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Matt Zimmerman has responded to a recent NewsForge article that suggests that the maintainers of derivative distributions are unintentionally violating the requirements of the GNU General Public License (GPL). Ubuntu's technical leader says the project may be able to help.

A Japanese tech group taps low-cost components to help spur development of humanoid robots.

[A Nerd I may be, but I liked the Transformers and Macross Saga and Star Wars and... - Scott]

Doc Searls wrote a magnificant column for an upcoming issue of LJ. He uses the movie"Matrix" to raise issues similar to the one I'm about to raise. His upcoming column should be considered a must-read for anyone who cares about free software and free speech.

The world depicted in a different movie,"Brazil", is similar to that of Matrix in that it is governed bycontrolling self-interest. Freedom, as in free speech, is a partial cure for controlling self-interest, which is what makes the concept of free software superior to any other type of software. But there's more to free software than concept. There's implementation. And that's where free software sometimes gets into trouble with self-interest.

[I have to admit, I completely agree with him. I can't believe it. - Scott]

OpenOffice.org extensions are a quick way to add functionality. Writable in a variety of languages, including Java, JavaScript, OpenOffice.org Basic, Python, and C++, they allow developers to contribute features without having to master much of OpenOffice.org's notoriously cryptic source code. For users, they provide quick fixes for commonly requested features.

In "Last.fm makes Internet music social," Dmitri Popov extols the wonders of Last.fm, a "social" music site that lets users create Internet radio stations that fits their tastes. Last.fm provides a free player for Linux, but if you want to use Last.fm with your favorite Linux player, you'll need the LastFMProxy written by Vidar Madsen.

Despite being on record as disliking public speaking, Mark Shuttleworth was in Dublin last month to give the keynote speech at this year's ApacheCon Europe. His theme was the future direction of open source software (OSS), and the issues developers should focus on to ensure the OSS movement’s continued success.

The Mozilla Foundation is wary of entering into too many sponsorship deals however, as they've learnt from Netscape's experiences.

Many governments and organisations are moving towards open standards and frameworks. To assist users in understanding open standards the International Open Source Network has released FOSS: Open Standards, the latest in its series of "e-Primer" books.

[Free book, foreword by Peter J. Quinn. -- grouch]

Open source start up Pentaho Corp grabbed $8m in venture funding to drive development of its rapidly evolving business intelligence suite.

A doctoral thesis submitted to the University of Zurich in Switzerland has focused on the question of what makes developers of open-source software tick.

The KOffice team today released the second bug-fix release in their 1.5 series. Several crash bugs were fixed, as well as a PowerPC issue in Krita and of course many smaller issues. There are also updated languages packs and a totally new language: Traditional Chinese.

Open source legal expert Eben Moglen's Software Freedom Law Center has given the OpenDocument Format its stamp of approval, declaring the office productivity format free from legal encumbrances.

HP, Blueloop And Omni demonstrate how up to 10 users can share a single linux desktop computer.

This new record beats the previous 2-core HP/Itanium2 and Oracle 10g performance record for Linux by 58 percent. It also beats the previous 2-core HP/Opteron and Microsoft SQL Server performance record and is less expensive by 23 percent.

It took some years - which is normal in the development of new architectures, but very slow until the market (read: big guys like Dell, or the stock exchange) reacted and accepted the fact that AMD had a clear winner, at least in the server and game PC areas.

Jitterbit, Inc. and salesforce.com, an on-demand business services, announced that Jitterbit's open source integration suite is now available through salesforce.com's AppExchange and can integrate directly with Salesforce implementations.

An innovative expert help service is turning heads in cyberspace. Richard Frank caught up with Capetonian co-founder, Helmar Rudolph.

VPSLink, of http://www.vpslink.com, today announced the addition of Gentoo Linux to its VPS product line. Gentoo is now available on all VPSLink hosting plans as a Stage 3 Install. VPSLink is committed to providing cutting edge technology at ultra-competitive prices.

The Smart Package Manager hopes to beat the native package management applications for distributions like Red Hat, SUSE, and Debian at their own game. Still in beta, it has support for most major GNU/Linux package and repository formats, with a modular codebase that hints at further compatibility. Smart introduces many innovative and useful ideas, but its killer feature, with which it purports to excel beyond its counterparts, is the algorithms it uses to select packages and versions that best resolve dependencies and ensure cooperation between the hundreds of applications and libraries on a user's system.

The AMD outlet in Dresden, Germany, is aggressively advertising its search for experienced Linux knowledge workers.