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Dell became the last of the four major server sellers to fully support Novell's SuSE Linux, announcing on Wednesday a partnership that puts low price front and center.

Stuart Cohen, the chief executive officer of OSDL, told ZDNet UK on Tuesday that the organisation is currently working on an open-source database which could be used by companies or patent employees to check for prior art -- whether a patent application contains original work, or has already been worked on in the open-source community. But campaigners against software patents said this would have little impact and does not tackle the essential issue that patents stifle innovation.

The countdown to Open Source Solaris has officially begun. Sun execs confirm the upcoming launch date for Nov. 15, when execs will outline their plans to "Open Source" Solaris. Open Enterprise Trends gets the latest insights from Jack O'Brien, Sun's Group Manager, x86 and Operating Systems, who speaks to us about Sun's goals for a Solaris Open Source community, and what it has learned to do (and not do) from other commercial-turned Open Source projects from such firms as IBM, BEA and others.

The company says SuSE Linux Professional will become more of a community desktop, while its upcoming Novell Linux Desktop will target business users.

Here is the current link to today's "executive memo" referenced in earlier news items.

Less than a week after Red Hat discontinued update services for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 customers who do not renew their subscriptions, Finnish Linux vendor Lineox has announced unified security and bug fix update services for its Linux operating system that is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux source code.

It has become fashionable to describe copyright, patents, and trademarks as "intellectual property." This fashion did not arise by accident -- the term systematically distorts and confuses these issues. Anyone wishing to think clearly about any of these laws would do well to resist it.

A memo signed by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has piled into the Linux operating system, claiming that users adopting it will be vulnerable to security breaches.

In future the German Federal Railways intend to rely more heavily on Linux as a server operating system. In line with the announcement made in May, changeovers with respect to a number of applications were being undertaken at present, an official statement by the company read. To the degree that this was technically and economically feasible, new and productive IT systems were accordingly to run on Linux.

After testing Microsoft products in 300 of the schools, the regional Education Ministry [of West Bengal in northeast India] said it decided to instead install open-source software on 10,000 new computers, the first phase of an even bigger project.

Asterisk, the open-source application that provides the functionality of a large telephone switch, can now run over a LocustWorld mesh network

As Bart Decrem (Mozilla Foundation spokeperson) is doing a press tour in Europe with Mozilla Europe, press coverage is getting quite amazing. I tried to gather all the links I could to European articles. You'll find articles from UK, The Netherlands, Belgium and France. Bart will continue his trip in France tomorrow and then Germany and UK again. We're just half way in this press tour and the response is already awesome! The Register, Reuters, ZDNet.be, you name it. French Google News home page even has a Firefox logo!

Open source is reaching new heights as space organizations look to this communally developed software to power both terrestrial and orbital operations. Both the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Indian Space Research Organization, in particular, are using open-source software to build, guide, and repair critical satellite systems.

The Windows vs Linux security debate has been given a fresh lease of life following the publication of a study by well-known tech journalist Nicholas Petreley which predictably concludes that Microsoft "Get The Facts campaign does not deal with the "real facts."

JBoss Inc., the company that produced the open source J2EE application server of the same name, last week announced it would adopt the jBPM open source workflow management application into its suite of offerings targeting the enterprise software market. The goal of business process management (BPM) software is to abstract away technical issues like data manipulation and procedural logic for higher-level logic involved in complex workflow designs used in this era of Web services and service-orientated architectures.

HP and Novell GmbH have launched a project in Germany today to support IT migrations to Linux desktops and servers in local German governments. Called "Linux Kommunale," the initiative teams HP hardware and Novell SuSE Enterprise Server 9, desktop and management tools.

Soon, having Linux "under the hood" may take on a more literal meaning. Austin's embedded Linux vendor Metrowerks recently announced the release of what it calls Automotive Grade Linux, a version of the open source operating system modified to run as an electronics control system in automobiles.

Mandrakelinux 10.1 Official is now available and provides improved hardware support, extended mobility and a better user experience.

Linux desktop vendor Xandros Inc. on Tuesday announced the availability of its new Xandros Desktop Management Server (xDMS) application, which gives IT administrators the tools to roll out, configure and maintain mass deployments of Linux-equipped PCs.

Welcome to this year's 42nd issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Roger So called for papers for the first Asia Debian Mini-Conf, to be held in Beijing, China next February/March. Support for the new m32r processor architecture has been added to Linux 2.6.9 and the root filesystem is based on Debian.