" or "free software" anywhere in this article. Maybe if the U.S. feds educated themselves better about the GPL, "Congress, the FBI, the Pentagon and the Treasury Department" would not be so terrified that "a foreign company could make one of the government’s primary security tools proprietary and take control of the Snort source code." Snort is GPL'ed, though you might have to dig around the site to discover that, as Snort proclaims itself "open source". It appears that studious use of the term "open source" and avoidance of any mention of the philosophy behind free software contributes to fear and misunderstandings. -- grouch]

Novell Inc. will start shipping Release 10 of its Suse Linux on Monday, marking the first full new release of Suse Linux since August 2004, according to the company's president and chief executive officer.

Here are five essential tools for securing Firefox by disabling JavaScript and Flash, sniffing out suspicious sites, foiling phishing, preventing peeks at private data, and preparing powerful passwords.

[Good information in there, if you can get to it through the advertisements. -- grouch]

IBM will also allow management of Xen virtual machines under IBM's Virtualization Engine, allowing IT managers to use familiar IBM management software to provision and manage multiple Xen virtual machines.

The company is called Ohloh, and was named after the first surfboard in Hawaii. Its mission will be to analyze open-source software projects and provide customers with detailed information about them, including how much it would cost to duplicate the project given an average programmer salary of US$55,000 per year. The Linux kernel, for example, clocked in at nearly 4.7 million lines of code, has had 1,434 man-years of coding effort put in so far, and would have cost approximately US$79 million in salaries.

[This is the second story of this startup, and I still don't trust the founders. No reflection on the author of the story, as it is a very good report, but I don't think Ohloh ever read David A. Wheeler's Linux Kernel 2.6: It's Worth More!. I'll trust Mr. Wheeler's well documented analysis long before taking the word of former MS execs. Their undocumented, asserted figure is only about 13% of what Wheeler estimates. Maybe this partially explains the incredibly low quality of MS software; after executives get done dipping in the revenue, the leavings for programmers are 13% of what is needed.-- grouch]

The SCO Group Inc. is appealing a U.S. magistrate's ruling that stripped many of its claims in a $5 billion lawsuit against IBM Corp.

Novell will try to recover from earlier Linux fumbles by releasing major updates on Monday, adding Xen virtualization software to its enterprise server product and glitzy graphics to the desktop counterpart.

How does one live in Gloucester County in the summer and study penguins? Gloucester resident and Virginia Institute of Marine Science student Heidi Geisz is finding out.

[Ok, ok, it's not about FOSS, but it mentions penguins, Gentoo and Adele. It's still fascinating. -- grouch]

At the recent KDE Four Core meeting Aaron Seigo interviewed a number of the developers. You can hear them now on the new KDE://radio site.

The localisation of OpenOffice.org into the Georgian language is to be completed this summer. It marks part of an important process taking place in Georgia, a former Soviet republic. A year ago the ministry of education decided to rely on open source software in its multimillion-dollar school computerisation project Deer Leap because delivering software in Georgian was only possible if open source was chosen; Microsoft's local partner had just announced another delay in releasing Georgian Windows.

Instead of being a separate license, the LGPL will be the GPL with additional privileges, a kind of template of what additions should be. First Stallman:

An interview with Larry Sanger - co-founder and "chief organiser" of Wikipedia, and now one of the driving forces behind the ambitious Digital Universe, a free Web guide and collaborative encyclopedia.

Building an open source–based infrastructure has helped mid-market Bonhams compete with the auction industry superpowers.

Linux graphics stack vendor Trolltech recently supplied LinuxDevices.com with a Motorola Rokr E2 music phone for (p)review. The phone appears to be the same E2 that shipped in China last week through carrier China Mobile, but semi-localized to the U.S., to demonstrate the phone's capabilities

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