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Profiting from open source software is foremost on Mark Shuttleworth's mind and this time he is looking at how the country can make its mark as a global open source software leader. He is doing this by spearheading a gathering of business, government and technology minds in the hope of building an open source action plan for the country which he will present later this year to South Africa's president Thabo Mbeki.

Two non-profit organisations have denounced Microsoft over the name of its forthcoming Windows Vista operating system. WorldVistA and the Vista Software Alliance both back the VistA application suite, which was originally developed by the US Veteran's Administration. The software brings electronic health records and hospital automation to institutions that take care of veterans, but its use over the years has expanded to other areas of the healthcare industry. VistA is in the public domain, meaning that it is not governed by any licence. This makes its use even less restricted than it would be under an open source licence. Earlier this week the two organisations sent out a press release with unusually harsh language about Microsoft's naming decision. WorldVistA is particularly upset about the timing of Microsoft's announcemen

Despite the European Parliament’s recent rejection of a controversial software patent regulation – which saw small, independent software developers breathe a collective sigh of relief – there could be more such regulations on the horizon. “If the community patent directive is passed, then software will be affected, and software patents will come into existence,” warned Péter Balsai, president of the Association of Hungarian Linux Users. Balsai argued that the EU directive on software patents, which the European Parliament rejected on July 6, will be replaced by a broader common patent directive that will incorporate computer-implemented inventions.

In keeping with its On Demand model, IBM is positioning itself as a problem-solver for customers, even if that means installing other companies' products. After six months and some 300 customer engagements, trying out a new sales and services approach that concentrates on industry-specific solution sets, IBM has decided to realign its global Linux-related sales and marketing teams around this model. The Linux teams are now concentrating on selling and marketing 17 solution sets that address IT and customer business problems, rather than focusing on selling specific products.

Sun weighing in on the fractious issue of protecting copyrighted digital content, on Sunday announced a project it calls the Open Media Commons initiative aimed at creating an open-source, royalty-free digital-rights management standard.

Oracle is taking the lid off a list of new technologies which engineers at the company say will boost the appeal of Linux for mission-critical enterprise applications. Earlier this month Oracle released its Oracle Cluster File System (OCFS 2) to general availability under an Open Source license. OCFS 2 is slated to be bundled with both leading Linux distributions.

"10 days? Well that hardly sounds hard enough! Sure, it doesn't sound so hard but take in account that over 500 million of us use a Windows OS at least once, everyday of the week and you too will see that going cold turkey from XP to KDE might be harder or more limiting than first thought."

"Vancouver" has gotten a very specific meaning in the Debian community: one of a visionary proposal[1] that received quite its share of flames from many Debian contributors, including myself. Since it appeared to many of us that the intentional result of this proposal would have been to essentially kill off many of our architectures, many of us weren't too happy with the proposal.

In the old days, Microsoft Corp. executives scoffed at Linux, the upstart operating system some businesses were beginning to try out. Microsoft’s technology was obviously superior, they reasoned. But as Linux has grown more popular, Microsoft has changed its attitude.

Released GoblinX Mini LiveCD. GoblinX Mini Edition is a small version of GoblinX, a livecd based on Slackware, and contains only XFCE as windows manager and GTK/GTK2 based applications. The edition is indicated for those users whose want to remaster the distro and also those with difficulties to download more than three hundreds of megabytes, original size of GoblinX Main distro. The GoblinX Mini Edition will have newer versions released faster and it will be used also for tests and for system and hardware support improvements.

The Quake III Arena "engine" has been released as GPL free software code, continuing id Software's tradition of releasing their older software to the public for free (as in libre) use. Why is this interesting? Because what they're doing isn't giving away an old game that nobody would buy, they're giving away a toolkit for virtual environments that is much more sophisticated than casual observers might expect.

VMware, in light of increasing competition for Microsoft and XenSource, last week announced at LinuxWorld that it is opening up its source code to independent software and hardware vendors. The move is intended to create an open virtualization platform and make VMware the center of it. The company announced it is working with AMD, BEA Systems, BMC, Dell, Emulex, HP, iBM, Mellanox, Novell and Red Hat, among others. VMware will provide its partners access to its ESX Server source code through a program called VMware Community Source, which will allow them to collaboratively develop ESX Server. The VMware Community Source program is intended to accelerate the development of virtualization software, expand its interoperability and supportability by creating standard interfaces and make virtualization technologies more widely available. The virtualization vendors stirred the pot at LinuxWorld in San Francisco last week.

The latest release of IBM Cloudscape, Version 10.1, a commercial release of Apache Derby, is now available for download. This article explains the differences for this version of the release. Additionally, it helps you to select the proper installer version of IBM Cloudscape to download.

First of all, some people are worried that they will not be able to use Linux hosting because they run Windows on their PCs. However, what operating system you run on your own PC is irrelevant to which web hosting environment you can use, because the latter is run remotely on a web server, where your website files will be uploaded. Linux and Microsoft Windows are two different operating systems. Windows is a well-known household name and does not require much introduction. Linux is a new version of the Unix operating system. Both these operating systems make excellent environments for web hosting. However, there are some differences between them.

A Redmond executive says he wants to get past the hype and let the chips fall where they will. The OSDL declines comment.

A group of former high-level execs from Red Hat are planning to launch a startup called rPath that will support customized Linux distributions.

This is a mail to the global Ubuntu community, to ask for your help in formulating a national government strategy on Free Software for South Africa. We hope this work will also be used as a model for many countries world wide.

The award-winning, open-source Mambo Content Management System's executives and developers disagree on how to manage the project, so the developers are taking the code and going their own way.

ThingMagic is shipping a Linux-powered RFID reader based on a software-defined radio (SDR). The company says the Mercury4 can read any RFID tag format, including those not yet invented, and can be adapted to meet regional regulations. Additionally, it can read 266 million tag-instructions per second,

The Shuttleworth-backed SchoolTool and SchoolBell development teams have released new versions of their applications that help schools and teachers manage their school timetables.