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Do the companies that benefit the most from open-source code give anything back to the community? That's a provocative question that comes up when you take a close look at how prominent open-source projects actually work. I don't want to point any fingers, but what about the banks and financial services firms? How much do they give back?

Madrid, Spain, May 8, 2006- After a successful Beta program, Genasys today announced the release of Version 9 of the GenaMap Product Suite. This powerful GIS development and distribution platform is celebrating more than 20 years providing flexible functionality and Unix and Linux support while Version 9 adds support for the Windows operating system.

A local representative of the principal backer of the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system has reacted negatively to a proposal to set up an independent Australian organisation to promote the software.

Debian, Gentoo, Mandriva, Red Hat, and Ubuntu issued security updates that addressed security problems for the following packages: ClamAV, Dia, the X.org X Server, Ethereal, Asterisk, Mozilla, Thunderbird, resmgr, GDM, LibTIFF, Mplayer, PHPWebSite, and SquirrelMail. Ubuntu also issued a kernel update addressing multiple vulnerabilities.

In its "Gunfight at the OK Corral" with a spammer, controversial Blue Frog maker, Blue Security, was shot out of the saddle, completely losing its own website to a denial of service attack. In addition, Blue Frog client email addresses were reportedly exposed, and 10 million non-combatants in Typepad's blogging community assumed room temperature for at least twelve hours. So what did Blue Frog mean when it assured skeptical experts that there would be no innocent victims?

There are already multiple implementations of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) in the marketplace. Why do adopt a standard - and therefore by definition go head to head with their competitors?

Does GNU or the Free Software movement need a new and more attractive logo to help us advertise Free Software ideas?

Many times I have come across seemingly hopeless situations where a program when compiled and installed in GNU/Linux just fails to run. In such situations after I have tried every trick in the book like searching on the net and posting questions to Linux forums, and still failed to resolve the problem, I turn to the last resort which is trace the output of the misbehaving program. Tracing the output of a program throws up a lot of data which is not usually available when the program is run normally. And in many instances, sifting through this volume of data has proved fruitful in pin pointing the cause of error.

Our list of Unix books, papers, and usenet postings continues to grow, so much so that I thought it best to move it to its own page, so we can organize it and continue to work on it on its own page. With that end in mind, Groklaw member grouch has collected all the comments you've left on the original article, and he's put them all together in one list.
Nice bit of work, Grouch!

Journalist Zenone Sovilla founded publishing company Nonluoghi Libere Edizioni (the name approximately means "Non-Places Free Editions") in 2002 after two years' experience running an online community called Nonluoghi.it, which he created to discuss social and political issues, with particular attention to the relationships between democracy and information. The focus of the newborn publishing house was on participatory democracy, libertarian theories, and nonviolence. Right at the start, Sovilla decided that this new business would not only support the philosophy behind free software, but also practiced it in full, since "it looked to be the only way to be consistent with the company mission." In practice, adopting free software was a bold choice in autumn 2001.

MySQL AB, developer of open source database, announced that the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has selected MySQL as its open source server-side database standard.

The Linux Professional Institute's recent decision to globally hike exam prices means SA geeks are running out of time to get certified cheaply. By next year, South Africans could be paying in excess of R900 per exam, about triple the current price.

Using OpenDocument format text in OpenOffice, KOffice and AbiWord

The OpenDocument Foundation has announced that it has created an Open Document Format plugin for Microsoft Office 97 and up. Distribution plans are still up in the air, but It may be released publicly as part of Google Pack. (Linux-Watch)

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes: "The driver, in theory, will be able to support any flavor of 802.11 -- a, b, g, and come the day it's finally approved, n. The driver doesn't concern itself with those issues. It's up to the chipsets' hardware radios to deal with speed concerns. The driver is designed to control the radio hardware on the target device, not replace it."

Sun said Thursday that it would alter its licensing terms in order to make Java easier to bundle with open source operating systems. The announcement is expected to come at the JavaOne conference later this month.

When technology serves its owners, it is liberating. When it is designed to serve others, over the owner's objection, it is oppressive. There's a battle raging on your computer right now -- one that pits you against worms and viruses, Trojans, spyware, automatic update features and digital rights management technologies. It's the battle to determine who owns your computer.

DistroWatch reports - The release candidate of dyne:II is out. In this 2.0 version there is a lot more than 1.0, it will take a while for me to write complete documentation about all the features, but let's go on and see what happens. In particular this release solves all problems with nesting, Unionfs for writable /usr, PCMCIA automatic recognition and... runs on Apple's new Intel based machines (docking and booting from CD with bootcamp). OSDir has some nice shots of dyne:bolic in the dyne:bolic 2.0 RC Screenshot Tour.

Current and former OpenEmbedded users are invited to complete a 23-question online survey conducted by the project. The first OpenEmbedded user survey aims to help the project understand its user-base and their needs, in order to improve the tool. The OpenEmbedded project maintains open-source embedded development tools primarily targeting Linux.

One of the basic premises of evolution is that traits that are advantageous to the species are perpetuated and adverse ones winnowed. Extending the metaphor to software design project management, one would expect that modern "best practices" would be the ones that had resulted in the most benefit to companies. James Turner analyzes why this is not usually the case, and what can be done to correct the problem.