OK, so why have Novell, Xandros, and Linspire all gotten into bed with Microsoft? Is it...
1. They were seduced by Steve Ballmer's charming smile?
2. They've gone over to the dark side of the force?
3. Terror of Microsoft's mighty patent portfolio had them groveling at Microsoft's feet?
When Linspire 6.0 is released next month, it will include the fruits of the recently announced marriage between Linspire and Microsoft. Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony says he has been in talks with Microsoft for about a year and a half before reaching an agreement.
Read more »This is a comprehensive explanation of the different perspectives of the Free Software Foundation and Linus Torvalds on the GPL. It explains that Linus likes the GPL mainly because of its share-and-share-alike principle, and doesn't care about the FSF's vision of software freedom.
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A weakness in multimedia production (or at least the perception of) has long been the Achilles’ heel of Linux. Yes, major Hollywood productions use Linux and there are a smattering of graphics and audio programs, but there has never been a comprehensive and cohesive collection of media creation tools for the average user—until now.
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I was almost sure that there would be no way to synchronize my Windows Mobile Outlook information (contacts, tasks, schedule, etc.) with Ubuntu. But after a bit of tinkering this morning I'm amazed to report that I am able to synchronize with Ubuntu! Not only is this fact amazing standing by itself, it is even more incredible when one considers that I cannot even synchronize this data with Vista
Read more »4Front Technologies is proud to announce the release of the source code to Open Sound System (OSS) v4.0. The software currently runs on Linux, SolarisTM, SCO UnixWareTM and FreeBSD platforms.
Read more »With the Foleo, Palm is clearly hoping to leverage the open-source community as well as third-party developers. The companion's synchronization architecture is open, the company said, and it uses a Linux-based operating system. Web access is via the Opera browser.
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"After talking about it for awhile, last night I disconnected my drive with Vista installed on it and reconnected a 30GB Maxtor drive which I then installed Ubuntu Linux on from the live CD. "
Read more »This article describes some useful tools and techniques for learning to build and hone regexps across a range of UNIX® applications, including:
* Highlighting matches
* Showing only the matches and not the lines
* Calling a wizard
* Studying docs
At its heart, predicting the supply of water is a math problem—an extremely complicated math problem. The USDA's team chose a platform consisting of open-source development tools from Sun Microsystems, Intland Software and Collab_Net.
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In [a] letter released Friday, Microsoft execs Tom Robertson and Jean Paoli stress that customers worldwide deserve choice and flexibility in standard file formats. They also paint Microsoft as taking pains to avoid confrontation over standards.
Read more »Novell is gunning for a chunk of the office market share from Microsoft with the release of its open workgroup suite for small businesses.
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The open source community needs a federated but decentralized system for tracking bugs and patches, according to Mark Shuttleworth. Speaking in a keynote address at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in Sunnyvale this week, the amateur astronaut and Ubuntu founder called for better collaboration among open source developers and companies.
Read more »Even though it's a corporation, Red hat has continually placed being a good member of the open source community over being one of the corporate community. Their dedication to open source is outstanding, and yet they receive very little thanks. As a stronghold and *the* prime of example of corporate GNU/Linux, they are an important domino. We have
Read more »From the very start, directories have served a very useful purpose on the Internet. (One I find useful for example is Free Web Directory). News sites can also be considered directories: they index and categorize news stories! What about categorizing software? In the open source world you get Savannah, SourceForge, Freshmeat; there are still, believe it or not, shareware and freeware directories like FileBuzz, PCWin Download Center and Freeware Downloads (although you need to be careful, as they are not like their free-as-in-freedom counterparts).
About Jonathon's article Anybody Up To Writing Good Directory Software?, it's clear that the topic of software directories is very hot. Most of what you find on Google, however, are not pointing to free and open soruce software -- or worse, they mix the two. Examples of such sites are Freeware Downloads and Shareware Download, which simply don't focus on "free as in freedom", and still can be used as good free software directories.
