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Technology collaboration and its expression as open source software could build long-term immunity against the practices of a global patent system running amok.

The Open Source Initiative--the organization that certifies open-source licenses--says that it has reorganized in an effort to bring more structure to the open-source software movement and that co-founder Eric Raymond is stepping down from his position as president.

Firefox's success has seemed to take even Mozilla advocates by surprise. On the SpreadFirefox site's blog, it was noted that on January 29th, Firefox downloads topped the 21 million mark.

Red Hat has really been grating my nerves as of late. Undocumented features that are advertised but unusable, recommended updates that are thoroughly broken, failure to update packages with high-impact problems, and a poor software packaging and distribution policy have me testing other distributions with a goal of taking my business elsewhere.

Linuxlookup.com is reporting on Skype, the Global Internet Telephony Company, today announced the availability of its feature-rich Skype for Mac OS X Version 1.0 and Skype for Linux Version 1.0 software applications, enabling high-quality voice calling via the Internet for multiple computer platforms. Skype is the leading VOIP-category product worldwide, with more than 23 million registered users, and more than 130,000 new users per day.

The OSI board has approved five new licenses for certification.

Andreas Brand is a sociologist researching ways of recruiting and organising teams of volunteers on the Internet. He has been studying KDE as an example of an open source project based upon collaboration without hierarchies. As part of his work he has conducted interviews with KDE developers, participated in several open source conferences, analysed the KDE home page, and distributed a questionnaire among volunteers. We asked him about his thoughts on the KDE development model.

Software Freedom Law Center to be led by noted IP lawyer and professor Eben Moglen of Columbia University - initial funding support from Open Source Development Labs

Going into 2005, Mandrakesoft is a company that has gone against everything that was predicted. It has survived the dot-com bust, become profitable and continues to frown on the idea of moving away from Free and Open Source Software development in favor of the proprietary approach advocated by many of the newer GNU/Linux distribution developers. To catch up on the changes since their last full interview, Mandrakesoft co-founder Gaël Duval recently agreed to talk with OFB’s editor-in-chief, Timothy R. Butler, about where the company is heading and the state of the industry at the present time.

At the OSDL Enterprise Linux Summit, an attorney for Black Duck Software advises enterprises using open-source software to establish policies to protect against intellectual property claims.

I got sick of rebuilding my mothers PC every 6 months because she is way to trusting and like the funny things her friends send her. Every 6 months her machine becomes so loaded with adware/spyware/malware that it has a hard time booting. [...] So she's been migrated to Ubuntu.

The purpose of this document is to describe the exact steps, hardware, and software required to establish a functional wireless connection between a PC and Router on a Linux-based operating system. These instructions detail how I was able to set up and configure a wireless network using Mandrake 10.1.

Moving away from a single, core LSB, the Free Standards Group has decided to break it down into modules that can be combined to build a server or a desktop standard.

Estimated 120,000 people winding up the World Social Forum meeting in Brazil. FOSS figures prominently in the agenda. " Activists at the World Social Forum, where Microsoft is viewed as a corporate bogeyman, urged developing nations yesterday to leap into the information age with free, open-source software."

Microsoft, Oracle and other conventional vendors must reinvent themselves to vie in the global marketplace where open source contends.

When providing the world with Independent Music, wouldn't it be nice to know that they were also promoting Open Source? There aren't many websites out there (that I know of) that do...

The Czech postal service is putting its faith in open source, by migrating a vital application onto SuSE Linux.

Ubuntu is a Debian-based distribution that is probably the most philosophical of all Linux distributions, which is saying a lot in the Open Source space. Bill von Hagen discovers the philosophy behind the code in this review.

Last year IBM took a significant step forward in cooperation with the free software community, by offering blanket licenses for 500 of its patents to all free software developers. This does not cover all of IBM's software patents, which must number in the thousands. And there are other areas where IBM does not yet cooperate with the free software community--they have not provided the necessary information to port a free BIOS to ThinkPads, for instance, and they are still pursuing Treacherous Computing. Nonetheless, this is a real step. Recently Sun made an announcement that superficially seems similar. It said that Sun had given us "free access to Sun OpenSolaris related patents under the Common Development and Distribution License." But those words do not really make sense. The CDDL is a license for the copyright on software, not a policy for licensing patents. It applies to specific code and nothing else. (Copyright and patents have essentially nothing in common in the requirements they impose on the public.)

The new Linux-based POS systems have been installed in about two-thirds of the company's 140-plus supermarkets in New England and New York. Hannaford Bros., a division of Brussels-based Delhaize Group, expects to complete the implementation of the thin-client systems by October, said CIO Bill Homa.