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After nearly a year's delay, Sun has released software designed to let its Solaris operating system run Linux applications without any modification. The software, formerly called Project Janus, but now rewritten and renamed BrandZ, was released to Sun's OpenSolaris community on Tuesday.

Something that has become really noticeable is the prominence of Asterisk (the open source PBX) in the telecoms media and at telephony shows. It is not just the high profile presence of Asterisk and Digium (the primary developer and sponsor of Asterisk) at events like VoIP Developer and IT Expo, but it is the growing number of other companies who have products based on Asterisk that is truly staggering.

In 2005, music execs found themselves boxed in by P2P, iPod, boring albums, and prices higher than the market was willing to bear. They responded by rootkitting customers' computers, planting viruses on file sharing networks, and suing grandmothers. Amazingly, sales still fell. Email Battles suggests a different avenue for building customer loyalty.

Dell and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission today announced a voluntary recall of approximately 22,000 Dell notebook computer batteries. The reason for the recall is that the batteries could overheat, which could pose a fire risk.

Andrew Morton [interview] released the 2.6.15-rc5-mm3 kernel noting that he'll be "non-functional" from today December 16'th through January 2'nd. Due to his absence he suggests, "when reporting any bugs please be extra careful to Cc the appropriate developer and mailing list."

2.6.15-rc5-mm3 is the first 2.6-mm kernel to require gcc-3.2.x or later for all architectures [story], a change that may eventually be merged into Linus' 2.6 stable Linux tree. Andrew went on to list half a dozen bugs that still aren't resolved from rc5-mm1 noting, "we need to get these things fixed up before maintainers merge into 2.6.16, please. I'll be checking!"

Five library associations voiced their support for the use of OpenDocument (ODF) in Massachusetts this week, sending a letter to William Galvin, the Commonwealth's Secretary of State. In it, the groups say the open source format is the best choice, as everyone has access to its specifications.

Secretary Galvin has publicly derided the plan, saying he has "grave concerns" about switching to OpenDocument from Microsoft Office. He also had been rumored to be pushing the various state agencies to decline to participate.

The Economist has a story about a trapeze artist who, in her spare time, is the Chief Lizard Wrangler at a non-profit," writes Sara Chan on slashdot. She goes on, "You perhaps know her as Mitchell Baker, leader of Firefox. From the article:

"Ms Baker gradually found herself the leader of this project. Perhaps this is because she is a somewhat unusual member of the Netscape diaspora. For a start, she is a woman in a community populated, as one (male) colleague puts it, by geeky males with 'spare time and no social life'. Ms Baker herself has never even written code. She studied Chinese at Berkeley, and then became a lawyer - her role at the old Netscape was in software licensing. On all technical matters, she defers to Brendan Eich, her chief geek."

In just under a year, Free Software Magazine has become one of the most prominent voices in the free software world.

John-Thor Dahlburg writes: The guilty plea from Kidan was the second in a month involving a former business associate of Abramoff, the once powerful Washington dealmaker who stands in the middle of a burgeoning federal ethics probe that has engulfed Congress.

LXer.com brought this story to the attention of the public in a series of articles due to the fact that Jack Abramoff functioned as a lobbyist for Preston Gates & Ellis - a firm representing Microsoft and the BSA.

For background into our investigation, please read the following articles:

Microsoft Getting Closer to the Fire

Following Bill Gates' Linux Attack Money


LA Times Full Story

There are lots of libraries there and Microsoft Foundation Classes rule the roost. wxWidgets positions itself as an Open Source cross platform alternative to MFC and other propritery Application libraries out there. This book Cross-Platform GUI programming with wxWidgets pursues how one can easily build applications using this library.

Google Inc. has launched Google Blogger Web Comments for Mozilla's Firefox browser, an extension that displays blogs about the current page view without leaving the page, reports Micro Persuasion blog.

It used to be that the visionaries sat down and predicted the next revolution before it happened. That's old school. Now, the revolution happens as the visionaries are dreaming it up. Take for example distributed journalism, the phrase coined by Dan Gillmor. As media visionary Dan Gillmor was hunkered down at his keyboard in the fall of 2004, describing the revolution of "distributed journalism" in his book, We the Media, Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson were out making it happen with Digg.com.

When people look around for reasons to say that Linux is just too hard, they will invariably arrive at software installations. The classic refrains include the difficulty of building from source, the problems with dependencies, and so on. Although there is some truth hidden in there somewhere, building from source is rarely necessary for mainstream packages because precompiled applications exist for most major distributions. Again, on the issue of package dependencies, most distributions use software installation tools that take care of the whole dependency issue for you, such as SUSE’s YaST, Debian’s apt-GUI, Synaptic, or Mandriva’s urpmi to name just a few.

This week, advisories were released for courier, osh, curl, ethereal, phpMyAdmin, Openswan, Xmail, Ethereal, perl, openvpn, thunderbird, xmovie, mplayer, and ffmpeg. The distributors include Debian, Gentoo, Mandriva.

Putting on its fedora hat, Red Hat recently released the first version of its free, open-source Directory Server.

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Visto Corp., a maker of mobile e-mail technology, has sued Microsoft Corp. for allegedly infringing on three of its patents related to how information is handled between servers and handheld devices such as cellular phones.

The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified monetary damages and a permanent injunction to stop the infringement, was filed late Wednesday — the same day Visto announced that NTP Inc. had acquired an equity stake in the company and signed a patent licensing deal.

Developers of the K Desktop Environment (KDE) have teamed with those at the OpenSync project to produce a graphical interface called KitchenSync to replace the KPilot PDA sync tool beginning with the release of KDE 4.

As the end of the year approaches, it appears that virtualization's time in the open source spotlight has all but come.

Whether it is because of the machinations of companies like Palo Alto, Calif.-based XenSource Inc. or analyst endorsement, emulating an enterprise-class infrastructure environment using open source has been on the rise in 2005. And, now, it looks ready to burst next year.

Two years ago, Joe Drouin, global CIO for automotive safety maker TRW, had a decision to make: whether to buy new hardware and continue running one of the auto parts supplier's major ERP systems from QAD on a proprietary Unix environment or standardize his system on a Dell cluster running Linux.

Here, thanks to jtiner, is the transcript of Microsoft's Alan Yates' remarks at yesterday's meeting regarding ODF/MS XML in Massachusetts. The audio from Dan Bricklin is here, if you wish to follow along. Yates also spoke in the Q & A session, if anyone is in a position to transcribe that part too.

I notice three salient things, from my point of view. You may notice other points, particularly if you are technical experts, but here's how it struck me.