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You'll see on the WebM license page and in our source code repositories that we've made a small change to our open source license. There were a couple of issues that popped up after we released WebM at Google I/O a couple weeks ago, specifically around how the patent clause was written. As it was originally written, if a patent action was brought against Google, the patent license terminated. This provision itself is not unusual in an OSS license, and similar provisions exist in the 2nd Apache License and in version 3 of the GPL. The twist was that ours terminated "any" rights and not just rights to the patents, which made our license GPLv3 and GPLv2 incompatible. Also, in doing this, we effectively created a potentially new open source copyright license, something we are loath to do.

IBM, Samsung, TI, Arm, Freescale and ST-Ericsson are founding members of Linaro. A group of chip makers including IBM, Samsung Electronics and Texas Instruments on Thursday unveiled Linaro, a new software-engineering foundation dedicated to improving Linux distributions, including Android, MeeGo and Ubuntu, used in consumer devices.

Your preferences while browsing the web depend largely upon what tasks you perform while using the browser. If speed is a concern, give the lightweight Midori web browser a try. Named after the Japanese word for green, I've found the Midori web browser to be just that.

Qimo 2.0 Linux distribution based on Ubuntu designed specially for kids with Xfce window manager, looks really simple to use and suitable for small kids and integrated with many games will help the kid to improve his/her skills. Mathematical, typing, drawing, learning ABCs. will show you all that in the review.

Amarok was my favorite for a long time. But when the new Amarok 2.0 series started coming in, I was left with no option but to leave my beloved music player in Ubuntu. Amarok 1.4 was by far the best music player I ever had in Linux. After a long time I gave a try at the latest Amarok 2.3.1 in Ubuntu, and I have to say, this is impressive work. Amarok is slowly getting back to its past glory and Amarok 2.3.1 is another huge leap.

The Device has 2 reasonable sized screens in a clam shell form factor, a smart design for a device which children are thought to be carrying around in their backpacks. The Kno will also feature HD video. I guess I want to go back to school as soon as this is common teaching material. This would make school more fun for me.

I received an email overnight that has me re-evaluating what my smart phone will be. But the email also raised a number of other questions in my mind that are more diverse and apply to more than just the decision of what smart phone to upgrade to.

Last month we reported on four indie games going open-source that were part of the pay-what-you-want "Humble Indie Bundle" after the developers experienced very favorable returns. The source-code to Aquaria has now been published with the source-code to the three other titles (Lugaru, Gish, and Penumbra Overture) already being available.

I've run across ten new Linux distributions inspired by current news stories. Some, of course, are better than others and a few just have no practical use or purpose whatsoever but still are worth a mention. These ten distributions are in no particular order of my preference or relevance. Maybe you've run across some of them too in your Internet travels.

The ARM platform has historically been superspecialized and hence fragmented - multiple different ARM-based CPU's from multiple different ARM silicon partners all behaved differently enough that one needed to develop different software for each of them. Boot loaders, toolchains, kernels, drivers and middleware are all fragmented today, and of course there's additional fragmentation associated with Android vs mainline on ARM, but Linaro will go a long way towards cleaning this up and making it possible to deliver a consistent platform experience across all of the major ARM hardware providers.

Google has added the newly open-sourced VP8 video codec to the latest developer-channel build of its Chrome browser. The codec is already part of developer builds from Mozilla and Opera, and it was rolled into Chromium, the open source incarnation of Chrome, in late May. But this marks its debut in Chrome itself. Version 6.0.422.0, available in the developer channel here, also includes various bug fixes.

At this year's COSSFEST in Calgary, I (Marcel Gagne) took part in a lively panel discussion titled "The Death of the Desktop", essentially a free-for-all discussion on whether 'the cloud' will kill off our beloved desktop. My fellow panelists included Aaron Seigo, Brad "Renderman" Haines, Adam McDaniel, and Craig McLean. The whole thing was taped and later edited (wonderfully, I might add) to create the video you see below. Warning! A few 'bad words' do occasionally slip in.

It's rather strange, this thing called Linux. We hear of Linux powered devices proliferating the market while the users are completely unaware of what they are using. What a success. An operating system that is so simple people simply are unaware of what they are using. It's an overwhelming success story. Phones, tablets, eReaders, netbooks, DVRs, and so on are everywhere, and Linux powers many of them. On the desktop, things are a little different. Most people use Windows, and fewer but many use Macintosh, and then are those lunatic Linux people. I often wonder why Linux hasn't taken off and I personally believe that much of it is due to a lack of marketing. So, what is this post about? Distributions.

When will Amazon release a Kindle application for Linux? Amazon’s Kindle applications are one of the most popular ways to read ebooks. Oh sure, some people actually own a Kindle reader but quite a lot of people don’t. They simply use the Amazon Kindle application for their particular hardware.

Salix 13.1 has been released! Available in both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures, Salix 13.1 is fully backwards compatible with Slackware 13.1. Salix 13.1 is built on top of a Slackware 13.1 base and offers a streamlined XFCE desktop environment with selected applications following the "one application per task" philosophy. Salix 13.1, can be installed using three different installation modes, "core", "basic" and "full".

This guide explains how to install Alfresco Community 3.3 on Ubuntu Server 10.04 (Lucid Lynx). Alfresco is the Open Source Alternative for Enterprise Content Management (ECM), providing Document Management, Collaboration, Records Management, Knowledge Management, Web Content Management and Imaging.

Yesterday, Stephen Kelly wrote on the dot about the successful KDE PIM sprint. Today, you can read more about him and his role as KJots maintainer in this interview by Giovanni from our Italian KDE community. This continues a trend of recent interviews talking to members of the KDE PIM team - last time we heard from Thomas McGuire of KMail. For our Italian readers, there is also the original interview.

This how-to should show the steps required to record whatever audio is playing on your computer, similar to recording “stereo mix” in windows. This makes recording audio played by any application, including flash videos, possible.

DockBarX 0.39.1 was just released, bringing a new preview system (ported from vanilla dockbar) that has live previews instead of stills. The new DockBarX 0.39.1 also brings support for Avant Window Navigator 0.4.1 which results in something simply amazing. Read on!

Deluge is a feature rich bit torrent client, which is really popular among Linux users. Deluge is cross platform and works in OS X, Unix and Windows platforms as well. Though I would rate KDE's KTorrent over Deluge, Deluge is definitely well integrated into the Ubuntu's Gnome desktop. Deluge recently released the first release candidate of Deluge 1.3 series packed with a lot of new features and bug fixes.