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STRONG FOOTING. Any discussion of open-source software and the law begins with software licenses. The GNU General Public License (GPL) is the world's most widely used open-source software license. It continues to be a very good license for different kinds of software. The competitors to Linux and open source always stress the risk that users and companies face if they use this software to run their business. You may be surprised to learn that the GPL has never been successfully challenged in court since it was introduced in 1991. That's a very good thing to know if your business runs Linux.

Proponents of free software are protesting the planned appointment of Boyden Gray as the US's ambassador to the EU because he was a lobbyist for Microsoft in the antitrust case against the software vendor. In particular, they fear that Gray will once again stand up on behalf of Microsoft in the antitrust proceedings again to the vendor's business practices in Brussels.

Darl McBride posted an "open letter" touting OpenServer 6 as the world's most powerful, secure and cost-effective UNIX, a scion of the True Unix Vine, yadda yadda. Here's a point by point trashing^Wresponse.

The progress of the Linux kernel is now focused into three developmental"trees," which balance technological progress and bug fixes. The new approach is bearing fruit, say open-source developers and founder Linus Torvalds.

It's a common story: You leave the comfortable confines of the university computer lab, where you've become accustomed to your Unix/Linux cocoon over the past four years. You're been thrust into the cold, hard reality of your first real job, where you are left to fend for yourself in the unfamiliar, and subjectively unfriendly, environment of Windows. Your handy shell scripts no longer do your bidding, all the useful tools to which you've become accustomed are nowhere to be found, and just where the heck do they hide /usr/bin on these machines, anyway?

Open-Xchange Server 5 Brings Commercial Support, Maintenance and Connectors To Leading Linux Operating Environment

Time to register for Ohio LinuxFest! The Greater Columbus Convention Center has been secured for the event. Reminder: Speaker registration has been extended to August 15, 2005. If you live in or near Ohio (Kentucky, Indiana, Pennsylvania, West Virginia), you should consider going to the event. Even organizers are asking that you forward this announcement to your LUG members and friends.

Despite today's impressive array of media PCs, low-latency frameworks, and revolutionary gold-plated sound cards, most people still prefer to watch television and movies from the comfort of their living rooms rather than in front of a computer monitor. Thus, for computer-acquired video, conversion to a video disc is often the order of the day. That's a task for tovid, a free suite of open source tools to make that trip from the hard drive in one room to a DVD player in another completely painless.

Open source visionary Brian Behlendorf talks about OSS in the enterprise.

This year's 32nd issue of DistroWatch Weekly. plus a section on tips and tricks with Konqueror and Kate.

Only about 2% of the thousands of developers working on open-source software projects are women, a number that women already involved in the open-source movement want to see increased.

IBM plans to make its enterprise search middleware, designed to facilitate searches of unstructured data, available as open-source code. It's called Unstructured Information Management Architecture, and IBM says more than 15 knowledge-management companies intend to support it as a standard framework. The company also is wedding the latest iteration of its WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind Edition with UIMA. Its goal is to make enterprise search results more relevant and make it easier to apply third-party analytics software.

Web-based service matches software users with the expertise they need when there is no corporation behind the software.

Growth in the Digital Special Effects (SFX) and computer animation industry, a sub-segment of the media and entertainment industry, is exploding world wide. A number of reasons have caused this growth and they involve the merging of technology and imagination.This article illustrates the dynamics and business model and processes of the animation effects industry and introduce the existing infrastructure.

Mobility equals productivity and Motorola is delivering on both counts with three new devices: the A910, A728 and A732, designed to deliver a seamless mobile office experience for today’s on-the-go professional. Leading the charge is the A910 which delivers the freedom of WiFi connectivity plus a flexible Linux software platform for top technology performance. Technology experts and novices alike will easily navigate the handset’s features and functions using Motorola’s next generation user interface.

At the beginning of this year Intel decided to get behind an open-source project called Xen, the end result of which is to develop a virtualisation engine — or hypervisor — designed to allow multiple operating systems to run on a single server. The project came along at the perfect time for Intel — the chipmaker is building Virtualization Technology (VT) into chips beginning this year

VMware, the global leader in virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems, today announced that it is working with industry leaders AMD, BEA Systems, BMC Software, Broadcom, Cisco, Computer Associates International, Dell, Emulex, HP, IBM, Intel, Mellanox, Novell, QLogic and Red Hat to advance open virtualization standards. This effort is open to vendors that share a common goal of accelerating the adoption of open standards for virtualization. VMware will contribute technologies based on its seven years of extensive innovation and market leadership to this standards development effort.

The OSCON Open Source Convention wrapped up Friday with a feminine touch as some of the community's most prominent women discussed the possibilities, problems, and parenthood aspects of open source software participation.

Petr Baudis announced the creation of a homepage for git, the directory content manager used to manage the Linux kernel. Git was originally written by Linus Torvalds in early April of 2005 [story], and is now maintained by Junio Hamano [story]. Other online resources available for the tool include atutorial that walks through the process of setting up and using git, aman page, and thegitweb interface providing easy browsing of the many kernel trees managed by git. The new webpage explains:

"GIT falls into the category of distributed source code management tools, similar to Arch or Darcs (or, in the commercial world, BitKeeper).

This is a detailed guide for Linux beginners about how to setup a web, mail and FTP server with Mandrake/Mandriva 10.2. It covers every aspect of the installation and demonstrates the setup process with the help of 39 screenshots. Experienced system administrators will benefit from this tutorial as well.