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WASHINGTON (AP) - A leading Israeli software company was forced to abandon plans Thursday to buy a smaller U.S. rival in a $225-million-US deal because of national security objections by the Bush administration. Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. in Ramat Gan, Israel, formally withdrew its proposal near the conclusion of a rare, full-blown investigation by a U.S. review panel over the company's plans to buy a smaller rival. Check Point had been told U.S. officials feared the transaction could endanger some of government's most sensitive computer systems.

This month, SAP's Shai Agassi referred to open-source software as "intellectual property socialism." In January, Bill Gates suggested that free-software developers are communists. A few years earlier, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer called the open-source operating system Linux "a cancer."

What is happening is that the CD purchase FTP ratio is out of control. People pretty much stopped purchasing CDs in quantities they used to and use the FTP mirrors instead. This lack of sales is what is causing the project to turn a small loss for the 2nd year in a row. To fulfill most development goals OpenBSD should be generating about $100K USD. With that amount of money the project can finance 1 large and 4 small hackathons per year. Pay the bills and a part-time developer to mind the shop when Theo isn't around. In an ideal...

If Paul Flessner and his SQL Server team have their way, traditional beta releases may soon be a thing of the past. And they aren't the only Softies who are pushing to overhaul the way Microsoft builds software to more closely emulate the open source process. Consider the beta. Beta testing has been the cornerstone of the software development process for Microsoft and most other commercial software makers for as long as they've been writing software. But if certain powers-that-be in Redmond have their way, betas may soon be a thing of the past for Microsoft, its partners and its...

  New Search Engine "Gulag.com" Coming To USA By Red Square3/14/2006, 6:43 pm A powerful search tool, originally designed to the rigorous specifications of the Chinese government, is now available in the USA . The latest innovations in search technology allow Gulag.com to provide you with search results without even having to type! Just click one button - your search will be returned immediately. Coming soon is the "advanced" mode, where you can actually type in your request! Immediately, your search is refined before even being submitted! No more faulty searches where you have to retype your query! No more...

Google has now begun censoring web results in the USA. Previously they have admitted censoring sites in China. Like the Chinese censorship the sites being cut from the search results are anti-communist. The following letter is from the web site "The Peoples Cube Worldwide" which is a parody-of-Marxism site. Google Purges The People's Cube Worldwide By Red Square 3/10/2006, 10:13 pm Open letter #2 to Google from the People's Cube (posted on Google.com Help Center at 8:30pm on March 10, 2006 Dear comrades at Google: At some point, quite recently, our popular site "The People's Cube" (ThePeoplesCube.com) was purged from...

I often find myself comparing the strife and pathos of the information technology industry to Greek and Shakespearean tragedies. Yet, the current debate on GPL 3.0 has me thinking back to my high school European history class. In the late 15th century, the Renaissance was at its height and Florence was at its center. Under the patronage of the Medici family, "humanist" scholars were fueling an explosion in new works of art, science and philosophy. Though it was also a time of increased vice (drinking, gambling and lipstick), most of these humanists were dedicated Christians who were merely reconciling their...

From our "Linux is for Total Newbies" series, courteousy of Robert Milner for reallylinux.com. Still hesitant to try Linux? I'd like to share a revelation with you. See, for me, Linux adoption always seemed a bit of a battle to get out there on the desktop. No, I'm not talking about getting it installed. The major flavor providers have made stellar strides in set-up, making it a breeze. Take a look for yourself at the powerful and useful features in Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, and SuSe. There are easy to learn graphical interfaces like Gnome, KDE, or XFCE to name a...

Open source gains another ally.

The most popular open-source software is also the most free of bugs, according to the first results of a U.S. government-sponsored effort to help make such software as secure as possible. The so-called LAMP stack of open-source software has a lower bug density--the number of bugs per thousand lines of code--than a baseline of 32 open-source projects analyzed, Coverity, a maker of code analysis tools, announced Monday. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security awarded $1.24 million in funding to Stanford University, Coverity and Symantec to hunt for security bugs in open-source software and to improve Coverity's commercial tool for source...

Key open-source code passes muster 12:37PM Analysis of the source code for key open-source projects has shown fewer than 29 'defects' in every 100,000 lines of code. Analysis of the LAMP stack - the Linux platform, Apache web server, MySQL database and Perl, PHP or Python scripting languages - showed that the commonly used open-source building blocks were well below the average for some 32 open-source projects scrutinised by Coverity. These included the likes of Samba, gcc, Gnome and FreeBSD. The average score for the projects analysed was 43.4 defects per 100,000 lines of code. Coverity undertook the task as...

The authors of a US government-sponsored report claim to have delivered the first reliable guide into judging the safety and reliability of open source software. The report, backed by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has evaluated 31 popular open source packages searching for defects that will cause "hard crashes" - problems that leave users open to hackers or cause downtime. And fortunately for many a young Silicon Valley start-up and entrepreneur, the report, conducted by fault tracking specialist Coverity, has effectively given the Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl/PHP/Python (LAMP) stack a healthy rating. LAMP "showed significantly better software...

Extend Firefox Contest We are happy to announce the winners in our Extend Firefox Contest! Many thanks to everyone who entered and everyone who helped spread the word about the contest. The winners are as follows: Best New Extension Overall: Reveal by Michael Wu Best Upgraded Extension: Web Developer by Chris Pederick Best Use of New Firefox 1.5 Features: Firefox Showcase by Josep del Rio Our three grand prize winners will receive a Alienware Aurora 7500 Firefox Edition PC and a Firefox 1.5 Prize Pack including: T-shirt, cap, and laptop bag. Most Innovative: New: Viamatic Foxpose by Vivek Jishtu Upgraded:...

Hewlett-Packard has announced that it will certify Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4 as the preferred operating system for its new AdvancedTCA Blade Server, which the company debuted last week at the 3GSM World Congress. The new blade server is HP's most recent addition to its Advanced Open Telecom Platform (AOTP) blueprint, a line based on the Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture (ATCA) industry standard created by the PCI Industrial Manufacturer's Group (PICMG). The AOTP is HP's suite of hardware, carrier-grade Linux, and software that supports the ATCA standard. HP's bh5700 server is a shelf-management subsystem with a 14-slot backplane made...

Who could be upset by a scheme that allows free use of software? Well, Gervase Markham has found one Trading Standards officer who is Who could possibly be upset with the Mozilla Foundation for giving away its Firefox browser? One of my roles at the Mozilla Foundation relates to copyright licensing. I'm responsible for making sure that the software we distribute respects the conditions of the free software licences of the underlying code. I'm also the first point of contact for licensing questions. Most of the time, this job involves helping people who want to use our code in their...

FOSS for OS/2: Keeping the flame alive Thursday February 16, 2006 (06:00 PM GMT) By: Bruce Byfield After a decade of neglect and increasingly reluctant support from IBM, the manufacturer, the OS/2 community persists. Where users of GNU/Linux or FreeBSD have turned to free and open source software (FOSS) for political and philosophical freedom and software quality, the surviving OS/2 community has been turning to FOSS as a means of defending members' right to use the operating system of their choice. The result is a small but surprisingly diverse collection of projects that, to a GNU/Linux user, is a mixture...

SugarCRM has become the second open source software company challenging proprietary client/server ISVs to land a technology partnership with Microsoft. The start-up and Microsoft have announced plans to improve interoperability between Windows Servers and SugarCRM's hosted customer relationship management (CRM) suite. SugarCRM additionally plans to release a distribution of its Sugar Suite under Microsoft's Community License, part of Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative. The Shared Source Initiative is Microsoft's program that allows customers to view Windows source code, launched in response to concerns over the security of its software. The SugarCRM partnership follows last year's announcement Microsoft would integrate its Windows...

California lawmakers on Wednesday debated the use of open-source software in the state’s electronic voting systems in hopes it might build public confidence in the nascent technology. Sen. Debra Bowen (D-California) called the hearing, citing successful use of open-source software—programs based on widely published code—by large companies including Amazon, AOL, and IBM. No action was expected to be taken. The hearing was scheduled more in the interest of expanding discussion of open-source alternatives, said a spokesperson for Sen. Bowen. California has already taken steps toward using such software throughout the state. In 2004, the California Performance Review strongly recommended the...

Sun Microsystems' ambitions have grown another size larger. The server and software company launched its servers based on its own UltraSparc T1 "Niagara" chips in December, a major part of a drive to restore its lost luster and financial strength. But alongside the hardware launch came a more quiet software push: an attempt to make the Linux and BSD Unix open-source operating systems a serious option for buyers of Sparc-based computers. To promote the technology combination, Sun is trying to coax an accompanying software business into existence. Sun has had some experience building such software "ecosystems." For example, it's in...

Server virtualization and cost reduction are Red Hat customers' top wants today, says Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens. His team plans to deliver both by delivering commoditized virtualization in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0 (RHEL5), the company's upcoming new Linux distribution release. What close-to-release technologies does Red Hat have in the works? Brian Stevens: We're in the middle of our development cycle for our next major release. When you build a major release, you have the opportunity to write to do more compelling technology solutions. What's driving IT is right now is getting ready for the commoditization of virtualization solutions....