Free Republic

Novell, Xandros and Linspire have signed well publicized agreements with Microsoft. Rumors on the Web have hinted that we might be next on the list. So we would like to clarify our position. At Mandriva, we believe working in heterogeneous environments is essential to our customers. So, interoperability between the Windows and Linux world is important and must be dealt with, and anything that helps this interoperability is a good thing. We also believe the best way to deal with interoperability is open standards, such as ODF which we support strongly and we are ready to cooperate with everyone on...

The past 21 days have been some of the most intense hacking days that I have ever had and the same goes for my team that worked 12 to 16 hours per day every single day --including weekends-- to implement Silverlight for Linux in record time. We call this effort Moonlight. Needless to say, we believe that Silverlight is a fantastic development platform, and its .NET-based version is incredibly interesting and as Linux/Unix users we wanted to both get access to content produced with it and to use Linux as our developer platform for Silverlight-powered web sites. Am now on...

There's a very interesting paper published by Goldman Sachs and posted by Hewlett Packard, Fear the Penguin [PDF]. You will recall that both companies sent representatives to join Steve Ballmer and Ron Hovsepian on the stage and to speak about how wonderful it all was on the day Microsoft and Novell announced their deal. According to the paper, Linux is going to take over the corporate data center. Here's the first paragraph: Linux-on-Intel appears likely to emerge as the dominant platform in corporate data centers. This paradigm shift should have significant implications for a broad range of enterprise IT vendors....

-- Red Hat Linux has received a new level of security certification, one that should make the software more appealing to some government agencies. Last week IBM Corp. was able to achieve EAL4 Augmented with ALC_FLR.3 certification for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, putting it on a par with Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Trusted Solaris operating system, said Dan Frye, vice president of open systems with IBM.

Free software gives everyone the freedom to run, study, change and redistribute software. It is these freedoms, not the price, that is important about free software. Free software advocates make the distinction between free, as in speech, as opposed to free, as in beer. Though many people would gladly accept a free beer, it is not one of the fundamental principles of democracy. In 1985, Richard Stallman, a computer programmer, released "The GNU Manifesto," in which he proclaimed a golden rule: One must share computer programs. Software vendors required him to agree to license agreements that forbade sharing programs with...

Memorial Day weekend has throughout our history been a time of reflection, remembering our honored service people who have given the ultimate sacrifice for our country and our freedom. In locales around the country, protesters and anti-military organizations that have 364 other days of the year, are not happy with that and also want to use Memorial Day and myriad celebrations across the country to push their "peace" at any price agenda. Instead of "honoring" our service members, active and veterans, by thanks and remembrance, they choose an "in your face" approach of political activism and leafleting. That, sadly was...

My AAR for Operation Simply Shred, Columbia, MO May 26, 2007I left my home at around 6:15 pm on Friday night to stay at the home of FReeper friends, Dogrobber and bluesagewoman in Columbia, MO.  After lots of stop and go rush hour type traffic of the folks headed to the Lake of the Ozarks for the Memorial Day weekend, I made it to their home at around 8:45 or so.  Rita showed me around their lovely home, and we sat up yapping until around 11, and then crashed.The next morning we got up and got ourselves ready to head...

Report: Microsoft says open source violates 235 patents By Stephen Shankland Story last modified Mon May 14 06:16:01 PDT 2007 Microsoft claims that free and open-source software violates 235 of its patents, according to a magazine report published Sunday. In an interview with Fortune, Microsoft top lawyer Brad Smith alleges that the Linux kernel violates 42 Microsoft patents, while its user interface and other design elements infringe on a further 65. OpenOffice.org is accused of infringing 45, along with 83 more in other free and open-source programs, according to Fortune. It is not entirely clear how Microsoft might proceed in...

AMD will soon deliver open graphics drivers, said Henri Richard just a few minutes ago, and the audience at the opening keynote of the Red Hat Summit broke into applause and cheers. Richard, AMD’s executive vice president of sales and marketing, promised: “I’m here to commit to you that it’s going to get done.” He also promised that AMD is “going to be very proactive in changing way we interface with the Linux community.”

Oliver Jones provides an even-handed summary: "I've been a stalwart Solaris x86 user for many years now - I refuse to run Linux on my hardware, when Solaris makes the penguin look decidedly second-rate." For reliability, he says: "I truly can't fault the Sun option: I consider that if Solaris is good enough for the banks, it's good enough for me." But, he also says: "To be honest, Solaris isn't without issues - the number one I see at the moment is the user experience (especially with regard to hardware support). Sun really needs to plough some more development resources...

THE FREE SOFTWARE Foundation has declared a jihad on Microsoft and Novell's licensing deal and has declared that it will wreck it using the latest draft of the GPv3. Peter Brown, executive director of the Free Software Association told Reuters that Open Saucers need to make sure that such deals "don't make a mockery of the goals of free software".

FIRMS WOULD LOVE to have you dump your computer every year, and your accesories, and your MP3 player, and your DVD, and your entire movie collection, and replace it with new ones. The software world is getting closer. I think that "Planned Obsolescence" is sadly here to stay; but there's hope, only one: open source. Microsoft has lately perfected the planned obsolescence game with its decision to make flagship products like Internet Explorer 7 not available for previous OS versions like Windows 2000. Cutting updates and no longer releasing patches for insecure products is not enough.

That Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux operating system, prefers the current version of the General Public License, GPLv2, over the version in development, GPLv3, is no secret. But in a lengthy E-mail response to questions from InformationWeek, he offers a full explanation of what he thinks is superior about GPLv2. Torvalds says he regrets that the authors of GPLv3 have decided to take aim at political opponents. He has little patience for statements about the "evil and immoral" nature of proprietary code or the "TiVo-ization" of Linux (a reference to set-top box producer TiVo producing a device that runs...

Red Hat's Fedora Core 6 Linux distribution has reached another big milestone, racking up two million installed users barely two months after tallying 1 million installed users. With the new threshold crossing, it is unclear whether Fedora 6 is the No. 1 Linux distribution in use today, but internetnews.com has learned that preliminary discussions are underway that could see Novell's OpenSUSE Linux distribution partner with Red Hat's Fedora to drive open statistics about Linux use.

San Francisco (dpa) - A week before the launch of Microsoft's new Vista operating system, its open-source competitor Linux received a giant boost Monday as prominent high-tech companies announced they were forming a consortium to promote the free challenger. The Linux Foundation, formed from two separate support groups, will have the backing of companies like IBM, HP, Intel, Oracle and Novell who aim to boost the free programme by providing promotion, standardisation and legal protection, according to James Zemlin, executive director of the foundation. "It's really a two-horse race now, with computing dominated by two operating-system platforms, Linux and Windows,"...

Around 25% of enterprises will be running mission-critical business application on Linux platforms by 2009. The prediction comes from analyst Saugatuck Technology, as a result of joint research with BusinessWeek Research Services. The researchers questioned over 130 firms and also found that 45% of enterprises will... Article Continues Below ... be using Linux to run critical applications by 2011. At the end of this year, 18% will be relying on Linux for critical applications. The analyst said Linux and other open source software take-up had now reached critical mass in the market place. It said recent open source announcements by...

I spent December seventh, eighth, and ninth in Seattle as Microsoft's guest. Microsoft flew me there from Florida at its expense, put me up in a nice hotel...They didn't quite play the old Beatles song "Love Me Do" in the background, but it was the event's unstated theme. [snip] In any case, there were five participants. And our first formal event, the morning after the introductory supper, was a tour of the Microsoft Home of the Future -- under a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). The young gent from the Inquirer wouldn't sign the NDA, so he didn't take the tour. Since...

Give people 12 months warning (time to work out what they're going to do, talk with the legal dept, etc) then make the kernel load only GPL-tagged modules. I think I'd favour that. It would aid those people who are trying to obtain device specs, and who are persuading organisations to GPL their drivers.

She had many codenames - Diane, Camille, Marie, Philomene - but to the Gestapo she was simply the Limping Lady because of her wooden leg. Gestapo chief Hermann Göring put out Wanted posters offering a reward for the capture of the woman he viewed as the most dangerous spy in war-torn France. But Virginia Hall ignored the Nazi secret police, and, working for Winston Churchill's SOE, the Special Operations Executive, forerunner of MI6, she slipped back and forth between London and France, wreaking havoc behind enemy lines. When he set up the SOE, Churchill said he wanted it "to set...

Shirly Ray Trumps, 84, a retired Army colonel who led commando operations behind German lines in support of the Normandy invasion, died of lymphocytic leukemia Nov. 15 at his home in Annandale. Born along the Bayou Teche in Breaux Bridge, La., in the heart of Louisiana's French-speaking Cajun parishes, he joined the Army in 1940 as a member of the Louisiana National Guard and was commissioned a second lieutenant of infantry in 1942. On a weekend pass to Washington in 1943, he heard that the Army was searching for French-speaking volunteers to train for special missions. He applied for and...