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Last November I described the Free Software's Surprising Affinity with Catholic Doctrine. Since then, several important things happened, from feedback by Stallman and other Free SW users to the birth, or acceleration, of some projects specifically based on the concept that Christians have even more reasons than others to adopt Free Software.

ValueSYS, the leading promoter of Linux and Open Source Solutions from Novell and Loghat Al-Asr Magazine, the most popular IT magazine in Egypt has announced the launch of Open SUSE Linux virtual image CD to the Arab World. Loghat Al-Asr Magazine has launched Open SUSE Linux virtual image CD on its April issue. It introduces the easiest way to run Linux on windows-based computers to facilitate users' interaction with Linux operating system and enable Linux users to install and run Linux in a safe and easy way with the minimal need of technical support.

Freescale is shipping a home NAS (network-attached storage) / media server reference design that runs Linux and targets power-efficient, always-on consumer products. The MPC8349E mITX Reference Platform includes a PowerQUICC-based mini-ITX board, along with a standards-based Linux software stack and SDK from Mediabolic.

Mozilla Corp. Thursday outlined a new support policy that includes a "sunset" provision which will quash any further security updates to the Firefox 1.0.x, Thunderbird 1.0.x, and Mozilla Suite 1.7.x product lines. "[Firefox 1.0.8] marks the end-of-life of the 1.0.x product line," Mozilla said in an online statement

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is planning a large-scale campaign against Digital Rights Management (DRM). Peter Brown, the executive director of the Free Software Foundation, said a campaign will be organised to target both consumers and manufacturers after the second draft of GPL 3 is released. GPL 3 will include provisions against Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology.

IBM's upcoming release of Lotus Notes for Linux is, according to Novell survey responders, among the most eagerly anticipated events in Linuxdom. And rightly so.

I started experimenting with Linux for fun, first with Slackware, but in the last few years more with Debian and its derivative distributions. Lately I've been using Linux increasingly in my job. As I've gotten more experienced with Linux, I've started teaching Linux courses to colleagues. Connectivity and fast package and file management are important components in my administration toolbox.

PHP creator Zend Technologies and IBM are continuing their partnership to forge new enterprise opportunities for PHP devs. This time, PHP is being ported to IBM’s i5/OS family of midrange systems. The program was prompted by strong end-user reception to the Zend Core for IBM program, which supported PHP dev access to DB2.

Centrify's DirectControl Suite 3 allows administrators to add Linux to their server mix and still use Active Directory to manage users.

ARM is shipping a new version of its graphical development toolset. RealView Development Suite (RVDS) 3.0 offers a unified, end-to-end toolchain for coincident hardware and software development, and is optimized for system performance and Linux application compilation, according to ARM.

Linus Torvalds first released the Linux Kernel in September of 1991 under a very restrictive license requiring that the source code must always be available, and that no money could ever be made off of it. A few months later, he switched to the GPL, or GNU General Public License, the license that has been used for the Linux kernel source code ever since. A recent thread on the lkml discussed some of the gray areas of legality where it's not explicitly clear what the GPL allows. Alan Cox [interview] was one of many kernel developers to offer some insights:

opentaps Open Source ERP+CRM Suite to be Unveiled at MySQL Users Conference 2006 The opentaps open source ERP+CRM suite will be officially unveiled during MySQL Users Conference 2006 in Santa Clara, CA during April 24-27, 2006. This fully integrated suite can be deployed with open source databases like MySQL and offers a complete and scalable solution for managing customers, products, inventory, orders, manufacturing, warehouses, and accounting.

  LXer Feature: 12-Apr-06

Linux News says don't negotiate with the economic terrorists of Microsoft via Port 25.

p2p news / p2pnet: We've all had it up to here with reports on the fact MacIntels can be booted with both Apple and Microsoft operating systems.

Exhausted, but happy about the work we've done I'm now back in Stuttgart. I have attended the 3 intensive days of discussions and work that were the Desktop Linux Printing Summit, jointly organized by OSDL (John Cherry) and Linuxprinting.org (Till Kamppeter). It was held in Atlanta, hosted by Lanier at their Education Center. The hosting was made possible by Uli Wehner. Uli is one of Lanier's senior support and testing engineers (responsible for Lanier's ever-growing business of non-Windows system printing); he is also quite active on the Linuxprinting.org user support forums.

Altogether we had nearly 40 people there. They represented a broad range of backgrounds. See yourself:

Red Hat, the world's largest Linux company is trying to grow into one of the world's largest software companies while at the same time keeping a grip on its Linux assets, says Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols in this edition of the Cyber Cynic podcast.

Linux afficionado Con Zymaris believes that the onset of dual boot Apple Macintoshes, running both Mac OSX and Windows, will be a boon for the cause of Linux and open source software. Zymaris, the CEO of Cybersource, an open source consultancy which has been in operation since 1991, says dual boot Macs will have minimal impact on the Macintosh space but may well convince many Mac users to jump ship to Linux.

Getting started with what appears to be a very powerful, very complex idea (in computing, at least) is often a daunting proposition, and Linux cluster computing is no exception. There is so much to learn! So many things can go wrong! It might require new, specialized, expensive hardware and software! But wait!

Most conversations about the cost of free software deal with its effects on the software industry. Microsoft people often talk about how much money the proprietary software industry can add to a developing country's economy. At the same time, proprietary software vendors tell us the total cost of ownership (TCO) for their products is often less than cost of running competing open source products, even though in developing countries the cost of labor is almost always low enough that license fees for proprietary software are huge by comparison. All these conflicting numbers get wearisome. Perhaps we need to look beyond the software industry -- and beyond software pricing -- to see what effects free and open source software have on a country's economy.

Creative Commons (CC) offers licenses that allow you to publish material with clear-cut licensing terms that reserve some of your rights while giving the public others. CC offers a number of tools to implement the licenses into the metadata of various media formats. Until recently, its ccPublisher program, which allows you to upload CC-licensed content to the Internet Archive, had official binary releases only for Apple Macintosh OS X and Microsoft Windows XP. This is about to change, with the upcoming release of ccPublisher 2.

Heads up to all authors, musicians, photographers, etc. It will be great having ccPublisher available for GNU/Linux. - dcparris