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Rachel App is a renaissance woman whose interests are shared mostly by men and not other women. She's an independent label singer, songwriter, musician, and Linux geek who uses a variety of open source applications to record and enhance her music.

What goes on in Redmond's Linux and Open Source Software Lab? Chief Bill Hilf is the one to ask.

Today, as the FBI sought to take former Microsoft lobbyist Jack Abramoff into custody, a friend forwarded a supplement to a NOTICE OF PROPOSED RULEMAKING asking if it was OK to limit access to a Federal Agency by only allowing people with Internet Explorer to access a Federal Web Site.

Red Hat, Inc. has recently announced the availability of Red Hat Network with Monitoring Module and support for Solaris. Red Hat and BMC Software also announced collaboration to extend cross platform support for heterogeneous configuration management. In the Monitoring Module, customers can create dozens of monitoring probes for each of their systems, configuring warning and critical thresholds for each probe. Probes can monitor systems, network functionality, or applications. Over 60 pre-built probes are available initially, including many for applications from Oracle, MySQL, Apache, and BEA. Meanwhile, the Red Hat Network Solaris Management is a simple and inexpensive tool to patch legacy Solaris environments. Customers with both Solaris and Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployed will be able to leverage the benefits of a single, unified systems management system with Red Hat Network.

Every software company worth its salt already has some open-source strategy. IBM may have set the pace with its early support of Linux, but it has become common for tech companies to release open-source versions of software that does not earn its keep. What better way to undermine a more successful rival?

The Meraka Institute's Open Source Centre (OSC) will host Soweto's first ever open source workshop tomorrow and has announced plans to develop satellite centres in the area with local open source experts able to assist users.The move comes as Meraka attempts to bridge the digital divide it sees developing in the open source arena. "There seems to be a disturbing trend emerging which reveals that our message seems to be getting through to everyone else but women and underprivileged communities," says Dr Ntsika Msimang of the OSC. "The irony here is that open source seems to be engineering its own digital divide and the idea of creating satellite centres is to reverse that trend by targeting the communities that we deem are the ultimate beneficiaries of bridging the digital divide."

People like Firefox because it just works. We designed Firefox to be invisible; we want you using the web, not the software. We've spent years refining it and streamlining it down to the pixel so that it works intuitively right out of the box. We have a formidable competitor in Microsoft, but the emergence of the network has changed the rules. If you create a great product, it will spread through word-of-mouth and people will use it. If people aren't talking about your product, your product isn't worth talking about.

Most set-top digital personal video recorders (PVRs) cost anywhere from several hundred to more than a thousand dollars. The Neuros MPEG-4 Recorder is a much lower-priced PVR, but the reduced cost carries its own price: it can't do nearly as much as its more expensive hard drive- and DVD-based competitors, such as TiVo, ReplayTV, and UltimateTV.

A different sort of evidence of free software's forward march came today at LinuxWorld. Two sales people from two different companies approached me within a 24-hour period to say they want to talk to me about making part or all of their product open source

The basic open-source licence covering software such as the Linux OS will be revamped and ready by 2007, according to an industry official involved with the project. The planned changes to the GNU General Public License (GPL) include resolving patent conflicts, accommodating Web services, and resolving incompatibilities with other licences. Dealing with wikis in the GPL also has been pondered.

It's late, it's lame and installing it won't be cheap, so now is the perfect time for Linux desktop vendors to make a charge at Microsoft.

There's been a lot of Firefox vs. IE talk in the industry. Some people say that Firefox is better than IE, more secure than IE, and so on. While Firefox users sing their tunes on how much better it is over IE, most IE users don't understand what the fuss is all about. For starters, both browsers have security problems. No browser is 100% secure.

SAN FRANCISCO - 10 Aug 2005 - The second day of LinuxWorld passed without any fistfights breaking out between vendors, although there are rumors of rancor between Sun and IBM over a modification of OpenOffice.org that IBM is passing out on CDs. There are more hardware vendors than last year, with bigger and splashier displays. And in honor of the late, great San Francisco newspaper columnist Herb Caen, I will end this paragaph and some other ones with three dots...

These guys have been talking to each other. Over the last two weeks, there has been a rash of announcements from a number of leading vendors pledging support for new open virtualisation standards. The plans pointedly do not involve Microsoft and could be seen as encircling the Redmond giant in the booming virtualisation market, which most observers see as becoming of growing importance over the next few years. Both Intel and AMD will build virtualisation hooks into their upcoming products, for example.

Many secondary schools students in the French region of Auvergne will receive CDs containing free and open source software when they return to school in September. The project, which has been funded by the local government, will see 64,000 packs of CDs distributed to school pupils, according to Linux Arverne, a Linux user group involved in the initiative.

Nomad Press is a small, "fiercely independent" book publishing company based in Colorado. It's run by Deborah Robson, a writer, editor, knitter, and now, a Linux user.

Two Linux allies are taking a leaf out of their opponents' book as they try to prevent software patents from dragging open source into a mire of patent-infringement lawsuits. Red Hat will finance outside programmers' efforts to obtain patents that may be used freely by open source developers, the top Linux seller said on Tuesday at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo.

Would it bother you if the only browser you could use to preregister a copyright claim with the United States Copyright Office is Internet Explorer, version 5.1 and higher? Well, you might be getting bothered real soon, because that is what the Library of Congress has in mind.

Distrowatch reports - Currently, SUSE Linux 10.0 Beta 1 (code name: Prague) is an unsupported, open source only, preliminary edition of SUSE Linux that contains bleeding-edge packages and represents the latest development snapshot. If you intend to test for bugs or contribute patches, this version is for you... OSDir has some

This week's tech conference in San Francisco still went by the name LinuxWorld. But the Linux operating system was only a part of what went on there. Attendees pitched databases, software to manage customer data, security add-on programs and scores of other products — some of it compatible with Linux's rival, Microsoft Windows. Rather than zero in on Linux, the conference has broadened its focus to include all open-source software — code that's developed and shared freely. Though Linux is still the poster child of open-source programming, it's far from alone.