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Keith Bergelt, CEO of the Open Invention Network (OIN), described the circumstances which led the company to recently purchase 22 Microsoft patents, as part of a talk at the first LinuxCon. While the circumstances surrounding that purchase were quite interesting—and indicative of Microsoft's patent strategy—he also described the mission of OIN as a protector of Linux from patent trolls. Because patents are likely to be a threat to Linux for a long time to come, organizations like OIN are needed to allow Linux development to continue with as few patent impediments as possible.

I finally experienced my first "phantom" update notification in Ubuntu 9.04. In previous versions of the system, a little icon on the upper panel would notify me that updates were available. I could either click the icon and open the Update Manager, then do the update. But in this new system (I've been running 9.04 about a week), the icon is gone. At some interval that I don't understand, the Update Manager just opens, minimized. I brought the window up and did the updates.

Yesterday I took part in an interesting event organised by BT called "Accelerating Enterprise adoption of Open Source Software" (disclaimer: filthy lucre was involved.) One topic that elicited much comment was why the public sector has singularly failed to deploy open source. As well as political issues (Tony Blair was and presumably still is manifestly in awe of (Sir) Bill Gates), there's another important issue to do with a fear of failure.

... On that Friday, with no warning, the little netbook failed to boot up. I couldn't even get to the BIOS. For the third time a Sylvania netbook I owned had suffered a premature hardware failure. The netbook had a one year warranty and it was only seven months old so I expected to send it in for repair at no charge.

Arora is a free, cross-platform web browser built on WebKit (the engine that powers Safari and Chrome) that we've mentioned once before, but its latest release includes some interesting new features by default, including built-in support for ad blocking.

Verizon Wireless has signed a deal with Google to co-develop two Android smartphones, says eWEEK. In other Android developments, further rumors about a Motorola Sholes phone heading for Verizon have emerged, an HTC "Dragon" phone using Qualcomm's Snapdragon was tipped, and Google announced improved "AdSense" advertising for smartphones.

Opensourc3 is a magazine dedicated to Unified and Cloud Computing using open source technologies. It is published on a monthly basis. This issue looks at: KaOS Linux - a new open source Hypervisor and virtual server platform, Live Migration, PostgreSQL, Virtualizing VOIP and packet analysis and generation with ScaPY.

A report from the 451 Group's analysts has revealed that the Open Source Initiative has had it's corporate status suspended by the Californian authorities. According to OSI President Michael Tiemann, the organisation has been unable to get "our paperwork to the state in time" and so the authorities have suspended the OSI's corporate status. Tiemann adds he believes this will have a "minimal effect on our mission".

LinuxCertified,Inc. a leading provider of Linux training, will offer weekend Linux system administration bootcamp on October 15th - 16th, 2009 in South Bay (CA). This workshop is designed for busy information technology professionals and is designed to cover the most important Linux administration areas.

When the Astricon conference kicks off Oct. 13 in Glendale, Ariz., I will be checking to see if Asterisk (the open source IP PBX) is ready for mainstream partners and solutions providers. Actually, I think I already know the answer to that question. Here’s why.

ITTIA unveils the revolutionary new ITTIA DB SQL hybrid memory and disk database for application development on embedded systems and devices.

Gentoo Linux celebrates its 10th anniversary, with a special edition LiveDVD. This LiveDVD features a superb list of packages.

Vstone has announced a two-legged humanoid robot that sports an onboard, Intel Atom-based PC. The "Robovie-PC" can walk on joints that offer six degrees of freedom, offers an accelerometer and gyro sensors, includes a 1.3 megapixel webcam, and has a body padded with polyurethane foam, says the company.

At first sight, news that the London Stock Exchange (LSE) is moving from the Microsoft .Net-based TradElect to the GNU/Linux-based MillenniumIT system, is just another win for free software. But the details provide some fascinating insights into the world of very high performance – and very expensive – enterprise systems.

The pending US Supreme Court decision regarding In re Bernard L. Bilski and Rand A. Warsaw v. Kappos, in principle about patents on business methods and software, has lead to briefs being filed by numerous companies and associations. Those in favour of extensive patent rights have already taken a position, without issuing major public statements, at the beginning of August. "Amicus curiae" briefs by those who oppose software patents were due to be filed by the end of September. When filing their briefs, the open source companies and free software associations issued press releases in which they demanded a conclusive course correction in the US patent system.

Everybody's seen redirection in bash commands, that's pretty common, but bash also allows you to define redirections when you define functions. This causes the redirections to be evaluated/executed whenever the function is called. This feature doesn't really give you any new features, just another way to express existing features.

In December, Palm will open the official webOS developer program to support the creation of applications for the Pre and other upcoming smartphones. The company also launched its App Catalog of applications available for download.

Given the popularity of Gmail, it’s not surprising that a score of desktop applets have emerged for notifying users of new messages. I recently set out on a quest to find the best one. Here are the results.

Ken Starks reported on his experiment with running Linux ads on the Kim Kommando radio show in Austin, Texas. Ken sounds a bit discouraged, but he shouldn't be-- it was a success and it proves that advertising Linux works. Let's take a closer look at what happened, and what the goals of any advertising campaign should be.

Another month has passed since the release of KDE 4.3.0, so today the KDE Community announces the immediate availability of KDE 4.3.2, a bugfix, translation and maintenance update for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop. KDE 4.3.2 is a monthly update to KDE 4.3. It ships with a desktop workspace and many cross-platform applications such as administration programs, network tools, educational applications, utilities, multimedia software, games, artwork, development tools and more. KDE's award-winning tools and applications are available in more than 50 languages.