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Firefox users are being urged to update their browsers in the wake of a new, malicious code set to attack compromised PC's.

HP South Africa is planning to launch a range of its notebooks pre-installed with the Linux operating system later this month. The machines will run the Linspire version of Linux and include the ThinkFree office suite.

I'm not sure if anyone or anything can kill anything music-related from Apple right now--or even give it a serious flesh wound. But Songbird is a new open-source music player, built on some of the same code as Firefox, that aims to change how people think about online music. This Windows-based program is rather iTunes-like in look, feel, and functionality. (Actually, it's incredibly iTunes-like: Sometimes, imitation is the sincerest form of open-source development.) But rather than hooking into one online music source--Apple's iTunes Music Store--Songbird aims to talk to lots and lots of them.

Tibco Software and Adobe Systems plan to offer alternatives to the open-source Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) tools being created by the newly formed Open AJAX collaborative.

Tibco this week plans to unveil Version 3.1 of its Tibco General Interface AJAX tools, while Adobe earlier this month introduced the public beta of its Adobe Flex 2.0 and Adobe Flash Player 8.5 tools, which use a proprietary scripting language.

Computer code that could be used in cyberattacks on Firefox users has been released, increasing the urgency for people to upgrade to the latest version of the Web browser.

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.