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There may be no song more widely sung in America than "Happy Birthday," but it isn't free to sing. Warner Chappell music licensing, which has long claimed copyright to the words, typically dings filmmakers and TV produces a few thousands bucks for a "synchronization license" anytime the song is used in video. Warner reported that by the 1990s the "Happy Birthday" licensing enterprise was pulling in upwards of $2 million annually.

The open source movement can trace its beginnings to a famous strategy session held in Palo Alto, CA in February 1998, where the term "open source" was coined. That meeting led to the Open Source Definition, to advocacy for the use of open source software, and, fairly quickly, to worldwide recognition of open source principles.

In the name of freedom, GNU Hurd has the ability to run device drivers from user-space via the project's DDE layer. DDE is an interesting feature and does allow for some interesting possibilities although conventional wisdom advises against accessing and controlling your GPU, network, and disk drivers, along with other components, from user-space.

Recently the topic of systemd has come up quite a bit in various communities in which I'm involved, including the musl IRC channel and on the Busybox mailing list. While the attitude towards systemd in these communities is largely negative, much of what I've seen has been either dismissable by folks in different circles as mere conservatism, or tempered by an idea that despite its flaws, "the design is sound". This latter view comes with the notion that systemd's flaws are fixable without scrapping it or otherwise incurring major costs, and therefore not a major obstacle to adopting systemd.

My view is that this idea is wrong: systemd is broken by design, and despite offering highly enticing improvements over legacy init systems, it also brings major regressions in terms of many of the areas Linux is expected to excel: security, stability, and not having to reboot to upgrade your system.

The currently in-beta Jagged Alliance: Back in Action is due to be pushed out properly to Linux users on the 14th of February.

I've used dozens of different netbooks over the last few years and I must say the performance of this new Haswell based Intel chip is phenomenal. A dozen browser tabs open, Netflix streaming all while writing an article or two and the little guy doesn't skip a beat.

Since last month Valve has been giving away free access to all their games on Steam to Debian developers. That program has now been expanded and Valve's free Linux games will also be made available to Ubuntu developers.

Today in Open Source: Which desktop Linux distros are best suited for new users? Plus: You can find Linux in the strangest places, and what do Linux users miss from Windows or Mac?

A recent survey by Gartner of CIOs found that only 25 percent of respondents were seriously invested in the cloud. Something tells me, they might have asked the wrong people.

Intel's Beignet open-source OpenCL implementation for their Linux graphics driver now switches to LLVM/Clang 3.5 as its preferred version.

The development team behind GNOME’s default text editor application, Gedit, has announced recently that another milestone of the upcoming Gedit 3.12 release is available for download and testing.

Besides opening up the Steamworks VR API code, Valve has also made public another update to the SteamOS 1.0 "Alchemist" Linux distribution that's still in beta.

Steam Dev Days was a very interesting two-day game developer conference with many different developers from all over the world. The videos are now online for all to see!

AMD has published a second version of their open-source Linux driver code for exposing the "VCE" video engine on modern Radeon GPUs under Linux via OpenMAX for accelerated H.264 video encoding.

The GNOME Project has announced a few days ago that Epiphany 3.11.4 web browser is available for download and testing, as part of the recently released GNOME 3.11.5 unstable desktop environment.

Mageia 4 was released recently. I made a fresh reinstall of my own KDE 64-bit system. Am I satisfied with the results? I'd say yes. Will I upgrade my Linux Mint 15 Cinnamon soon? The answer is "no".

At the end of 90`s Mandrake Linux was the most popular distribution out there. Most thing that are today said about Ubuntu where first said about Mandrake. It was the number one distro from 1998 util 2004. User friendly, easy to use, easy to install, lot of preinstalled software, most popular by new users and Mandrake made at that point most users to change on Linux. All that is today said about Ubuntu. Yeah, Mandrake had also free shipping for DVDs back then. But soon the empire started to fall apart. In 2004 Mandrake had died. In 2005 Conectiva, the company who bought Mandrakesoft announced and released Mandriva and in 2006 they fired Gael Duval. Duval was the author of Mandrake. The new distribution, Mandriva, was nothing like good old Mandrake and it made lot of users to change their system. Fast forward to 2014 and let us have a look on the legacy of Mandrake Linux. Last stable release of Mandriva was in 2011 and it was not really stable. But in last 10 years Mandriva inspired many users and developers and new distributions popped out. One of them is Rosa Linux. Rosa Linux is a Russian Linux distribution.

If you really hate spam, and you run your own e-mail servers, you'll be glad to know that Apache has released a new version of its award-winning, open-source anti-spam program SpamAssassin.

Marcus Hanwell is a physicist by training, but his background in science led him down a different path than most reseachers. Today he is a contributer to a number of open source projects aimed at helping the scientific community better analyze and visualize their data. If you've got a question about finding the right open source tool for a scientific application, Marcus can point you in the right direction.

Nootka is a graphical application intended to teach classical score notation.