Dear Minister Roberto Bizzo, on 25 May 2010 the regional government authority of Bolzano decided to spend 2.2 million EUR over the next three years to renew software licenses from Microsoft Ireland, and to buy additional licenses. All this was done without a public call for tender, making it impossible for competing suppliers of similar software to make offers of their own.

Microsoft Wednesday inked another cross-licensing patent agreement, this time with South Korea's LG Electronics, covering the company's Linux-based embedded devices.

This time it's Microsoft's turn to be bashed, but next time it may be an open-source company, or your company. Many big technology companies pay up to patent pirates, and while i4i isn't one of those and Microsoft talks big now, they may well end up paying up. U.S.

"...any computer that runs Vista is under Microsoft's total control. Microsoft can alter the software in any way it wishes, or make the machine inoperable. It can do this to any user, at any time, for any reason."

What do all these licenses do for you? That's the 64 license question. Today I'm pondering if the current open source model is still valid or if it's outdated. Do we need licensing for open source software? Do we need the GPL, LGPL, APL and all the other licenses that plague...er, grace us? If your software is free and open source, why bother with a license at all?

What happens when something patented or copyright from the MS frameworks make their way into other products (probably accidentally but a huge amount of software is based on the same design patterns.) Does Microsoft agree to not sue? Nope.

It seems that some video game companies are beginning to change their business model based on products for another based on services.

"Relating this idea to open source, I can see a time when SugarCRM, JasperSoft, OpenBravo, etc., offer to certify third-party, community add-ons for a fee."

There seem to be a lot of people out there looking to run a custom application
on a Linux-based platform running on a solid-state storage device. From time to
time, we receive questions from customers looking to make their Linux platforms
read-only in order to maximize the longevity of their flash devices. I thought

At a time when graphical DVD rippers and encoders propose to make the backing up of your movies just a click away, a text-based application may actually be the best tool for the job.