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IBM granting access to 500 software patents to the open-source community was a good start. Now Big Blue must assemble a consortium of other IP powerhouses with an interest in defending the open-source development model.

Timothy Miller is a long time developer of graphics chips and drivers. He has observed that there is a growing trend by graphics hardware vendors to provide less and less information to free and open source operating system developers. Without this information, it is becoming more and more difficult to purchase new graphics hardware that is stable and reliable on Linux and other free and open source operating systems. In response, Timothy worked with his employer, Tech Source, to form the Open Graphics Project.

Wormux is a libre software clone of the game named Worms. The goal of the game consists in winning a fight against an opponent team of "worms" (or else) by leading his own team.

Blake Ross has written a weblog post about the design philosophy behind Mozilla Firefox. The short version: Firefox, like most good software, should be means to an end that's largely invisible to its users.

The company will use its new Common Development and Distribution License for its Open Solaris project. Sun also will release the code to its DTrace technology, which is found in the upcoming Solaris 10 operating system and allows a look into its inner workings.

Ben Goodger, Lead Engineer for the popular browser Firefox has announced that he is no longer paid by Mozilla, and has joined Google.

Mozilla Foundation President Mitchell Baker will return to working on the Mozilla project full time. She will continue to be an employee of OSAF and will retain her seat on OSAF's board.

More than a year after IBM's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Sam Palmisano challenged his company to move to the Linux desktop by the end of 2005, IBM has significantly toned down its rhetoric on the subject of open-source clients.

The United Federation of Teachers embraces open-source technology for its enterprise systems.

On Tuesday, Sun Microsystems Inc. will announce that it will be using its newly minted Common Development and Distribution License open-source license for its long-promised Open Solaris project. However, creating a developer community around such plans to open-source Solaris will not be easy—for many reasons—according to analysts and industry figures.

Since its release last November, Mozilla Firefox 1.0 has been downloaded over 20 million times. Asa Dotzler has posted a graph of culmulative downloads and a chart of daily download totals.

Open source has won another convert in the local government sector, with soft migrations to Linux imminent across Vienna's municipal authority.

Broadband Subscribers to Benefit From Tabbed Browsing, Increased Privacy and Security Features, Built in Pop-Up Blocking and More

This excerpt from Exploring the JDS Linux Desktop teaches you how to instant message friends and colleagues from your desktop system.

Have you ever bid in on eBay auction item and thought you were going to win, only to see it go at the very last second for a bid just slightly higher than yours? Congratulations, you've been sniped. Luckily, you can fight back by getting your own sniping tool, courtesy of the open source community, which provides JBidwatcher, one of the best ones gunning.

There is a Native American proverb that says, "Tell me and I'll forget, show me and I may not remember, involve me and I'll understand." These words are the mission statement of a new scheme for certifying IT capability -- the International Grades in Office Technology (INGOTs) program. To obtain their certificates, students must demonstrate an understanding of free and open source software (FOSS) issues by actually contributing to the OpenOffice.org project. INGOTs creator Ian Lynch contributes to the OpenOffice.org as education lead. We have asked Ian to explain the main features and advantages of the program.

The software patent saga continues, with adoption of the CIID now scheduled for next week.

Use this free Diagnostic Tool to help you better understand information provided by your JVM (Java Virtual Machine) garbage collector. It will analyze critical issues in great detail such as quantities of heap memory involved, frequency of the garbage collection, time spent in different phases of garbage collection, and much more. Recently updated to manage very big heap sizes.

Many mission-critical applications have been built on Internet Explorer, and most organizations don't have the budget or resources to recode them. In addition, PCs' application loads need to be properly tested to ensure that nothing breaks with the addition of a different browser. In the near term, many business users will be better served by keeping Internet Explorer and installing security updates as they're released.

"Open Source is an opportunity for small, local companies to position themselves against offshore providers", says Gerhard Havlik of OSCON co-organizer incite. The Open Source Business Conference (OSCON) was held last Friday in Vienna. Danese Cooper, a proponent of Open Source at Sun Microsystems, spoke about what she had seen in India: a large section of the economy was working solely on applying standard software and linking various standard components to each other.