Free Republic

This story was posted on FR back in 2007, but it's fitting to repeat now, since "Jibby" is in many of your prayers at this time. I'd like to share the story below about an O.S.S. World War Two veteran of the Halyard Mission rescue operation returning to Serbia 60 years later to pay tribute to the Serbian and American veterans who played out one of the great, heroic stories of World War Two that has remained largely hidden all these years. ____________________________________ The above is the back of signed photo given to OSS Radioman Arthur Jibilian by General Mihailovich...

WASHINGTON — Famed chef Julia Child shared a secret with Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg and Chicago White Sox catcher Moe Berg at a time when the Nazis threatened the world. They served in an international spy ring managed by the Office of Strategic Services, an early version of the CIA created in World War II by President Franklin Roosevelt.

One was a historian and assistant to John Kennedy, another was the chef who first introduced French cuisine to American households, and a third was the father of Stewart Copeland, drummer for the band The Police. In their every day lives they had nothing in common but Arthur Schlesinger Jr, Julia Childs and Miles Copeland shared a secret life - serving in an international spy ring at a time when Hitler was threatening the world. Their work and that of thousands of other members of the Office of Strategic Services, an early version of the CIA, will be revealed today...

WASHINGTON - Famed chef Julia Child shared a secret with Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg and Chicago White Sox catcher Moe Berg at a time when the Nazis threatened the world. They served in an international spy ring managed by the Office of Strategic Services, an early version of the CIA created in World War II by President Franklin Roosevelt. The full secret comes out Thursday, all of the names and previously classified files identifying nearly 24,000 spies who formed the first centralized intelligence effort by the United States. The National Archives, which this week released a list of the...

The Fall of Microsoft Office By Anders Bylund (TMF Zahrim) May 27, 2008 On the same day that the state of New York published a report supporting open formats for electronic documents, mighty Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) said that it would support the open-source ODF format in Office 2007. Redmond's own Open Office XML specification may be heading for the great Recycle Bin in the sky, never to come back. What happened? The twin developments are noteworthy to astute investors for multiple rasons. While several European countries, the EU itself, and the state of Massachusetts have distanced themselves from proprietary document...

When I think about what works really well in open source development and technology, the following things stand out: Modular architectures, Programming language agnostic, Feedback-driven development, Built-for-purpose systems, Sysadmins who write code, and Standards-based communication.

The KDE Community is thrilled to announce the immediate availability of KDE 4.0. This significant release marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the beginning of the KDE 4 era.

The inaugural version of OpenDisc has hit the streets! Featuring major updates for FileZilla and OpenOffice, and new versions of Blender, ClamWin, Firefox, Pidgin and WinSCP. Also by popular demand the Tux Paint stamps package makes a return to the disc. As per usual printable disc covers and labels are included, but if you’d like to view them online simply visit the cover art section. Most importantly there are five new programs on OpenDisc 07.10, three of which were added due user suggestion; Dia, GnuCash and the ever-popular VLC are now featured, as is the streamlined Sumatra PDF and TrueCrypt.

Linux users from around the world are filling out the Linux Foundation's desktop survey. But what John Cherry, the foundation's director of global Linux workgroups, wants to know is, "Where are the responses from the North America?"

The part that I find interesting is the “Grandma’s linux is called Mac OS X” bit. Not because it’s likely to be controversial but because I’ve come to the same conclusion over the past few months too. I have the belief that there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all OS. For the most part Windows continues to dominate, although it’s hard to say how much of that is due to the fact that it fits most of the people most of the time and how much of it is down to people assuming that Windows is something that comes with...

Fearing the restrictions it places on their work, the majority of open source software developers do not plan to publish code in the next year under a controversial new license authored by the main governing body for open source and free software, according to a survey released Wednesday. In addition, more than 40% of those surveyed said they won't ever publish their work under Version 3 of the General Public License, which was released earlier this year by the Free Software Foundation. "GPLv3 is controversial because it imposes restrictions on what you can do with programs," said John Andrews, CEO...

In what may be the first action of its kind in the U.S., a lawsuit has been filed to enforce an open-source license. In what may be the first action of its kind in the U.S., the Software Freedom Law Center has filed a lawsuit to enforce an open-source license. The SFLC filed the suit on Wednesday in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York against Monsoon Multimedia Inc., on behalf of the developers of BusyBox, Erik Andersen and Rob Landley. The suit charges Monsoon with using BusyBox under the GNU General Public License version...

Stallman: The fact that Torvalds says "open source" instead of "free software" shows where he is coming from. I wrote the GNU GPL to defend freedom for all users of all versions of a program. I developed version 3 to do that job better and protect against new threats. Torvalds says he rejects this goal; that's probably why he doesn't appreciate GPL version 3. I respect his right to express his views, even though I think they are foolish. However, if you don't want to lose your freedom, you had better not follow him.

AMD will continue producing a closed-source proprietary driver; however, they are opening the source-code to a critical library with accompanying GPU specifications for X.Org developers. To get the ball rolling, AMD is also funding the development of a new open-source R500/600 driver.

Three MythTV Linux distros compared By Nathan Willis on August 28, 2007 (9:00:00 AM) Print Comments My Series 1 TiVo is getting old, so I am planning an escape route based on MythTV, a free software system that turns an old computer into a personal video recorder. This week I tested three MythTV-specific Linux distributions: KnoppMyth, MythDora, and MythBuntu. I found MythDora the best overall fit for my needs -- but there are important distinctions between the three that may lead you to a different decision. My curiosity toward MythTV-specific distros was touched off by MythBuntu's latest release earlier this...

... Lt. Col. Duncan Chaplin Lee was confidential assistant to Gen. Donovan from 1942-46. ... The sad truth, however, is that Lee was just one of many identified Soviet agents in the OSS. Others, as we now know from numerous impeccable sources, included Maurice Halperin, Carl Marzani, Franz Neumann, Helen Tenney, Julius and Bella Joseph and Lee’s Oxford classmate, Donald Niven Wheeler.

Microsoft is spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt among open source users, Linus Torvalds said in an interview published last week. The software giant is falling short with its technology and, because it cannot win against open source on price, it is trying to encourage inertia in the IT industry, the creator of the Linux operating system said. Microsoft has been at the centre of considerable controversy over the last 12 months, mainly ;arising from its statements on open source and its technology partnerships with a range of Linux distributors.Microsoft has claimed that open source software violates 235 of its patents,...

Kevin Rose founded Digg in late 2004. It was the beginning of something phenomenal... to be precise, the Digg phenomenon. Digg was all about the tight-knit community of techies who wanted to get in there, share relevant tech news, vote for it, and talk about it. And what a fabulous idea it was. So fabulous, in fact, that according to an article about Digg, Kevin and co literally had potential investors beating down the doors, offering fantastic quantities of money to them because of their potential. They accepted a couple of million in late 2005 and the rest, as they...

Excerpt - Big UNIX news this morning. Apple has bought out CUPS, the common UNIX printing system. The name may not sound familiar, but it's part of every Mac OS X installation. CUPS implements a cross-platform printing system based on the Internet Printing Protocol and is, according to its web page, the defacto standard printing system for Linux. Until now, CUPS has been distributed by Easy Software Products under the GNU general public license. Although the purchase was announced today, it seems the actual deal went down this past February. In addition to acquiring the CUPS source code ownership, Apple...

Red Hat Inc., a provider of open source platforms, said Tuesday it has taken steps to expand its footprint in the telecommunications market. Those steps include the acquisition of Mobicents technology and new membership to the SCOPE alliance. Mobicents adds a service logic execution environment (SLEE) to Red Hat's technology portfolio and complements J2EE to enable convergence of voice, video and data in next-generation applications, Red Hat said. Mobicents is certified for JSLEE 1.0 compliance. Red Hat said it intends to develop a communications platform that integrates Mobicents with Red Hat middleware offerings. The company said more information about subscription...