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I once stood in a hotel lobby in Amman, Jordan, listening quietly as a passionate GNU/Linux advocate tried to get Microsoft employees to agree that free software would be better for the Muslim world than proprietary software. His opponents were getting paid to boost Microsoft and proprietary software and couldn't change their beliefs -- at least in public -- without losing their jobs, so there was no way the Linux advocate could "win" this argument. I've witnessed similar scenes all over the world, and cringed at every one. Linux boosters shouldn't waste their (our) energy trying to convince unconvicable people. There are better uses for that passion.

Analysts said it doesn't really matter whether these organizations are on board because Sender ID will be adopted anyway, and it will happen quickly. "If IBM, Microsoft and Sendmail are using it, then it's less of an issue," said Mark Leavitt, a research analyst at International Data Corp., a Framingham, Mass.-based market research firm.

Kompose' is an Expose'-like (OS X) full screen task manager for KDE that has just gone to release 0.4.1 in two months. You really have to see it to understand, but imagine that tiny little box in your taskbar that indicates all our running windows blown up and on the entire desktop. Then add a tiny screenshot for each app.

The long awaited version 6.8.0 of the X.org implementation of the X Window System will be announced and available today. Development has finally moving rapidly forward after years of stagnation.

XML and Web services have been touted for years as the new lingua franca for application development, destined to transform the way companies conduct business and communicate. Lingua franca, or "bastardized French," was a pidgin or trade language used a couple of hundred years ago by various language communities around the Mediterranean to communicate with others whose language they didn't speak.

-- Targeting $2.5 Billion Education Market --

Open source software providers may have less to fear from legal action over patents than proprietary software developers, according to a patent law specialist.

Opposition to Microsoft Corp.'s licensing for a technology intended to stop spam and phishing is spreading, with calls made for one of the industry's leading standards bodies to update its Intellectual Property Rights policies.

Continuous Computing has ported its high-availability middleware for "hot standby" servers to Linux. UpSuite High Availability (HA) is application-transparent, for easy installation and maintenance, the company says, and is optimized for Xeon and Pentium processors on AdvancedTCA, CompactPCI, and rackmount servers.

Unisys, the maker of high-end servers, has joined the Red Hat Partner Community, strengthening its ties to the Linux vendor. Unisys, formerly a Windows-only shop, began offering its ES7000 servers with the Linux operating system earier this summer.