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Some people feel that the Reiser4 file semantics will present problems for the Linux community. In a nutshell, every file now looks like a directory and can be opened as a directory. The names in that directory are not new files but metadata associated with the file, as documented by Hans Reiser on the Namesys site. The immediate response in the community has been that this is too big a change and should be withdrawn. I humbly propose that this is a challenge we should face head on now or we may not have an opportunity to do so in the future.

Sybase has announced a freely available "limited-use" Linux version of its flagship database, following moves by IBM and Computer Associates last month to open source their databases.

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.