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Doc Searls pans Paul Otellini's CES presentation of Intel's ViiV for the media cartel it's bound to create:

Some of us (myself included) have been concerned about the DRM capabilities reportedly built into ViiV, but in his presentation Otellini made clear that Viiv has been in development with Microsoft, as a new Wintel platform for home entertainment…It's being presented as the Complete Replacement for TV…."A chance for broadcasters and rights-holders to extend their franchise"…This is an Intel-Microsoft story. All about Windows Media, but barely mentioning it….What about non-OEMs? Good luck. This is a juggernaunt.

This is not a hoax (as the previous post on the front page is) Darwine, as the OS X port is called, currently only compiles for the power PC but they are working on an Intel build and hoping that the new Intel macs will bring more interest to the project.

Project site

Open source really is becoming more popular, especially in big business, according to a survey performed by Optaros and InformationWeek magazine. The survey shows that, on average, a company with over $1 Billion in revenue saved around $3.3 Million in 2004 as the result of using open source technologies over proprietary technologies.

A couple of weeks ago, I quoted a reader as saying ""It is frustrating, to say the least, to see Novell gleefully decide that we (others with my experience) all need to embrace an OS that we have no familiarity with and that few of our software vendors support. If Novell were willing to make an initial investment in helping us retrain (for free, or at least at a greatly reduced price), it would make it easier for us to justify staying with Novell products."

Military, weapons, and national defense are certainly not synonymous with open source software, but developers and companies that provide Linux and other open source software for such applications indicate the ideals of open source communities are not contrary to its use in defense.

Rivendell and other Salem Radio Labs projects bring GPLed open-source tools to broadcasters everywhere.

The BSD Certification Group (BSDCG) is a non-profit organization established to create and maintain a global certification standard for system administration on BSD-based operating systems. After a year of work, the group behind the BSD Certification project plans to complete the process for the first certification (BSD Associate) in the first half of this year, with the first exam to be available by the second quarter. We interviewed Dru Lavigne, BSD advocate and creator of the initiative.

O'Reilly has announced the release of “Running Linux, Fifth Edition: The Ultimate Getting-Started, Problem-Solving Linux Guide”. The book is authored by Matthias Kalle Dalheimer and Matt Welsh. According to O'Reilly, “All those newcomers need to be welcomed, supported, informed, and educated.”

Matthias Kalle Dalheimer says, "More and more non-technical people are moving to Linux from Windows, and they need to be well received and shown that while Linux is a new world--a world in which those who are willing to do their part of the thinking will thrive best--it is still a friendly world, with a wealth of tools and applications to help."

Google has announced it has opened up its new instant messaging service, Google Talk, to all other IM networks that utilize the XMPP protocol, which originally was developed for Jabber. This enables Google users to communicate directly with users of Linux IM clients GAIM and Psi, Apple's iChat, Jabber, Gizmo Project, Tiscali, Netease, Chikka, MediaRing, and several others.

Not everything Novell does is designed (or so it seems) to make the choice about moving to SuSE as hard as possible for you. This week I want to mention two major efforts by the company that could, perhaps, make your decision easier. One was actually announced a few months ago (but got very little press attention) while the second surfaced just last week. I'll start with the most recent announcement.

Q&A:Richard Stallman, founder of the FSF, talks about his goals for the GPL and the hopes and fears of free software advocates.

This week, the University of Otago will host the first linux.conf.au Australian Linux conference to be held outside Australia.

The five previous approximately annual conferences have been held in various Australian state capitals since 1999 (there was no conference in calendar year 2000). This year’s event will involve as speakers some of the seminal figures of Linux and wider open source development, including Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of web-related open source programming language PHP, Andrew Tridgell from the Samba project, Linux kernel developer Dave Miller, Damian Conway, developer of Perl, Jon 'Maddog' Hall, executive director of Linux International and Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu and Thawte, often described as the First African in Space (he was a civilian cosmonaut aboard the Russian Soyuz TM-34 mission in 2002).

The government has surpassed the private sector to become the country’s largest employer of freelance IT specialists.

Over one in four IT contractors in the UK now work in the public sector, according a report by contractor services firm Giant Group.

The University of the Western Cape kicks off 2006 with a new release of KEWL.NextGen, the free software e-learning application originally developed under the university's AVOIR project.

For many reasons I think, for the moment, it is better to heap praise upon our real friends than to attempt to root out the abusers. There is just too much noise to signal for even to be possible to convey the proper message.

So when the next Sap (as was so emblematicly expressed by SAP) complains about the short comings of F/OSS (because they failed to get the free labor they so ardently desired) to revive their decaying product line, just grin. I think by the most subtle means possible, in a subliminal sense, the message is being sent to the uncaring public that something is more amiss with these large corporations than their targets of the moment.

Hence, reward those worthy with praise and give scorn to those such as the above only in forums where the audience level of knowledge and interest is sufficient to understand the underlying arguments. For the rest patience, thought and contributions to the new forthcoming GPL 3. The latter, if done right, will then make it more difficult for the abusers to gain mileage with inferior products via false, misleading marketing.

Confused about what DHCP offers and how you can take advantage of it on your Linux system? Here are some tips and pointers.

In the past month, there's been much ado about Xen in the online community, both from developers, columnists and the SearchOpenSource.com audience at large. First Xen was given the green light to become an open source killer app, thanks to the work done by companies like XenSource with its XenOptimizer 3.0 upgrade. Meanwhile, some users and analysts said the technology was unproven and had a ways to go before the killer app label would fit. . Xen, for the unfamiliar, is a virtual machine monitor for x86 that allows a user to run several operating systems at the same time. So why is Xen so important, and why could it be an open source force in 2006 and beyond?

I believe that 2006 will be the year for Linux-powered consumer electronic devices. For the past few weeks I've been enthralled by one early example: the Nokia 770.

The KDE Project released a security advisory today for a heap overflow vulnerability in KJS. Earlier this month, a number of integer overflows affecting KPDF, and consequentially KOffice were found and fixed.

Not everyone is happy with the first draft of the GPL 3 open-source license.