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After reading Electronics Manufacturers Use US Legal System to Thwart Hardware 'Hacks' I was all set to type a fiery response, but Linux Today readers beat me to it. In a nutshell, the tech industry is accelerating its attacks on our rights to do what we want with our own property.

More than 100,000 app developers have reportedly signed the iPhone Development Program License Agreement allowing them write software for the iPhone, however few people outside the inner circle of developers have ever seen the documents thanks to a non-disclosure clause included in the agreement.When NASA released the NASA App for iPhone, The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) seized the opportunity to get a copy from the federal government under the Freedom of Information Act. The EFF scoured the pages and released a fascinating look at the agreement, teasing out some of its finer points for closer inspection.

Mozilla is updating its open source license after more than 10 years of use. On Wednesday, at a new site dedicated to the license overhaul, the Foundation announced that it's now gathering update suggestions from world+dog and that it hopes to release a completed document by October or November. The Mozilla Public License was originally developed at Netscape by current Mozilla head Mitchell Baker, and the Foundation has used version 1.1 with apps like Firefox and Thunderbird for more than a decade. Version 1.1 has also been used with various other projects, including Sun's OpenSolaris and Adobe's Flex.

Building distro-specific packages is not one of the strengths of most developers. The KDE OBS Generator should solve this problem with the help of openSUSE Build Services.

Given the outcry in the open-source community over the coupon deal Novell struck with Microsoft, you can only begin to imagine the mother of all rumpuses that would ensue if SUSE actually ended up in the Redmond bed, but these things have a habit of dying down eventually. What happens if Microsoft doesn't buy Novell, and SUSE gets sold off to somebody else? Where would that leave Microsoft's plans to co-exist with Linux and learn from its customers that want to run an open-source OS as well? And what would happen to the fruits of its 2006 agreement with Novell: the joint research facility, the strides towards interoperability, virtualization compatibility and so on? The truth is, that might all have to be abandoned. No doubt other companies will be running a ruler over Novell, but if Microsoft decides it wants Novell, it will be hard for anyone to stop it.

Based on Fedora, VortexBox is a free, open source (GPL v3), quick-install ISO that turns your unused computer into an easy-to-use music server/jukebox. Once VortexBox has been loaded on an unused PC, it will automatically rip CDs to FLAC and MP3 files, ID3 tag the files , and download the cover art.

The CodePlex Foundation has announced the arrival of several new board members, including Jim Jagielski, the Chief Open Source Officer of SpringSource. Jagielski, who was one of the original cofounders of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), brings a lot of credibility and leadership experience to the CodePlex Foundation. When the CodePlex Foundation was established by Microsoft last year, an interim board of directors was assembled to help get the organization off the ground while permanent board members were being chosen. A number of the interim board members, including Novell's Mono project leader Miguel de Icaza, will be turning their seats over to new representatives. Former Microsoft open source evangelist Sam Ramji, currently VP of strategy at Sonoa, will be remaining on the board, along with Microsoft .NET Framework program manager Davies Boesch.

This year's CeBIT, held each spring since 1986, took place from the 2nd to the 6th of March, 2010 in in Hannover, Germany. CeBIT, an acronym for "Centrum der Büro- und Informationstechnik", which means "Centre of Office and Information technology", is the world's largest trade fair showcasing the latest in information technology (IT) products and solutions from more than 4,150 companies from 68 countries. The trade show is held on the Hannover fairground which features its own railway station, 5.3 million square feet of covered indoor space and consists of 27 halls and pavilions plus a convention centre with 35 function rooms.

The GNOME Developer Kit is a Linux distro based on Foresight Linux. Its new release shows a somewhat reduced collection of software for GNOME developers.

I can make Netflix Watch Instantly work on my Linux media center. Almost. Yes, almost. No, I don't have it working. But I thought that with a little help from the community along with instructions on how I've gotten this far might help bring some support to the topic.

Novell Inc. lied about owning the copyrights for the Unix computer operating system then collaborated with IBM to damage Unix owner The SCO Group, the latter's attorney told a federal court jury Tuesday. In the first day of testimony in a trial to settle a long-running legal dispute between SCO and Novell, SCO went on the attack by calling as its first witness the former CEO and chairman of Novell. Robert Frankenberg testified that despite Novell's claims of ownership, his intent was to sell the copyrights in a 1995 deal that's at the heart of the conflict.

In my last article I looked at performance loopers for Linux. This week I begin a 2-part review of similar applications called arpeggiators. What Is An Arpeggiator? An arpeggio is a musical technique whereby the notes of a chord are played in succession rather than all at once. The order of the chord notes in this succession may follow a strict set of rules or they may be played in purely random sequence. A device that acts upon a chord in this manner is known as an arpeggiator.

A post on Microsoft's Port 25 blog manages to talk about open source platforms without mentioning Linux once: instead it refers to "POSIX-compatible" code. Feeling threatened, are we, perhaps?

Google seems to develop new tools every week defying the stereotypes of the large, slow company, but with each new tool, it gathers more information about us and at some point, we have to consider if the trade-off is worth it.

In this ongoing series on lightweight Linux desktops, Juliet Kemp takes us on a tour of Windowmaker, the popular fast, lightweight window manager based on the look and feel of the NeXTStep interface. How does Windowmaker measure up in this era of fancy special effects GUIs?

Red Hat already focuses on Linux, JBoss middleware and virtualization. But there are multiple signs the open source company will make a business intelligence move soon. And Red Hat’s move could involve either Jaspersoft or EnterpriseDB — or both. Here's why.

Linux is an excellent choice for a server operating system, no matter what the size of business. However, it is still not very easy to administrate. Recently many distributions have launched their own interface to configure these server components, but really failed at delivering an easy-to-use interface to configure it. eBox is trying to fix this particular issue.

Fedora 13 Alpha was released yesterday with a plethora of new features and updated packages for this Red Hat Linux distribution. Aside from the features like Btrfs system rollback support and PolicyKit One support for Qt/KDE applications to excite end-users, each Fedora release always pulls in the very latest Linux graphics code. Fedora was the first distribution shipping with the Nouveau driver, then its KMS driver, and now with Fedora 13 it's the first OS deploying Nouveau's Gallium3D driver (there's benchmarks behind that link). Fedora 13 is also carrying the latest packages for the unreleased X Server 1.8, DisplayPort monitor support for more graphics cards, the latest ATI driver code from the xf86-video-ati DDX to the in-development DRM, and then there is the very latest Intel work too. To get an idea for the direction that the Intel 3D support is heading in this release, we have carried out a few quick OpenGL benchmarks.

Mozilla's high-performance TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which was first introduced in 2008, has lost a lot of its luster as competing browser vendors have stepped up their game to deliver superior performance. Firefox now lags behind Safari, Chrome, and Opera in common JavaScript benchmarks. In an effort to bring Firefox back to the front of the pack, Mozilla is building a new JavaScript engine called JägerMonkey.

Access subsidiary IP Infusion announced a new Linux-ready "stateless tunneling" product that enables the coexistence of IPv4 and IPv6 networks. Based on the IETF's "6rd" (IPv6 rapid deployment) specifications, ZebOS Rapid Deployment forwards IPv6 traffic though existing IPv4 networks, enabling carriers to more easily transition to IPv6, says IP Infusion.