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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.

When the first announcements came out that a new Sharp Zaurus would "run Linux," the Linux community was abuzz with fascination and rumors. Years later, there are still handheld devices running Linux that draw inspiration and ideas from Sharp's work, even though the Linux-based Zaurus has faded to obscurity in the U.S. market. In this article Peter Seebach dismantles the Zaurus SL-5600 to get a better look into history.

A paper recently written by two university professors offers a business model that would keep the software open and free, while allowing its developers to profit. The model would have open source software companies make money through royalty fees and sales of their newest innovations, then offer the complete software and source code for free after a predetermined period.

A new study on the major players in the Unix server market has declared IBM the clear customer favorite and brought to light some serious issues with Sun Microsystems' product line. Most alarmingly for Sun, the company appears to have lost its cachet as the dominant Unix player and done so while alienating customers. Sun finished last in almost every one of the Gabriel Consulting Group (GCG) survey's categories, spanning technology performance, customer satisfaction and software tools

The fedora kernel-devel package does not include the complete kernel headers. This is not a problem in most cases, but there are times that the missing headers are absolutely needed. This document outlines a method to obtain the complete kernel headers for your currently running kernel from the sources, without compiling the kernel itself.

KDE Dot News is now fully hosted and supported by the OSU Open Source Lab

For those interested, the OSUOSL server hosting has been provided to us in the form of a Xen virtual machine running Gentoo Linux. Xen is completely transparent to the typical VM user and if I didn't know better I'd think we had a dedicated machine

Proprietary software vendors sow fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) about free and open source software licenses because those licenses are new and different. More notably, open source software licenses threaten their business modes—and they want their customers to believe that those licenses will somehow "infect" their organizations. The truth is that open source software licenses will almost always be more beneficial for consumers than proprietary licenses. Furthermore, open source licenses rarely (if ever) impose more terms on software users that are any more onerous than those imposed by proprietary licenses.

This article is about software licenses, which spell out the rules by which you must play to use the software. Agreeing to an End User License Agreement (EULA) by opening a shrink-wrap package, clicking "OK" for an installer or downloading software from a website means you agree to abide by the terms the software owner sets. If you have questions about the terms of those agreements, you can contact your attorney for definitive answers.