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54 people from 15 African countries and 16 facilitators/helpers from outside Africa gathered in Okahandja, a small Namibian town, for African Source from 15th of March to 19th of March 2004. African Source was the first all African conference of Free Software/Open Source Software (F/OSS) developers. Vladimir Petkov (GNOME) and Uwe Thiem (KDE) presented the current state of the open source desktop, its strengths and shortcomings.

Besides, it looks like they might have left us a killer loophole. We can get "reasonable remuneration" for any intellectual property we're forced to license. So maybe we can prevent the Linux people _ and all those other "software should be free" communists who give away what they create _ from using or even seeing the programming interfaces that let them interoperate with our software. Your move, Torvalds.

The second major milestone release of Nvu, the Web publishing application based on Mozilla Composer, is now available for Linux and Windows. The main new feature in Nvu 0.2 is support for the creation, modification and utilisation of templates, preset pages that can include both editable and static elements. Version 0.2 also allows more CSS properties to be applied to pages and lets users to extract inline styles and make them into classes.

Australian doctor and Linux kernel interactivity specialist Con Kolivas [interview] announced the release of a new experimental process scheduler [journal]. Con describes his "staircase scheduler" as, "a descending multilevel single runqueue per cpu with deadline elevation of priorities." It was designed with interactivity in mind, makes renicing processes affect CPU distribution, scales well, and offers low scheduling latency for normal policy tasks, all with low overhead.

Bynari, a Linux-based email server development company, has joined IBM's ISV Advantage Initiative, a program designed to provide independent software vendors (ISVs) with technical and marketing support to help meet the specific needs of small and medium business (SMB) customers.

On Saturday March 20, I spent my lazy Saturday morning browsing the web for Linux news. I surfed over to DistroWatch.com & read the latest happenings in regards to Linux distributions. I read a news blurb on latest release of dyne:bolic 1.2. dyne:bolic is self described as a free multimedia studio in a GNU/Linux live CD. I was intrigued by the prospect of playing with a multimedia studio on live CD that won't interfere with my PC's current setup. I downloaded the ISO via Azureus Java bittorrent client. I burned it to CDR using K3B and booted my DAW off the dyne:bolic CD.

Despite the many and severe problems highlighted in my previous article, all is not lost in the drive to increase the adoption and use of FOSS in developing countries. Many measures can be taken to help increase the use of FOSS in developing countries.

Companies looking to migrate from Exchange to a Linux-based messaging system or that want broader groupware functionality will find a good solution in Scalix's Email and Calendaring Platform. From the user's perspective, the Outlook experience is very good, although the Web client could use some improvement. Email and Calendaring Platform is priced at $60 per user, $600 for a server with 500 mailboxes and $3,500 for the Enterprise Edition. More information is available at http://www.scalix.com.

Far from penalising Microsoft, Wednesday's decision by the European Commission assures a bright future for the company as a patent licensing operation. That's according to Jeremy Allison of the team behind Samba, an open source implementation of the SMB (Server Message Block) file sharing protocol, who notes that only two open source interests were called to testify before the EU investigation.

Pink Software says its open source TurboCASH accounting package has exploded the myth that every country, or even every company, has unique bookkeeping needs.

For better or for worse, Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) is a wildly popular way of exchanging information. On Windows and Mac OS, most people create PDF files by first creating a PostScript file and then using Adobe Acrobat Distiller to generate a PDF. Linux, however, has no version of Distiller. There are a number of ways to create a PDF in Linux, but one of the most popular methods is to use a utility called ps2pdf.

Released earlier this month, GnomeMeeting 1.0 is a free, open-source, H.323-compliant application that supports videoconferencing, audio conferencing, text chat and IP-based telephony. In eWEEK Labs' tests, we found GnomeMeeting 1.0 worked reasonably well, although we did have difficulty setting up our audio and Universal Serial Bus-based video cameras to work on our test systems. This was mainly a Linux issue in our tests; anyone who wants to try GnomeMeeting, and hasn't installed a USB video camera, should plan on investing some time installing drivers. GnomeMeeting also supports FireWire-based cameras.

A FlashMob Supercomputer is created by connecting a virtually infinite number of computers via a high-speed LAN, to work together as a single supercomputer. A FlashMob computer, unlike an ordinary cluster, is temporary and organized ad hoc for the purpose of working on a single problem. It uses volunteers and ordinary laptop PC's, and is designed to allow anyone to create a supercomputer in a matter of hours.

A memory leak in mod_ssl allows a remote denial of service attack against an SSL-enabled server via plain HTTP requests. Another flaw was found when arbitrary client-supplied strings can be written to the error log, allowing the exploit of certain terminal emulators. A third flaw exists with the mod_disk_cache module.

Wind River will integrate third-party real-time debug and analysis tools with Workbench, its Eclipse-based development suite for embedded Linux and VxWorks (formerly, "Wind Power IDE 2.0). ScopeTools, from Real-Time Innovations (RTI) will be the "first significant tools" integrated with Workbench when it arrives later this Spring, according to Wind River.

Dr. Larry Augustin was present at a moment in history of sorts—the genesis of the term "open source" in Mountain View, Calif., on Feb. 3, 1998. That was when a small group of Silicon Valley software folks (which also included Eric Raymond and Christine Peterson) sat down to decide that there needed to be an actual name for what this new and uncharted genre represented. So he owns a deep perspective on open source. And last week, he shared some of that perspective at the first Open Source Business Conference here by outlining his eight simple rules for open-source business strategy.

Hewlett-Packard Co. and software maker Novell Inc. will sell personal computers worldwide loaded with the Linux operating system, which competes with Microsoft Corp.'s Windows. Novell's SUSE Linux operating system will be distributed on Hewlett-Packard's desktop and notebook PCs aimed at business users in North America followed by Europe and Asia, according to a statement from the two companies. Palo Alto-based Hewlett-Packard will also provide global support, training and consulting on Linux, the statement said.

The objective and intended application of General Public Licences (GPLs) are well known and succinctly stated. Code licensed under GPLs can be copied, passed on and passed around, improved and amended by anyone who wishes. The intended legal obligation is that any changes and amendments must be done under the terms of the existing license: it must be done under the same terms as the licensee received it. In context of "free software" it must be "free" not in terms of "free of consideration" but "free" in terms of being unrestricted in terms of use.

Inspired by the release of Nmap 3.5, the latest version of the award-winning network security tool, I've been exploring network security issues for a couple of weeks now. Nmap's major skill is port scanning -- learning which ports on a machine are "open" and what applications are using them. Sound network security planning dictates that you take a look at your network machines to see what the bad guys can see from outside.

There are many available scripting languages that support web services. PHP is one such language, with a powerful arsenal of open source functions and tools.