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We've talked in the past about how unfortunate it is that the US Copyright Office seems almost entirely beholden to the legacy copyright players, rather than to the stated purpose of copyright law. That is, instead of looking at how copyright can lead to the maximum benefit for the public ("promoting the progress of science") it seems to focus on what will make the big legacy players -- the RIAA and MPAA -- happy. Part of this, of course, is the somewhat continuous revolving door between industry and the Copyright Office.

Linux has not received much attention from the major gaming houses, even though it seems a natural fit as a robust gaming platform, so the announcement of the Steam for Linux beta last December generated a lot of interest. A Linux game port can be done in one of two ways. The first way is to use the operating system's own resources and to make allowance for a variety of versions and functinally equivalent applications. The second way is to recreate the norms of another operating system and require specific applications and versions. Despite the client being available as a .DEB package, Valve's Steam beta for Linux generally opts for the second approach, making it less promising than it might have been.

What do 16th century Incas, 18th century shipyards and 21st century professionals have in common? Phil Verghis describes an issue that has plagued civilizations and industries throughout history: inadequate access to lessons already learned. We all understand the importance of sharing knowledge, so why is it difficult for us to implement it into our daily business practice? Dancing E is a startup aimed at

Danish municipalities are increasingly using free and open source software for collaboration and innovation of ICT solutions. More than 10% of the country's municipalities last year joined the newly founded Open Website Community OS2. The group has already delivered a Drupal-based municipal content management system (OS2Web) as well as an application offering paperless meetings (OS2dagsorden).

I suppose it's not shocking or newsworthy (to most people) when an open source project changes its license. Some projects involve a small number of developers, making consensus around such changes easy; some projects have a contributor agreement whereby copyright is assigned to a single entity, averting the need for consensus. However, when an open source project has many contributors and no contributor agreement, then such a switch is indeed attention-grabbing. Why? Because to do so means obtaining the permission for the license change from each contributor—a task that is undoubtedly arduous and tedious, requiring an unswerving attention-to-detail and perseverance. But it can be done, as so proved by the efforts of Jean-Baptiste Kempf in switching VLC from GPLv2 to LGPLv2.1.

The Porteus community is pleased to announce Porteus 2.0 RC2, the latest development release of our Standard and Xfce editions. We've cleaned up several minor bugs that were present in RC1 and have added some new features. Please give this a thorough test so we can continue refining everything for 2.0 final. Here is our changelog from 2.0 RC1: Linux kernel upgraded to 3.7.5; fixed a bug with linuxrc not ejecting CDs in copy2ram mode; added a function to rc.M which disables discrete video card for PCs with dual graphics setup; rc.services - added a function for setting brightness when booting on battery.

MariaDB is due to replace MySQL in Fedora 19 and, in this version, udev will handle network device names. Additionally, the developers are still discussing the integration of Apache OpenOffice 4.0

One of the really neat features of coding for a portable platform like a phone is that you can use its motion sensors to control the UI. How useful this is in a particular app varies from "neat gimmick" to "UI perfection" -- admittedly the example here is more on the "gimmick" end of the spectrum, but it'll get you started with using the Android motion sensors. We'll carry on using the code from the previous three tutorials, but this time, we're going to add a detector which enables you to start the timer by shaking the phone.

I received this e-mail from the AP this morning -- Dear Users: Please be advised AP has been effected by the automated system patch released by Apple this morning, blocking java based applications on mac computers. This may slow down the publishing of some AP photos. AP Engineers are working on a solution.

Open Developer Break catches up with miscellaneous news from the open development world. This week: a new Node.js version, Red Hat's Developer Toolset, a new CyanogenMod bug tracker and a collection of Apache releases

Microsoft and BlackBerry face a a paradox. They can't really attract developers in large numbers away from iOS and Android without a critical mass of phones -- and phone buyers tend to stay away from phones without a vibrant app store. It's a stalemate that's going to be tough to break.

With the release date for the next enterprise Java version approaching and a number of deadlines missed, JSR107, the Java caching standard will now not make it into Java EE 7

The developers of Etherpad have released an update that fixes a security issue with the open source collaborative notepad application that could cause the server to be crashed by a malformed client message

(Sacramento, CA, USA: January 31, 2013) The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world's premier Linux certification organization (http://www.lpi.org), announced that in 2012 the organization surpassed two significant milestones: delivering over 350,000 exams and 120,000 certifications worldwide since the organization's inception.

Aeon Command is a space war strategy game that's now been released for Linux...

The first point release of the Enlightenment E17 desktop was released today. In addition, an early development snapshot of E18 was released too...

We at Last.fm love Linux. Not only does it power almost all of the server machines that bring Last.fm to you, it is also the operating system of choice of many of our developers at Last.HQ. For our desktop application Last.fm Scrobbler, Linux is a first class supported operating system.

At the 2013 CES convention, CNET's editorial staff loved the Dish Hopper DVR and nominated it "Best in Show." That journalistic decision was quickly tossed out, however, by the legal department at CBS, CNET's corporate parent. CBS is involved in litigation against Dish over the Hopper.

New tools help web devs find problem spots As every web developer knows, one of the biggest headaches of building modern, standards-compliant web pages is getting them to look and work right in Internet Explorer. Well, coders, apparently Microsoft feels your pain, because it has released a new set of free tools to help you do just that.…

Twenty-five women have been accepted for participation in the GNOME-led Outreach Programme for Women which runs from January 2 to April 2, according to a media release from the GNOME Foundation.