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The competition sponsored by Creative Commons South Africa for South African digital artists has been won by Tessa Comrie, a Rhodes Fine Arts student, for her 60-second video entitled Once upon a time.

When Alan Yates, Microsoft Information Worker Product Management Group business strategy general manager, first came to me to say that his company had been railroaded when Massachusetts voted the OpenDocument office file format (ODF) in, and Microsoft's Office XML Reference Schema (OXRS) out, one of his original arguments was that OXRS was getting a bad rap for not being implementable in open source software.

As Yates originally explained it to me, "Our license may not be compatible with the GPL, but it is compatible with many other open source licenses, and certainly can be used with the OpenDocument license." However, as it turns out, "many" is in the eyes of the beholder. When I went back to Yates and explained how I found that claim to be untrue, he clarified his original claim by saying "While it is beyond my capacity to analyze [all of the open source licenses listed on the Open Source Initiative's Web site], we think that there is no problem with the two most used, key alternatives to the GPL; the LGPL and the BSD licenses."

developerWork’s has published the first in a new series of Linux Professional Institute tutorials. In this tutorial (free login required), David Mertz discusses intermediate network administration on Linux, and in doing so, continues preparing you to take the (LPIC-2) Exam 202. You learn how to configure a basic TCP/IP network, from the hardware layer (usually Ethernet, modem, ISDN, or 802.11) through the routing of network addresses.

Bob Young is, arguably, one of the most influential figures in the development of Linux and open source. By co-founding Red Hat with Mark Ewing in 1993, Young helped turn Linux into a household name. After being involved with Red Hat for more than 12 years, Young recently stepped down from Red Hat's board of directors. We caught up with him to see what his plans are, and what his thoughts are on Red Hat and the future of open source.

Open Source in Government: Some governments have embraced the potential of open source, while others seem culturally opposed to the whole concept. [Ed: Little difference exits. The problem has more to do with politicians than culture.]

Gnusolaris.org reports - Nexenta is a complete GNU-based open source operating system built on top of the OpenSolaris kernel and runtime. It is a result of our inspiration and desire to build a great system based on the best existing software: SunOS kernel and GNU software. We use Debian - one of the best existing software distribution/packaging mechanisms - to glue the numerous pieces together. Nexenta OS Pre-Alpha 1 has been released.

OSDir has some hot screenshots of Nexenta OS.

You might think that the sky is falling the way the media has gone on a feeding frenzy related to a Linux worm. Sorry to disappoint you, but the worm will hardly affect the user base. It's not like the "Code Red" worm which self-replicated malicious code that exploited a known vulnerability in Microsoft IIS servers (CA-2001-13). Rumor has it, Wal-Mart didn't cope with it very well.

Stephe writes: The entire case was just wrong. The protesting companies made claims that were simply incorrect. That's why they lost. The reporting was sensational and wrong. That's why I wrote the article for USENIX ;login: once I was out from under the embargo of the appeals time frame. (I was the USENIX representative to the IEEE POSIX working groups, as Shane and Jeff both were before me.

[Ed: Interesting to get a perspective from the author of the article ten years after he testified at the hearing. If you have a difficult time getting to Stephe's article in the archives, need we say more?]

Related to:
Did Bill Gates Invent Linux and Has He Erased the Evidence?

How Microsoft Got its OS Declared an "Open System" and wound up in Government

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group (PGDG) is expected to formally announce the availability of PostgreSQL 8.1 today at the Open Source Database Conference in Frankfurt, Germany. The new release has more than 120 enhancements, according to a press release from the PostgreSQL Project, including new and improved features and performance improvements. There are also a number of changes in query syntax and PostgreSQL utility commands, which are detailed in the release notes.

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group proudly announces the release of PostgreSQL 8.1, further extending PostgreSQL's lead as the most advanced open source database management system. Designed, built, and tested by a large and thriving community and backed by a growing number of corporate sponsors and support companies, version 8.1 will expand the scope of PostgreSQL application development. The new release includes performance improvements and advanced SQL features which will support bigger data warehouses, higher-volume transaction processing, and more complex distributed enterprise software.

POWAY, CA -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 11/08/2005 -- MARVELit, a provider of Open Source Business Intelligence (BI) software solutions, today announced the launch of its turnkey, web-based open source executive dashboard reporting tool. Demonstrated at the recent OSCON (Open Source Conference) tradeshow, the free MARVELit software is available for download at www.marvelit.com.

DistroWatch reports - Kaella is, effectively, a French edition of the popular KNOPPIX live CD. After many weeks of testing, version 2.1 has now been released for download. The new version is based on the CD edition of KNOPPIX 4.0.2, but it comes with OpenOffice.org 2.0.0, Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird 1.0.7, and a corrected French language module for KDE.

OSDir has some nice shots of Kurumin 5.1 Alpha 3.