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Philips Electronics China Group announced Wednesday that the company, together with Sony, IBM, Red Hat and Novell, has decided to join funds to create a joint venture-- the Open Invention Network (OIN), to purchase core patents of Linux operation system and offer them, free of charge, to any institutions or individuals. The effort is meant to aid the advancement of Linux and break the global dominance of Windows by Microsoft.

"IT service companies have been telling small businesses 'trust us' for a long time. With nowhere else to turn, our customers trusted us to deliver reliable and economical IT solutions. Was their trust misplaced? Happy with the status quo, failing to investigate or innovate alternatives, have we simply been feeding off our customers?"

I see a melancholy lesson here. Proprietary code can disappear when its company or creator goes away. With open-source code, however, your work can live on forever.

In a sharp change of public standpoint, the Electronic Freedom Foundation announced Wednesday that it has declined to submit comments in the US Copyright Office's DMCA rulemaking proceeding, denouncing the process as "too broken" with respect to consumers, and issuing a report that charges the Copyright Office with overstepping its legal authority.

The Inkscape project has released version 0.43 of Inkscape, a freely available, open source Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) drawing tool available for Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, and Windows. The program boasts capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, and Xara X, which also use W3C standard SVG file formats.

  LXer Feature: 12-01-2005

Bill Gates said he wanted to be able to make the next paradigm shift. Libre software has created a free-market economy in the technology realm. Don Parris offers Microsoft some free consulting to help them make that paradigm shift. What do you think of the two approaches he suggests?

Diggable

SCO was able to sell $10 million worth of shares to existing shareholders and a member of its board of directors.

Saying he is "ecstatic" about Sun's move to open source its software stack, JBoss CEO Marc Fleury characterized the move as a strike against IBM, not JBoss.

Southern Africa's largest independent medical aid scheme administrator, Medscheme, stopped using Windows and SCO Unix, to adopt an Oracle, Unisys and Suse Linux solution that is expected to save the company around R10 million ($1,5 M) in its first year alone.

This release marks a significant milestone for the open source community, who now have access to the code for the console and administration engine as well as the previously open sourced LDAP engine. This release uses the Apache httpd engine as its administration server, and includes mod_nss - a rewrite of mod_ssl which uses the Mozilla NSS crypto engine.

Sun Microsystems, already waist-deep in open source, is getting in deeper. The company announced yesterday that it would be releasing more of its software for free -- and, eventually, as open source software.

  LXer News: 12-01-2005

The Web Empowered Church aims to web empower 10,000 churches by 2010. Using Typo3 and other libre software, this ministry could change the way churches view and use the Internet.

Diggable

Two Korean public financial institutions, the state-owned Korea Post and The National Agricultural Cooperative Federation, will start the first Linux-based Internet banking services this month as the government tries to end Microsoft Windows’ long-running monopoly in online banking systems.

Diggable

Tony Mobily of Free Software Magazine interviews Patrick Luby, the man behind OpenOffice for Macintosh.

TM: Patrick, first of all: please tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you do? What’s your programming background?

PL: I run my own software development consulting company called Planamesa Software. I have spent nearly a decade working as a software developer in a variety of commercial and open source projects including OpenOffice.org and Apache Tomcat using the C, C++ and Java programming languages on a variety of operating systems such as Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris and Windows...

Click here to read the whole interview.

Diggable

The kind engineers at IBM have delivered a new tool for moving customers off Sun Microsystems' Solaris operating system and onto Linux.

The Migration Kit for Solaris to Linux arrives at no charge and can be picked up by business partners, ISVs and customers. Those interested in the kit will likely use it to shift Solaris C/C++ software over to Linux running on IBM's Power, x86 and mainframe systems. This toolkit complements a more structured migration program IBM announced in conjunction with Red Hat in May.

One of the most extensive uses of free software in the Italian educational system uses Zope, Plone and Fle3 to run its e-learning portal.

Microsoft's creative troubles are about to hit Main Street. Redmond has unleashed a trio of killers: Windows Live, Office Live and Windows Live Custom Domains. The web-based Windows services promise to steal small business accounts from those Microsoft-centric dealers and ISPs still standing after earlier scourges. Can Linux/BSD fill the breach?

LONDON — Thales computer operations has entered into a hardware partner agreement with Red Hat. Under the agreement, Thales will deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux software in embedded defense systems and will also act as a reseller for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other Red Hat solutions when specific defense and security markets are serviced by the Thales group.

If you are not familiar with the Core series of books from Prentice Hall PTR, I recommend that you quickly remedy the situation. My personal favorites are, "Core Java 2, Volumes I and II " by Horstmann and Cornell. Special mention goes to Wesley Chun for his great introductory Python book, "Core Python Programming", the 2nd edition of which is said to be coming out Summer 2006.

While Microsoft supported the proposed directive, Mr. Rocard wanted to very clearly exclude software from the scope of patentability. Mr. Rocard had a special message for Microsoft and EU commissioner Charlie McCreevy: "You will discover that we were right."