In order to spread the popularity of its single platform proprietary technologies among developers Microsoft has to retain and extend the appeal of technologies such as .NET and the proprietary languages it uses - and this means catching the imagination of developers, and locking them in to Microsoft technologies. This is the attraction of open source to Microsoft.

"Slashdot has an entry about a lawsuit filed this week by parents of a Texas minor whose photograph was used by Virgin Australia in an advertising campaign. The photograph was taken by an adult. He posted it to Flickr under a CC-Attribution license.

At a breakout session for the Future of Music Policy Summit in DC this week, online music distributors complained that licensing music for digital retail is still far too complicated, and blamed this complication for the paucity of online distribution outside of the US market.

Hurray! Finally some sense in the EUropean institutions.

Microsoft has lost its appeal against a record 497m euro (£343m; $690m) fine imposed by the European Commission in a long-running competition dispute.

While Google is leading a charge to create a global privacy standard for how companies protect consumer data, the search giant is recommending that remedies focus on whether a person was actually harmed by having the information exposed.

MUNICH, Germany — With a new licensing model, software maker QNX tries a balancing act between the open source and commercial world.

Part of what Groklaw is doing is making an historical record of the SCO litigation. Since the August 10th ruling by Judge Dale Kimball that found that Novell did not transfer the Unix and UnixWare copyrights to Santa Cruz Operation in the 1995 Asset Purchase Agreement, there has been a flurry of media coverage.