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Massachusetts is expanding its landmark stance on open-source software purchases to cover digital documents in general, planning to require all state agencies to create and store information in noncommercial software programs such as HTM and PDF.

In his recent article Why I won't upgrade my Linux distribution Nathan Willis argues that there are many reasons not to upgrade your Linux-based system frequently. What he is really talking about is the proverbial RPM Hell and the not-so-good fragmentation of RPM-based distributions. Packages not part of your distribution might easily be broken by a system upgrade. Even parts of the distribution can stop working due to the upgrade. But RPM-based distributions are not the same as Linux.

A lengthy and interesting thread was started on the lkml by Chris Wright looking to define a centralized place to report security issues in the Linux Kernel...He explained that he wanted to centralize the information "to help track it, make sure things don't fall through the cracks, and make sure of timely fix and disclosure". The resulting discussion was joined by numerous members of the kernel hacking community, exposing a wide range of opinions.

The Linux Trace Toolkit, or LTT, "is a fully-featured tracing system for the Linux kernel. It includes both the kernel components required for tracing and the user-level tools required to view the traces. Information on the project's page notes that the tool is not intended to be used as a kernel debugger, but instead "is intended to provide users with information regarding the dynamic behavior of their system which was previously unavailable using conventionnal tools such as gdb, strace, top, ps and the likes."

Mitch Kapor, of the Open Source Applications Foundation, said that Firefox users should stop gloating and thinking that the product's future is assured. Having made his fortune during the heyday of proprietary software, Kapor is both president and chair of the OSAF and chairman of the Mozilla Foundation.

IBM, Intel, the Open Source Development Labs, and other industry lights are planning to announce that a consortium has been created that will rewrite the components in the Linux kernel that have been alleged tread on other people's IP - or at least the 27 Microsoft patents that Linux is supposed to infringe. The aim? To rob Microsoft of the ability to scare customers off of Linux by saying that the operating system is a patent infringer, informed sources say. "Operation Open Gates" as they are calling it is reportedly going to be unveiled on January 25.

IDE for Laszlo is a technology preview of an Eclipse-based development environment for creating, editing, debugging, and testing applications based on the LZX (an XML and JavaScript description language).

Sun Microsystems reported on Thursday a profit of $19 million, or 1 cent per share, for the last quarter of 2004, but the server and software company's revenues once again declined.

This is a response to Subhasish Ghosh's editorial entitled "Free Software in Reality Isn't Free". If I come across as kind of harsh here, I apologize. I know Solaris and and SunONE rather well, so this is familiar territory. Some of the concepts in Ghosh's editorial were quite baffling to me, so this editorial in fact raises more questions than it may answer. Such is discourse in the digital age :)
-- FeriCyde

Once again a Debian Miniconf will be run as a prelude to the annual linux.conf.au (LCA).

The next major version of KDE may run up to 30 percent faster, due to improvements in how its graphical framework uses resources.

ITtoolbox.com holds information on lots of infrastructures, protocols, and operating systems. Its Linux site hosts a wide variety of white papers on Linux. But it's hard to envision making regular visits to this sparsely populated portal.

I began using free software when I bought some Mandrake 8 CDs from Wal-Mart in 2000. At that point a severe addiction to Counter-Strike, a Windows-only game, kept me dual-booting with Windows XP Professional, but that Linux partition was there to stay. I repartitioned periodically, and the sliver of Redmond on my 40GB hard drive kept getting smaller and smaller. But though Linux served me well, I recently moved to a more elegant, if less user-friendly, operating system -- NetBSD 1.6.2.

EDS CONTRACTORS working for the Department for Work and Pensions have managed to break all records by engineering what experts are calling the biggest crash in computer history.

Software, whether application software like gcc or system software like Linux which are part of the Free Software Foundation attract masses by their appeal of being free. In reality, this in-born-nature of FSF software of being free (in the sense of freedom of speech and not free beer) is not so clear and cogent to a common man. More significantly, if one takes an in-depth look into the Linux world, things seem to go the other way.

With KDE 3.4 beta just announced a few days ago spokesman George Staikos has written about the new RSS/RDF/Atom Aggregator included in the new relase, aKregator, in his column KDE: From the Source. "In contrast to a news ticker style of RSS application, you don't need to constantly look at aKregator to see if there is new news. I have found that with news tickers such as the applet in KDE, I was constantly staring at the news feeds as they scrolled by and re-reading the same headlines over and over. With aKregator, I find I never look at old news as headlines that are read are conveniently grayed out and pushed down the list." This is a much better way to track news in KDE than the somewhat outdated news ticker.

Distrowatch is one of the best resources for people who want to choose a Linux distro they'd find suitable. The site also raises awareness for smaller distributions. It has a large database with just about every Linux distribution currently available, along with useful information about each one that will help Linux searchers find the best one for them.

Linux vendors Red Hat, Novell and MandrakeSoft on Wednesday released patches for several vulnerabilities, ranging from flaws that could allow denial-of-service attacks to buffer overflows.

Computer users may spend hundreds of dollars to equip their machines with software. But thanks to freeware and open source software that can rival high-priced software, those on a student budget may not have to choose between buying a software program and eating.

The company has added support for the AMD 64-bit architecture to its compiler suite for Linux clusters