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"This could be a new opportunity for Linux to find additional niches above and beyond the home and [small office] markets where Macintosh has historically been strong," Interarbor Solutions Principal Analyst Dana Gardner told

The Free Software Foundation is already hearing complaints from companies about the GPL 3's provisions for digital rights management, which it calls"a malicious feature and can never be tolerated."

[Ed: It's good for companies to be uncomfortable with the GPL's anti-DRM provision. They really shouldn't be so comfortable about depriving people of their freedom to begin with. - dcparris]

The UK Government plans to toughen up computer crime laws under proposals outlined in the Police and Justice Bill on Wednesday. The bill would double the maximum jail sentence for hacking into computer systems from five years to ten years, a provision that will classify hacking as a more serious offense and make it easier to extradite computer crime suspects from overseas. Denial of service attacks, something of a grey area under current regulations, would be clearly classified as a criminal offense under amendments to the 1990 Computer Misuse Act (CMA) proposed in the bill.

Book review The Real Stories Behind the Exploits of Hackers, Intruders& Deceivers

Virtualization is an old idea--running multiple distinct operating systems atop a powerful box has a lot of advantages. Xen is a new virtualization platform. Despite its youth, its Linux support is very good. Kris Buytaert explains the basics of virtualization and shows how to configure and install Xen and to create new virtual machines.

Microsoft may not be off the hook with the European Commission (EC), despite this week's sweeping promise to license Windows Server communications source code. An EC spokesperson has reportedly called it "premature" to assume that access alone to the code would solve the problem of Microsoft's failure to comply.

Microsoft to open up Windows source code to rivals MICROSOFT caved in to European regulators and agreed to open up the Windows source code to rivals today. The decision goes back to 2004 when the EU ordered the Vole to share the code. Associated Press reported Microsoft lead legal counsel Brad Smith as saying that companies on both sides of the Atlantic were being given the details of its offer. However, he said rivals would be expected to pay for the source code and regulators will want to see the details of the Microsoft move. The wire reported an EU commission representative as saying that it, and not Microsoft would be the judge of whether Microsoft was complying with its rulings. µ

Having spent the last six years overseeing the acquisition of, integration of, and partnership creation with open source software companies—and managing open source litigation, I am still surprised by how little CIOs truly understand about open source software's potential benefit and impact on their companies' fiscal and legal health. With 80% to 90% of Fortune 1000 companies using open source, it's here to stay—as are the licenses and obligations that come with using it.

If you are an old school Linux or Unix user, you probably remember the System Administrator's Tool for Scanning Networks (SATAN). In 1995, SATAN brought browser-based network auditing to the world. Despite its initial splash, SATAN fell to the wayside due to lack of updates. Thanks to the kind folks at the Advanced Research Corp., SATAN is back, in the form of the Security Auditor's Research Assistant (SARA), a kinder, gentler, easier to use, and more updated auditing tool.

In November, Real Networks opened its Rhapsody.com online music service to non-Windows clients, a venture widely touted as the first "legal" online music service available to Linux users. How does it measure up?

The Persistence of Vision Raytracer (POV-Ray) graphics software has existed for 15 years under a license designed to keep it free and open. But with continued confusion as to what that license allows, the POV-Ray developers are looking for something new.

Gentium is something new in fonts. Its design is a mixture of the practical and aesthetically pleasing. It support the diacritical marks needed to render a wide range of Latin characters, yet it is also designed for readability, compactness, and visual appeal. What is really unusual is that its designer, Victor Gaultney, has released it under a free licence and is developing it as a free and open source project.

There is a utility called service that can be used to shortcut the path of init (or rc) scripts on several platforms. The service utility is written in Perl. As an exercise service is being rewritten in C. The command needs to be able to do very few operations. The version presented in this text will have room for improvement requiring some additional functions and operational changes.

Email Battles reports that their unpublished Squid server was up for just 17 hours and 35 minutes before an attacker tried to use it as an open proxy. The story examines how the company used a program called ProxyJudge to find the perpetrator registered in Korea but located in Austin, Texas. The story also says: " if the Korean door-knocker had succeeded, our server would have been added to a list of open proxies."

Desktop Linux specialist Xandros Inc is targeting the education sector with Education Edition of its Xandros Desktop OS Linux operating system with prices starting at $10 per seat for student use.

Although Microsoft is becoming an increasingly formidable rival in the same space, IBM, Sun, Oracle, and many other vendors are now responding to renewed opportunities for Linux in department store environments, as retail chains like Circuit City, Pep Boys, and Urban Outfitters start to step to 100-percent Linux deployments on their store-level IT systems. Jacqueline Emigh reports from this year's National Retail Federation show.

Alcatel, Ericsson, Motorola, NEC, Nokia and Siemens launch industry alliance to boost the use of free software in the telecommunications arena. Better interoperability between providers is high on the new alliance's agenda.

A guide to why the Debian distro is a good choice

The rollout of ODF in Massachusetts is going well - but there are still hurdles ahead. Here's the current status and expected action date on each of them.

The company has been integrating large amounts of PC real estate into the processor, or the associated chipset, for some time. The graphics controller is one obvious example. But now it is looking at what constitutes a 'server' and starting to identify that functionality as targets it can integrate into its own architectures.