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While there certainly has been little reason to doubt where IBM stands on ODF, it was reassuring to see it pledge its support today in a letter delivered to Massachusetts Secretary of Executive Agency Finance and Administration Thomas Trimarco. The letter is signed by IBM's VP of Standards and Open Source, Dr. Robert Sutor (it was Bob, you may recall, who hosted the Armonk Meeting back on November 4.

Bob's letter doesn't hesitate to establish IBM's right to make its opinion heard. It opens as follows:

With all the recent activity around document formats and the strong leadership position taken by Massachusetts, I'm writing to you to reaffirm IBM's full support for the OASIS OpenDocument Format for Office Applications (ODF) standard. IBM, with our nearly 5000 employees in Massachusetts, is pleased to continue our active participation in the open, community-driven OASIS standardization process as well as our support for this important global standard in an upcoming version of our IBM Workplace product. Massachusetts is one of the epicenters of IBM software innovation, which will continue to be a key growth engine for our company. Lotus, Rational and Ascential all call the Commonwealth home and are developing the next generations of customer solutions based on open standards.

Diggable

In 2006, Novell plans to further capitalize on its Linux product line with the launch of a "Linux awareness" program meant to migrate more customers, resellers, and development partners from NetWare and Microsoft Windows to open source alternatives. Jacqueline Emigh reports.

This is the question I've asked to the GNOME's marketing-list this morning. 31 minutes later (midnight in Mountain View - California) we got the response from Chris DiBona, Open Source Program Manager at Google Inc. and responsible of Google's Summer of Code:

NEW YORK The rules governing the use of most free software programs will be revised for the first time in 15 years in an open process that was to begin Wednesday.

First Public Discussion Scheduled for January

BOSTON and NEW YORK, Nov. 30 /PRNewswire/ -- The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) today released a document specifying the process and guidelines for revising the Foundation's GNU General Public License (GNU GPL). The FSF will release the first discussion draft of the new license for comment at the International Public Conference for GPLv3 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on January 16 and 17, 2006.

Mologogo uses GoogleMaps with a Java and a GPS-enabled cell phone to show a target phone's position on a GoogleMap, allowing you to track it from your own phone or through the Web. This artcle provides insight into Mologogo and other Web 2.0 contenders and their privacy issues.

"We want to decide our IT strategy in Mannheim and not have Microsoft make the decision for Mannheim," declares Gerd Armbruster, the IT infrastructure manager at the German city. For in Mannheim, open standards — not cost — is the main driver of the software strategy.

Here's what the world needs: Yet Another DNS Boss. That's what UnifiedRoot hopes to become with its Dot-comless alternate root server registry, at just $1,000 per domain name issued.

Welcome to this year's 48th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Andreas Schuldei sent out a [1]reminder for the DebConf call for papers. Martin Krafft [2]announced a [3]bug squashing party that lasts until December 14th and rewards 25 bug squashers with a [4]book.

Firefox 1.5 is finally out the door, and Thunderbird 1.5 won't be far behind. The new releases sport some interesting new features, including faster page navigation, redesigned preferences dialogs, a new update system, and much more. Let's take a look at what the Mozilla Foundation has been up in the year since the first major release of Firefox.

This mail is being written to let you all know about a pending transition underway in the Xorg packages.

Last week we learned a bit about what Asterisk can do (short answer: everything but cook dinner), and what hardware is needed to make it go. Today we'll put together a basic iPBX using Asterisk@Home. Asterisk@Home is a nice bundle that includes a Web-based graphical configuration interface, a Flash-based Operator Panel that lets you monitor all activity on the network, and even barge in on calls. Plus hold music, fax support and a bunch of other goodies. It's not just a toy for home users; it's also great for business use.

Installation source for KDE 3.5 is finally available for SuSE users.

Debian's standard text-based installer has been vilified in the past, so I was excited to see an announcement about a graphical installer under development for Debian. A good GUI installer could bring Debian to a lot of users who don't feel comfortable taking the plunge with a text installer. It's pretty early in the testing cycle for Debian's next version, dubbed Etch, so it's likely that there will be a number of changes before the new installer is finalized, but I took the current version for a test run and found that it's already fairly usable.

There is something I like about playing games that is, strangely enough, much the same as what I enjoy about reading science fiction or fantasy. The medium lends itself beautifully to creating other times, places, and even worlds. Some of these worlds can be familiar — what we call simulations — while others are a bit more out there. My game recommendation for this month is called Fish Fillets Next Generation, and it definitely fits into the out there category. Perhaps a little description to start with...

IBM plans to announce on Wednesday that it's giving away software to help customers and business partners adapt software written for Sun Microsystems' Solaris operating system to its open-source rival Linux. The Migration Kit helps people assess software written in C or C++ programming languages and move it from Solaris to Linux.

IBM is an aggressive Linux booster, though it competes with its own AIX version of Unix. Sun supports Linux, but prefers customers to buy Solaris support contracts.

In my last post, I covered learning to program with a dialect of Lisp, called Scheme, from resources freely available on the internet from the SICP course at MIT. In this post, I plan to continue this theme by going over a few reasons that I have found for learning Lisp and to offer a few more resources for those of you out there who would like to add Lisp, or Scheme, to their programming repertoire.

Many of you no doubt have tried out the Beta and Release Candidate builds. Here’s a list of things to do and see with Firefox 1.5.

Personally, I don't like IM to start with, and wouldn't allow it on any network that I had to maintain. It seldom has any real business purpose, and any excuse that can be made for it can be fulfilled by other means almost always.

Bangalore: The grounds of the Bangalore Palace have seen many high tech conferences but nothing like this: On Tuesday nearly 3000 young `techies' queued up for over an hour to register for `FOSS.in', the annual Free and Open Source Software conference which began five years ago as the Bangalore Linux event.