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In the February issue of the Globus Consortium Journal (www.globusconsortium.org/journal), open source Grid computing pioneers explain Grid's relevance to common enterprise data management requirements. "It's data management -- not mere compute horsepower -- that's capturing commercial interest in Grid today," says Greg Nawrocki, President of the Globus Consortium.

Message Partners has selected Protagon, a Brazilian security software company based at Belo Horizonte - Minas Gerais, and Yellow Cube, a IT security and messaging company based in Budapest, Hungary, as distribution partners for its Message Processing Platform (MPP).

The Gnome project Wednesday released version 2.12.3 of its popular Linux desktop, the final release in the 2.12 branch. Version 2.13 will be skipped, and the next edition, v2.14, is already well into development, the project said.

An article in Vnunet.com seems to say that there's a rift between Sun and IBM at OpenOffice.org, and that Sun is fighting to hang on to the OpenOffice.org code. I asked Bob Sutor and Simon Phipps, and they both say, "no way."

Intel helps fund European Linux company

Borland Software is flogging its JBuilder, Delphi, C++ and C# business while buying Segue Software, in a strategy to reverse corporate losses by focusing on software performance instead of development.

The Metasploit Project site has published a hacker's code for exploiting a vulnerability in Mozilla's Firefox 1.5 browser.

I once read an essay in which the author wrote: "No one can cheat you out of ultimate success but yourself". When it comes down to making irresponsible decisions about Linux and Open Source Software, you might make the kinds of mistakes that people have made in the past in other endeavors thinking they knew the future as it slipped through their fingers.

CodeWeavers Inc. and Linspire Inc. Wednesday jointly announced the release of CrossOver Office 5.0 for Linspire, a specially optimized version of the product for the Linspire Linux distribution. CrossOver Office enables Linspire users to run Windows applications natively from their Linspire desktop.

Recently I posted about the Fallacy Of Composition (which says that an advantage shared by everyone is not an advantage) and how it applies digital music: If everyone can make and distribute music cheaply, the price they can charge goes down and they all make less money. It should apply to open source as well. Is there an escape route?

[Ed: Just 10 years ago, I predicted that there would be fewer big enterprises and more "mom & pop" shops. In some ways, that seems to be playing out today, especially in the libre software community. Mind you, I see a return to the Middle Ages, not a whole new way of doing business. - dcparris]

Alfresco Software has closed US$8 million in Series B venture capital (VC) funding, the open-source ECM (enterprise content management) software startup announced Wednesday.

Russell Shaw has some great analysis on what Google could be up to. It seems logical based on his analysis that we will soon see Google competing with Microsoft Office. It would further seem that this software could indeed be free meaning Microsoft’s cash cow is in jeopardy of being slaughtered.

Like many features in free and open source software, OpenOffice.org's spellcheck, hyphenation, and thesaurus dictionaries are based on code from earlier projects. You can learn the basics about them from the Lingucomponent Project, but detailed information is difficult to find. Thanks to an email message from a reader and a discussion on the OpenOffice.org mailing lists, I realized that no one had prepared instructions on how to edit the dictionaries. I began to investigate, using nothing but a file editor and persistence. The investigation was a mixed success, but I did learn enough to make some basic hacks and to note where more advanced methods were needed.

WINE is available for Linux and *BSD and makes it possible to run Windows applications unchanged. It is now possible to run some applications on Intel based Mac OS X . The code is available in WINE's CVS repository and a unofficial binary is available from here.

As you may know, Google is close to making a deal with Dell in which the search giant will get to preinstall its software package on Dell PCs. What you may not know is that Google may be spending a billion dollars over three years for the privilege.

SheepShaver is an open source PowerPC MacOS run-time environment. That is, it enables you to run PowerPC Classic MacOS software on your computer, even if you are using a different operating system. However, you still need a copy of MacOS and a PowerMacintosh ROM image to use this program. SheepShaver is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Ken Fisher writes: "Stallman recently decided to do an e-mail interview with LinuxP2P.com, touching on P2P, DRM, the GPL, Creative Commons, and a handful of other topics primarily relating to the world of intellectual property. The interview touches on a number of topics that I won't repeat here, but I do want to just briefly comment on one trend that I see solidifying in discussions of intellectual property law that is coincidentally represented by Stallman's comments."

Linux Gazette
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The free software movement was inspired by the ideals of academic research, and in the last few years it has given some of the fruits of that inspiration back to academia. One of the largest open source projects in academia is the Open Source Portfolio Initiative (OSP) -- a specialized content management system, comparable to WebCT. Its functions are to assist universities in administering Web servers, teachers in preparing online course components, and both teachers and students in designing and using portfolios, which are academically oriented personal Web pages. Despite some flaws, the project fulfills its functions well.

The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced in a press release that the Office’s representatives will hold a meeting on February 16, 2006 focusing on open source software.