The big news in tech today is of course Intel buying McAfee, in a deal valued at about 7.7 billion dollars. I think this deal is all about mobile devices and mobile computing security. I think Intel has made a huge misstep here and the reason maybe they don't understand open source software.

I have borrowed a headline from an earlier posting by Shane Schick to discuss something I saw this week. McAfee filed a report last month with the Securities and Exchange Commission that made a few statements about risks associated with their use of some Open Source software. These statements received quite a bit of media attention.

LINUX DISTRIBUTOR Linspire has shown what it is costing it to sign a deal with Microsoft over patents.

This morning a press release winged its way from Linspire which said the outfit was "joining the current efforts to improve the ability of OpenOffice.org users to work with the Office Open XML format by increasing the interoperability between ODF and Open XML".

"McAfee warned that license terms governing [Free Software] 'may result in unanticipated obligations regarding our products.' ..."

While showing admirable concern for his own interests, Matt Asay misses an essential point about open source this morning.

"Across classrooms, government departments and public undertakings in Kerala, a quiet but radical shift is taking place. Students, teachers and bureaucrats have thrown proprietary software out of the windows and switched to free software.

Wind River and PrismTech announced a jointly developed "Spectra SDR" software-defined radio (SDR) middleware platform for both military and public sectors, compatible with Wind River's Linux and VxWorks distributions. Meanwhile, Wind River launched a blog feature, starting with President Ken Klein explaining how Wind River is a "firewalled subsidiary" of Intel, committed to independence.

Even though it's not really warranted because security is less of a problem with GNU/Linux but more importantly because we already have free software anti-virus solutions, McAfee is planning on jumping into the GNU/Linux market becuase of the growing number of MIDs running the Moblin Linux OS.

Feudal Times is a world where you become a king, where you rule a small town and where you will make a great empire. Diplomacy, economy, town and army management, are the bases of every empire, how you mix them all is up to you. This is the first browser based game to be realised open source.