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For the first time in my life, I want to thank Larry McVoy. He recently eliminated a major weakness of the free software community, by announcing the end of his campaign to entice free software projects to use and promote his non-free software. Soon, Linux development will no longer use this program, and no longer spread the message that non-free software is a good thing if it's convenient.

Jason Macer owns OSI Hosting.net, a hosting provider incorporated in Texas. Macer's claims in a NewsForge story last October about having "6,000 people signed up for dedicated servers" proved to be false. So did Macer's claims that he was going to open a huge facility and employ thousands of people in the chronically depressed city of Texarkana. But Macer still claims, despite evidence that his company has virtually no significant assets or income, and no employees other than himself, that by mid-May he is going to acquire three companies in Austin, Texas. He says he can't tell us where he's getting the money for these acquisitions because all his deals are covered by non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). We're just supposed to trust him.

roseman sent us links to a couple of online newspaper features about Mozilla Firefox. The first comes from Australia's Herald Sun and is entitled Keep tabs on Firefox. The short article mentions security, tabbed browsing, popup blocking and extensions as Firefox's main attractions. The report does suffer from a few factual errors though, such as its statement that "Firefox is produced by Mozilla, a company that used to be known as Netscape" (as we all know, the relationship is a little more complicated than that).

The ideas in this article came from my project to give my retired father a computer running Debian Sarge and KDE. All the ideas can be transposed to any modern Linux/Unix distribution, and most of these ideas should work with any desktop system.

Earlier this month, we reported that Mozilla Foundation President Mitchell Baker was included in the 2005 Time 100. In a weblog posting, Mitchell describes how she found out that she made the Time list. She talks about her first meeting with Time (for an article that never ran) and how she got nominated for an award she'd never even heard of with no explanation.

Ewald Kicker has written a detailed tutorial about debugging a PHP script inside Quanta Plus using the Gubed debugger. The document is aimed at beginners and describes step-by-step how to set up and use the debugger for your web projects.

Larn about the availability of MySQL Database Server for Linux and how to develop apps for MySQL in PHP, Java, C/C++, Python, and Perl.

HP has changed the name of its Linux operation to the Open Source & Linux Organization (OSLO) to advertise its open source sympathies, it said. It's supposed to signify HP's focus on open source beyond the Linux operating system. Martin Fink will continue to run the unit.

Turbolinux is enjoying its fourth consecutive year of growth in the China Linux market, after a report issued by IDC this week said its share saw significant growth in 2004.

Open source development got a bit faster this week thanks to the release of the GCC 4.0 compiler. GCC is included in every Linux distribution and has been one of the leading compilers in use over the last 15 years.

Some at the ACT's Intellectual Property and Technology Summit touted the importance of IP as crucial to development; others said software patents shouldn't exist.

IBM has released a Linux based technology enabling spatiotemporal modeling of infectious agents across the United States, providing scientists and public health officials with a powerful tool for understanding, and potentially preventing, the spread of infectious diseases.

In an exclusive interview, the Linux founder talks about the new Linux software configuration management program he created: Git.

After a long battle over how Linux should be developed, Torvalds has created his own system, Git, to replace the controversial, proprietary BitKeeper.

Intel will establish an open source development laboratory (OpenSource Lab) in Vietnam, train local open source programmers, support a number of local firms to access open source technologies and tools, consult on matters concerning open source applications and help increase the community’s awareness of open source applications.

IBM and the chief scientist of Israel's Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor on Friday said they have agreed to a pact to foster development of open-standards technology by Israeli start-ups. The pact calls for IBM to provide hardware, technology expertise and sales and marketing support, while the Israeli Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor will supply funding to Israeli start-ups. No financial terms were disclosed.

Learn all you can about open-source software models and focus on providing specific services, according to speakers at financial-services show Linux on Wall Street.

Borland Software is releasing code from its core JBuilder integrated development environment (IDE) into the Eclipse open source community after a surprise drop in first-quarter sales.

A software design expert claims that software quality is declining everywhere except in the open source world, but others insist that proprietary software is just as good as the alternative

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