Safaribooks online were availabe in HTML-View for a long time and were accessible with free software.Now the O'Reilly Safari team has decided to stop this and deliver online books in Adobe flash format only for online reading. As expected gnash does not work. This means reading and browsing O'Reilly books online is no more possible with free software.

In the old days, when Microsoft wanted to kill the Open Source Movement, O'Reilly's Open Source Convention was where you found true software revolutionaries. Great coders, they also were idealists who believed software was something you shared. Then a funny thing happened. Open source went mainstream.

At the O'Reilly Open Source Convention today, Software Freedom Law Center director Eben Moglen threw down the gauntlet to O'Reilly founder and CEO Tim O'Reilly. Saying that O'Reilly had spent 10 years making money and building the O'Reilly name, Moglen invited O'Reilly to stop being "frivolous" and to join the conversation about software freedom.

Both Microsoft and Novell can be accused of harming perceptions of “Open Source”. Novell seeks justification by clarifying that it really is a mixed-source company, whereas Microsoft shoves the word “open” everywhere it deems possible.

The freedom of the software we all sometimes use is under attack, in part thanks to companies like ACCESS and Microsoft, which found a partner in Tim O’Reilly and others who take money to change the direction of Open Source (taking it further away from Free/libre software)

It's a radical departure, this news from Microsoft (MSFT) that openness between its products and the rest of the universe is more than a hollow platitude. To take Microsoft at its Word, given this release, is to open an era of an entirely new Microsoft. But is it?

AbiWord has been my favorite open source word processor for a long time, and it's now out in a new version 2.6.5, which adds some excellent features. If you haven't used this application (for Windows or Linux) before, definitely download it, and if you already use it, go for the upgrade.

Hate is a strong word … especially when you’re in love. Consider the situation between Red Hat and Microsoft. During the Red Hat Summit in September, the open source company warned customers and channel partners not to get locked into Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud strategy. Fast forward to the present, and Red Hat and Microsoft are locked in a virtual hug. Here’s the scoop.

Of the formative figures in open source, Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and Eric Raymond loom large. Arguably, however, few have had as much of a disruptive force as Tim O'Reilly, who has helped to create the open-source market and has spent the last six years reshaping it with his seminal "Open Source Paradigm Shift" and other articles.