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AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - The free software foundation said on Tuesday it would start adapting rules for development and use of free software by including penalties against those who patent software or use anti-piracy technology. Free software needs to be licensed under specific rules to guarantee that it can be freely studied, copied, modified, reused, shared and redistributed. The Linux operating system kernel is one of the best known examples of free software.

The free software association said on Tuesday it would start adapting rules for development and use of free software by including penalties against those who patent software or use anti-piracy technology.

There's a fundamental barrier between fans of open-source software and the world of Microsoft Windows, and no, it's not the $299 list price of Windows XP Professional. It's actually a very real communication problem based on differences between Windows and Linux's file systems—the structures that operating systems use to file away data on a computer. Think of the file system as a simple spreadsheet: It associates a filename with an index in a file allocation table. When you ask your computer to open a document, the OS checks this table to determine where on the hard drive it stored the file, down to the precise sector on your disk. Windows uses a file system called NTFS, today's Linux distributions primarily use ext3, and like two warring tribes, the two barely speak. Fortunately, there's a handy tool from Paragon Software Group called NTFS for Linux, which acts like an interpreter for these battling nations.

The free software foundation said on Tuesday it would start adapting rules for development and use of free software by including penalties against those who patent software or use anti-piracy technology. Free software needs to be licensed under specific rules to guarantee that it can be freely studied, copied, modified, reused, shared and redistributed. The Linux operating system kernel is one of the best known examples of free software.

Just like in other towns across the region, volunteers from the Austin Linux Group are pitching in to help in the recovery from the devastation of Katrina. People displaced by Katrina began showing up in Austin on Wednesday of last week. By the weekend, there were thousands in the Austin Convention Center, and perhaps as many as 5,000 total in Austin. Volunteers eager to help Katrina's victims turned out in droves from the start -- although the frustrations of the chaos attendent with a half-bureaucratic, half-volunteer effort of this scale have taken their toll. Above all else, volunteers have needed to bring patience and creativity with them as they arrived at the convention center.

Adoption of Linux on the desktop may begin in basements and bedrooms throughout the world, and gradually trickle up to large enterprises, says Matt Asay, a Novell Inc. technology evangelist and one of the people behind that company's Linux and open source strategy. SearchEnterpriseLinux.com recently spoke with Asay about his predictions for the path of Linux desktop adoption. Asay also offered some insights into Novell's desktop Linux strategy. Here are some excerpts from that conversation:

The Free Software Foundations are proud to announce the creation of the global "GPL Version 3 Development and Publicity Project". The project will bring together thousands of organisations, software developers, and software users from around the globe during 2006, in an effort to update the world's most popular Free Software licence. The GPLv3 promises to be one of the largest participatory comments and adoption efforts ever undertaken. The sister organisations in the United States and Europe are also happy to announce a total grant of 150,000 EUR from Stichting NLnet to support this truly-unique project. The global process will be overseen by the Free Software Foundation with support from its legal counsel the Software Freedom Law Centre (SFLC). Free Software Foundation Europe will be coordinating the European activities closely with both organisations and contributing to the global communication effort.

Trolltech, provider of leading technologies for Linux and cross-platform software development, today announced that its Qtopia software for Linux-based mobile phones is the application development foundation for Cellon International’s new C8000 handset platform. Cellon International, the world’s largest independent design house for wireless devices, has used Qtopia to build, customize and extend the Linux-based software applications and graphical user interface (GUI) for the C8000. A major European Vendor has already shipped the first mobile phones built on the C8000 platform in the third quarter of 2005. “Cellon produces handsets for some of the largest and most well-known brands in the world, including Alcatel, Philips and Siemens, and we are honored that they selected Trolltech’s mobile application platform for their Linux-based phone design,” said Trolltech CEO Haavard Nord. “Linux is an ideal operating system for Cellon’s complex, full-featured phones, and Qtopia gives them a proven technology for developing customized, innovative applications and user interfaces for this platform.”

Net User is an international interdisciplinary conference that takes place in Bulgaria every two years and features a wide variety of current trends in network activities intended to develop a better theoretical and practical understanding of the creative use of new media and technologies. The third edition of Net User conference was last month on an island in the Black Sea, a mile away from Burgas, Bulgaria.

The following is Sam Hiser's comment on the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' Information Domain -- Enterprise Technical Reference Models draft document, version 3.5. (The Office of the Chief Information Officer requested that public comments be made by Friday, September 9, 2005.)

In an earlier blog I had discussed as to when a PHP CMS is a better option than a Java CMS. TheServerside.com had later referred to the blog in the thread Ask TSS: Do any Java CMS/Portals match the PHP ones?

First shipping OpenSolaris distro, Schillix, shows promise, but Sun has much left to do.

The city of Munich will not start its migration to Linux on the desktop until 2006, a year later than planned and three years since it decided to migrate to Linux.

Piggy Bank is an extension to the Firefox web browser that turns it into a “Semantic Web browser”, letting you make use of existing information on the Web in more useful and flexible way

Many of you might have questions around successful business models. Recent Forbes article on SourceForge and the blog on SugarCRM's functionality differences between open source and pro versions raise interesting questions. If you are contemplating on a new open source venture - my recommendation is not to differentiate (functionally) between the commercial and open source versions, like in the case of MySQL's dual license. From my conversations with CIOs, enteprise architects and IT developers there are three major reasons for adopting open source: 1. No vendor lock-in and proprietary code 2. Freedom to change or enhance - free in libre 3. Cost effective - pay for tangible services and not for the software

David Boswell writes: "This September mozdev turns 5 years old. The site has been providing free project hosting and development tools to the Mozilla community since 2000 and now supports over 200 active projects. This year we are celebrating the anniversary by trying to raise $5000 to pay for new hardware and ongoing hosting costs. If you are able, please consider making a donation to help support the mozdev.org community site. Thank you for all of your support over the years."

DistroWatch reports - The fourth test release of the upcoming Ubuntu Linux 5.10 Breezy Badger is available for download and testing: Colony CD 4 is ready. This will be the last Colony CD release before the Breezy preview, so any testing you can provide is appreciated. If you test it, be sure to send us a report to ubuntu-devel at lists.ubuntu.com. Significant installer changes since Colony 3 include: many fixes to the live CD, including usplash integration; GRUB tries harder to boot even when the BIOS fails to pass a boot drive; APT configuration when the network is unavailable should now be much faster...

OSDir has put together a screenshot tour of Ubuntu Linux 5.10 Colony 4.

A plan to move 14,000 desktops from Windows has been delayed by a year, partly because of the need for an additional pilot phase.

Ah, the time one could spend bouncing around from blog to blog -- co-workers, customers, competitors -- thoughts from all of them may be just a few clicks away. Co-workers, competitors, and customers? Why not? Yet while some see blogs in business as a growing trend that may become standard enterprise procedure, analysts say there are still hurdles organizations must overcome before blogs can boost productivity.

Among the hundreds of Linux distributions, only a handful get much media attention, and only a small segment of those have become household words in the Linux community. At Distrowatch.com, one of the better known Linux ranking sites, you'll see the same names week after week in the top 20 -- Ubuntu, Mepis, Fedora, Slackware, etc. So who is using the bottom 80? And why?