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Welcome to this year's 22nd issue of DistroWatch Weekly! Last week, your DistroWatch staff had the extreme pleasure to meet with Dr Richard M Stallman, a truly fascinating, albeit controversial figure, dedicated to fight for our computing freedom; Robert Storey has summarised the experience. Also in this week's issue - a brief look at Libranet GNU/Linux 3.0 and a call for voting on which new packages you want to see tracked by DistroWatch from next month. Happy reading!

Last year IBM took a significant step forward in cooperation with the free software community, by offering blanket licenses for 500 of its patents to all free software developers. These are but a fraction of IBM's software patents, but still it was a substantial step. These 500 patents, at least, are no longer a danger to free software developers.

Our final interview in this series with the hackers at the on-going Dutch KDE PIM meeting is with none other than KDE-PIM module project leader of Cornelius Schumacher. Enjoy the interview.

The developer of PalmOS, PalmSource, Inc., has made a commitment to Linux with its recent acquisition of Linux smartphone software vendor China MobileSoft (CMS). This week at "Mobile Summit," PalmSource's annual developer event, keynote speaker Dr. Dave Nagel expanded on Linux's importance to PalmSource.

According to figures from w3schools.com which is a site frequented by the Browser elite, Netscape is not even a pimple on a mole. For them, the real browser battle is between Microsoft IE and Firefox. Microsoft makes up 65% of use while Firefox is now up to 25%.

“Public-funded software must be open to the public and sharing of knowledge only enhances its richness,” said Italian senator Fiorello Cortiana at a four-nation international conference on Free Software which began at the Technopark here on Saturday. The two-day conference is being organised by the Society for the Promotion of Alternative Computing and Environment (SPACE), Hipatia and the Free Software Foundation-India.

This article by Howard Fosdick, author of the Rexx: Programmer's Reference, tells you everything you need to know to get started using Rexx on your Linux desktop. Linux features powerful scripting languages like Bash and Perl, but these may not be suitable for end user scripting. Rexx, on the other hand, has proven ideal for desktop Linux users, according to Fosdick, yet it combines both ease of use and power, and is available in a three basic forms including procedural ("classic" Rexx), object-oriented, and Java-compatible versions.

It's obvious -- Linux has become an attractive option for non-x86 platforms. Why? In the early days, Linux ran on just a narrow range of systems, mostly processors compatible with the Intel 80386 processor. But the drive to get the first shell prompt on a new piece of hardware motivates people to do crazy things, targeting a variety of processors that "everyone knows" are not viable Linux platforms, such as handheld computers, watches, game consoles, and a variety of workstations and servers.

Microsoft and the entertainment industry's holy grail of controlling copyright through the motherboard has moved a step closer with Intel Corp. now embedding digital rights management within in its latest dual-core processor Pentium D and accompanying 945 chipset.

A couple of weeks ago we were speculating about the possibilities of a Certified Novell Engineer educational track for Open Enterprise Server. I mentioned the possibility of somehow combining the NetWare 6 CNE with the Certified Linux Engineer certification Novell offers for SuSE Linux (NetWare and SuSE are the two components of OES).

O'Reilly has published a book on the classic Unix art of shell scripting. "Classic Shell Scripting" describes common Linux tools and shows how to use bash to combine them into scripts that can automate simple and complex tasks.

This installment in LinuxDevices.com's "Executive Interview" series explores PalmSource's plans with respect to morphing Palm OS into a middleware and application stack that runs on top of Linux, with an aim of targeting mobile phones and other wireless-enabled devices.

The Linux based tools from IBM’s software group uses the Eclipse framework as a vehicle for delivering a number of Security Management solutions.

Founder Larry Lessig joins African counterparts to launch South African chapter of organisation working to challenge and re-define the notion of intellectual property rights.

The amazing creative frenzy that characterizes Linux is both a blessing and a curse: a blessing in providing a multitude of different Linux distributions to choose from, and a curse in providing a multitude of different Linux distributions to choose from.

The next edition of the most popular open-source software license, the GPL, may show up sooner than expected and will cover patents, says primary author Eben Moglen.

First-round voting now open.

Daniel Molkentin, from the beautiful city of Königswinter in Germany, is one of the maintainers of Kontact and has also been involved in many other parts of KDE. He is one of the developers visiting the NL-PIM meeting this weekend. This meeting, sponsored by NLnet, Trolltech, NLUUG and many more companies, will allow Daniel and the other KDE-PIM developers to get together to further improve the KDE-PIM applications and framework. In this interview we talk about Daniel's involvement in Kontact development, the NL-PIM meeting and future plans for KDE-PIM.

One of the biggest difficulties in migrating from Windows to Linux is the lack of knowledge about comparable software. Newbies usually search for Linux analogs of Windows software, and advanced Linux-users cannot answer their questions since they often don't know too much about Windows :). New list of Linux equivalents / replacements / analogs of Windows software is ready to use.

Can't we all just get along? The answer is no, we can't, so we'd better at least be polite about it.