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Novell's new CTO Jeff Jaffe is bullish on the outlook for the Linux desktop going forward, saying he believes it is on the cusp of a significant adoption wave. "I think we are approaching a tipping point on the enterprise desktop side," Jaffe said.

"The industry has built a commercial infrastructure to make it easy now for more open source projects to be relevant to business. There used to be all sorts of barriers and obstacles, even if the technology was good enough, but a lot of the nontechnical barriers are now evaporating," he said.

While previously there was not enough momentum behind the desktop, the technology is now better. Corporate IT departments have became more comfortable with having the right skills for Linux and are developing acquisition policies to bring open source into their enterprise, he said.

Editor's Note: Dave Kearns is traveling this week. In place of his usual newsletter, we bring you breaking Novell news from Networkworld.com.

Commercial software companies like SAP don't get it about Free or Open Source Software. Neither do Venture Capitalists. The ecosystem doesn't rely on a medium of exchange but first on faith and trust and then monetization. Those concepts don't fly well in a system where decision makers cannot take a long-term approach to business. Look how long it took Linux to get into the mainstream and look at the changes in the industry once it broke through.

On Digg.com

Two German Video-DVDs use a new copy protection scheme which creates a security risk on Windows machines.

LXer reports of a declaration of war against Google from cDc (Cult of the dead cow), a prominent hacker group who in 1998 invented Back Orifice, one of the first rootkits against Micro$oft’s Windows operating system. They link to the original article, which has some nice layouts for t-shirts which are supposed to support the campaign.

Google isn't about to loose a version of Ubuntu upon the unsuspecting world, Shuttleworth announced on his blog. But it is pretty good at sending patches back.

The growing array of open source tools available to translators and localization professionals got a little bigger recently, when ENLASO Corp. began to port a set of its localization tools to the open source Okapi Framework, which is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).

  LXer Feature: 16-Feb-06

Charlotte, NC - The Charlotte Linux User Group, in a monthly meeting Saturday, discussed the provisions of the GPLv3 draft. Members of the group expressed concerns about the language used in the anti-DRM, license compatibility and license termination sections of the revision draft. The anti-DRM section was seen by some as a potential show-stopper for many developers, while the license compatibility section was seen as potentially encouraging further adoption.

On Digg.com

Another issue of cryptography wisdom accumulated by Bruce Schneier.

This article will help you use Ajax to build a solid foundation in which your application handles errors and problems smoothly, so your users will continue to return to your site and Ajax application.

Back in 2002, the newly formed Open Source Applications Foundation announced that it would change the way corporate and consumer users looked at email and calendaring by releasing an application called Chandler. Workable Chandler 0.6 builds are now available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. As a work in progress, it shows plenty of promise.

Specifix snags a new COO who has experience with the challenges and opportunities of the company's mission.

PC DVD player software and codec specialist InterVideo is demonstrating a hardware/software digital video player reference design targeting mobile devices, at 3GSM in Barcelona. The company's iMobi design runs embedded Linux, and includes technology that can bring live digital TV to mobile phones, PDAs, and media players with Texas Instruments DSPs, the company says.

For months, the Globe's ombudsman has been ignoring calls to investigate the story that led to Peter Quinn's resignation. Last night, he finally responded

Two vulnerabilities were identified in PostgreSQL, which could be exploited by malicious users to cause a denial of service or obtain elevated privileges.

The first flaw is due to an error in the "SET ROLE" command when restoring the previous role setting after an error, which could be exploited by malicious authenticated users to gain superuser privileges.

The second issue is due to an error in the "SET SESSION AUTHORIZATION" command when the application has been compiled with Asserts enabled, which could be exploited by malicious users to cause a denial of service.

At today's meeting of the House International Relations Subcommittee on Global Human Rights, Google took the opportunity to explain how "Don't be evil" squares with collaborating with censors, while Cisco, Yahoo, and Microsoft expressed their positions much more clearly than they had hoped. All in all, it was a very good day for the Cult of the Dead Cow and others hoping to bring sunshine to the dark alley where free-market collaborators make money helping unelected authoritarian regimes control their citizens.

The C type system is often misunderstood or overlooked. This article, the second in a series, discusses the derived types, or types that are built from other types, and some of the interactions that occur when data of multiple types are mixed. Part 1 introduces the basics of the C type system, with an overview of what it means to talk about type and a discussion of the basic types in some detail.

New CTO Jeff Jaffe has high hopes for the Linux enterprise desktop as more corporate IT departments bring open source into their environments.

According to the report by Gavin Clark in The Register from the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) in San Francisco yesterday, Linus Torvalds has "misread" the draft of version 3 of the GNU Public License (GPL).

Though it is increasingly diversified, Oracle's primary business is selling its own proprietary database software. MySQL, in contrast, is a leader among several companies trying to commercialise rival open-source products.

MySQL Chief Executive Marten Mickos confirmed the acquisition attempt in an interview at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco but wouldn't provide details such as when the approach was made or how much money Oracle offered.