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When Joseph Guallar-Esteve was laid off from IBM in the summer of 2001, he thought it would take months to find another job in technology. After all, he had seen some of his friends remain unemployed for nearly a year before finding work. But Guallar-Esteve had an edge: He knew Linux.

[Updated 3 March 2004] Revised libxml2 packages are now available as the original packages did not contain a complete patch.

The Haryana government has chosen to go the open-source way and signed an agreement with Sun Microsystems to use it open-source based office suite, StarOffice 7. StarOffice 7 will be adopted across all the state government departments.

Many companies have employment policies that stipulate that the company owns anything its employees develop. What happens when an employee works on an open source project? How is it possible for your employee to give away their developments while fulfilling the requirements of his or her employment agreement?

Unitech has confirmed it will ship a Linux-based PDA co-developed with IBM on March 11. The PDA will use a PowerPC chip, and, like the Enterprise Zaurus developed by Sharp in conjunction with IBM, will likely target enterprise customers.

The KDE Community is pleased to announce the launch of the Quality Team Project, a community of contributors who will serve as a gateway between developers and users in the KDE Project, and as a new way for people to begin contributing.

Getting new people involved is a key aim for any free software project. For projects like KDE, which are in a sense the face of free software for many non-technical users, getting widespread involvement from a representative sample of users can be difficult. To address this, and to develop a whole new community, the KDE Project today officially launched the Quality Teams Project, allowing participation from programmers and newbies alike. This is a more radical idea than it might appear.

Last week, JBoss Inc., provider of an Open Source J2EE application server received $10 million in venture funding in a group led by Matrix Partners.

Continuing with the Linux on the AMD64 series of articles, this installment is to be a summary of two new distributions, and the changes that have been made to Gentoo since the last installment. Here I review the installation of TurboLinux 8 (both with and without the update CD), the installation of Fedora Core for x86_64, and more news on Gentoo for the AMD64.

Paul Starzetz and Wojciech Purczynski of isec.pl discovered a critical security vulnerability in the memory management code of Linux inside the mremap(2) system call. Due to flushing the TLB (Translation Lookaside Buffer, an address cache) too early it is possible for an attacker to trigger a local root exploit.

Joanne Rohde named Executive Vice President of Worldwide Operations to guide Red Hat's delivery of software as a service.

NASA is crafting a license that it would use to release applications developed by the space agency as open-source software. A team of intellectual property lawyers—from NASA’s headquarters, Ames Research Center, Goddard Space Flight Center and Langley Research Center—is working on the agreement.

In 2004-02, we posted 592 stories (security alerts were not counted). SCO, Microsoft, IBM, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems were the big newsmakers in February. Click to find out who was in the news in February.

Open source software is WONDERFUL stuff that adds lots of value to the computing ecosystem. That does not mean, however, that all software should be open source. That was the essence of my criticism to Richard Stallman's recent article. Furthermore, the fact that open source is "super cool" does not require that we believe that open source, BY ITSELF, is going to provide the revenue that would serve as the foundation for a decent software development business.

Faster time-to-market, lower cost of ownership, multi-vendor interoperability and easy migration to IT infrastructure cited as driving reasons behind support for open source business model

Distribution Giant Aligns Sales, Marketing and Technical Skills To Support Growing Interest in Linux Solutions

The push within Australia to give open source software major grip in government and large organisations has been boosted by the formation of a new representative body, Open Source Industry Australia.

Public sector organisations should consider using open source software on desktops as well as servers, the government's spending watchdog said last week.

The professional association PHP Quebec organizes the largest conference dedicated to PHP and Free Software in Canada, on March, Thursday 25th and Friday 26th 2004. The conference will be hosted by the Crowne Plaza Hotel, Montreal, Quebec.

Gentoo Linux is proud to announce the release of Gentoo Linux 2004.0 for the x86, AMD64, PowerPC, Sun SPARC, and SGI MIPS architectures. Additionally, the Gentoo Hardened team is announcing the inaugural release of a security-enhanced Gentoo platform for the x86 architecture.