Free Republic

BALTIMORE - In 1942, the Gestapo circulated posters offering a reward for the capture of "the woman with a limp. She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies and we must find and destroy her." The dangerous woman was Virginia Hall, a Baltimore native working in France for British intelligence, and the limp was the result of an artificial leg. Her left leg had been amputated below the knee about a decade earlier after she stumbled and blasted her foot with a shotgun while hunting in Turkey. The injury derailed Hall's dream of becoming a Foreign Service officer because...

People may be passionate about their favorite sports team, but if you really want to get them fired up, ask what Web browser they use. There's the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" crowd who tend to stick with the browser that's included with their operating system -- Microsoft's Internet Explorer on Windows and Apple's Safari on the Mac. There are the "I've just gotta be me" folks who prefer lesser-known browsers, such as Opera from Opera Software. And there are the "live free or die" open-source true believers who champion Mozilla's Firefox above its commercial counterparts. Then there...

The chief information officer of Massachusetts' Information Technology Division (ITD) resigned earlier this week, citing a lack of funding for the state's IT programs. Louis Gutierrez had been a champion of open standards and was a strong supporter of the state's plan to implement the OpenDocument format (ODF) and his resignation could slow the ODF rollout, which is scheduled to go live in January. Gutierrez had been sounding the alarm over the lack of funding since August when the state's legislature failed to approve a bond issue that would provide financing for various IT programs including the move to ODF.

Capping a monthlong investigation, Oakland police arrested the estranged husband of a missing Oakland woman Tuesday on suspicion of murder. Police said they have evidence to suggest that Nina Reiser, 31, who went missing Sept. 3, is dead. Her body has not been found. "All avenues led us to Mr. Reiser being responsible for the death and disappearance of Ms. Nina Reiser," said homicide Lt. Ersie Joyner.

When Bill Clinton made his speech to the Labour Party conference, he bamboozled a few by finishing with the word "Ubuntu".

In a surprise move, Linspire is now offering its CNR ("Click 'N Run") software service at no charge to its Linspire and Freespire Linux distribution customers. In addition, the company will soon be open-sourcing the CNR Client. CNR, previously a fee-based service offered at annual subscription rates of $20 for basic and $50 for premium ("Gold") access to new programs, had been the San Diego-based company main source of income. Now, however, according to CEO Kevin Carmony, Linspire is doing well enough from selling its higher-end products and services that it can afford to offer its basic CNR service free...

On August 4th, we found out that Lenovo Group, the company that has taken over IBM's Personal Computing Division, had made a deal with Novell Inc. to preload SLED 10 (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) on its ThinkPad T60p mobile workstation. For the first time, a major OEM (original equipment manufacturer) has committed to preloading a Linux desktop.

Normally, we expect new Linux desktop users to come from the ranks of disgruntled Windows users. After all, they're the ones who have to deal with high-prices and endless security problems. Now, it seems that some Mac gurus are also making the switch to Linux.

Picasa is a photo organizing and editing tool from Google that does most of what most people need to do with their digital pictures. Now Picasa, previously a Windows-only program, has binaries available for most popular GNU/Linux distributions. The Linux version of Picasa is still a beta release, but it's ready to handle photo storage, organizing, and light photo editing on your Linux computer. Even if you don't want to use Picasa, Google's creation of the Linux version may help make your Linux computer more versatile. The Picasa Linux port is being made with Wine, and in the process more...

IBM, Red Hat, and Novell Named in Suit that Goes Down in Flames Daniel Wallace's second anti-GPL suit accusing IBM, Red Hat and Novell of predatory price-fixing and restraint of trade has gone down in flames like his first against the Free Software Foundation, which wrote the license. The second decision came from a different judge in the Southern District of Indiana and, like the first judge and the FSF complaint, he found that Wallace didn't properly state a claim. He said he accepted the allegations as true but that Wallace didn't allege anticompetitive effects in an identifiable market by...

TORONTO — The recent LinuxWorld trade show in Toronto was dull, but exhibitors liked it that way. Excitable younger Linux evangelists had given way to the more sober executives and IT managers. That plays into the hands of Andreas Typaldos, chief executive officer of Xandros Inc., just fine. For him, it's an opportunity. IDC forecasts that the market for new and redeployed PCs running Linux will grow to $10-billion (U.S.) and 17 million units by 2008, with an installed base of more than 42.6 million units. Mr. Typaldos is hoping to carve a niche in this growing market, offering Xandros's...

For years scientists trying to visualize the concept of gravitational waves churned by the collision of black holes have relied largely on artists' conceptions. Now, at long last, they have Einstein's conception. According to Einstein, when two massive black holes merge, all of space jiggles like a bowl of Jell-O as gravitational waves race out from the collision at light speed. This is a mind-boggling notion, to be sure. NASA scientists have reached a breakthrough in computer modeling that allows them to simulate what gravitational waves from merging black holes look like. The three-dimensional simulations are a manifestation of Einstein's...

Oracle is studying whether to launch its own version of the Linux operating system and has looked at buying one of the two companies currently dominating the Linux world, according to Larry Ellison, the software company’s chief executive officer. Such a move would redraw the software landscape and open a new front in Oracle’s long rivalry with US rival Microsoft. In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Ellison said that Oracle wanted to sell a full “stack” of software that, like Microsoft, included both operating system and applications. “I’d like to have a complete stack,” he said. “We’re missing...

Last November I described the Free Software's Surprising Affinity with Catholic Doctrine. Since then, several important things happened, from feedback by Stallman and other Free SW users to the birth, or acceleration, of some projects specifically based on the concept that Christians have even more reasons than others to adopt Free Software.

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...

Is Dell is on its way to becoming the first tier-one PC vendor to offer a mainstream business Linux desktop to US customers? It's starting to look that way. In the recent past, Dell has toyed with shipping a Linux-powered PC to the US market. But, when push came to shove, the results -- a Dimension E510n PC shipped with an empty hard drive, a copy of the obscure, open-source FreeDOS operating system and no support if you did install Linux -- were less then impressive. It's a different story for so-called workstations priced nearly as cheaply as desktops. Dell...

In an exclusive interview on Friday, infamous hacker Kevin Mitnick told Tectonic that, given the choice between finding security vulnerabilities in closed and open source, he'd prefer to attack an open source environment. “Open source would be easier [to hack],” admits ex-hacker turned security consultant Mitnick. “It's less work.” Mitnick says that open source software is easier to analyse for security holes, since you can see the code. Proprietary software, on the other hand, requires either reverse engineering, getting your hands on illicit copies of the source code, or using a technique called “fuzzing”. Fuzzing means putting fake data –...

GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Discussion Draft 1 of Version 3, 16 Jan 2006 THIS IS A DRAFT, NOT A PUBLISHED VERSION OF THE GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE. Copyright (C) 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc. 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed. Preamble The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software--to make...

1.i am not a MS hater, i just wanted something without all those virus problems. i do have a theory that the virus programs are all writen by linux users.(smiles) 2.i have tried most of the top 50 distros at distrowatch and hated most of them. i came close to keeping desktopBSD but it pissed me off too. in the end most distros just don't work after you install them. they either come broken or just plain lack the programs for the things i need installed. then came pclinuxos OMG!!!!!! wow!!! it really works. samba hooked up to my...

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."