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Organizations adopting Linux might not abandon Unix entirely. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, for example, has migrated its e-mail system from Sun hardware and Solaris to HP servers and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. But even though the use of Linux on production servers is growing, the practice isn't yet the norm at the laboratory, said Douglas Hughes, a service engineer at JPL Information Services.

LinkGear is shipping a small form-factor, ultra-low-power network appliance device that comes preinstalled with Linux, and targets WiFi bridging and routing applications. The LinkGear Series 100 (LG100) is powered by an SH-4 (SuperH) processor, draws only two Watts (typical), and costs $200 in quantities of 25+,

Some prominent people have called free software “communist” in an attempt to bring Cold War bugaboos to bear against the movement—a kind of “nuclear option” of FUD. I remember the paranoia of the Cold War personally, and I thought then (and I still do now) that it was “just stupid”.

So rather than react as some have done with a knee-jerk “no it’s not!”, I propose to accept the label and see where that insight takes us. Maybe there is something communist about free software? I think we will see, however, that the idea behind free software is far more radical: no less “communist” than “capitalist”, but no more so, either.

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) announced today that Mapbender, a portal-based suite of software for geodata management using Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) OWS architectures, has met all of the legal and community requirements to become the first official product supported by OSGeo.

"Math hasn't changed since Isaac Newton," declares Scott McNealy. So why, he asks, is California paying some $400 million annually to "update" grade-school textbooks?

That's just one of the practices questioned by the Sun Microsystems chairman. And one of the problems he believes can be solved.

Review: Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 is a strong contender to Windows on corporate clients, with a well-thought-out desktop environment and some innovative features.

Elein showed how to use timestamps to keep an audit trail of all changes in your DB. With this technique, you never actually delete records, you just give them an end date. Multiple copies of a record (again, with timestamps for each one) also allow you to track edits. (This is a pretty standard approach, especially in ‘validated’ environments, or in government-regulated industries.)

At the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Ore., last week, I had the opportunity to sit down for a few minutes with Mozilla Corp.'s Mike Schroepfer to talk about Firefox development, security, updates to JavaScript, and cooperation with Linux vendors and other downstream providers of Firefox.

For most of us, the philosophical debate of "open source versus Windows" is reduced to a simple fact: We have both types of systems, and they have to work together. Rick Cook discusses how to make seemingly incompatible formats get along.

LAS VEGAS -- The Black Hat Briefings wrapped up yesterday, ending two full days of fast-paced, crowded, sometimes hectic presentations, panels, and Turbo Talks. Many Black Hat attendees, both feds and civilians, will now stay on in Las Vegas for three days of DEFCON.

[Joe has some interesting comments about ethics and bottom lines. -- grouch]

It all started innocently enough. Last Thursday, the Free Software Foundation released the second discussion draft of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3. What followed was an interesting and overblown media misunderstanding, though we can hardly say that no one followed the "discussion" very well!

If about a year ago, Microsoft could still afford to look at Firefox with the superiority that its dominant position of Internet Explorer allowed, the things have radically changed nowadays.

Dextrus Prosoft today announced that it has joined the SpikeSource Solution Provider Program to deliver business-ready open source applications to early stage technology firms. Dextrus Prosoft will offer services to tailor Spike™ Ignited Content Management and Spike™ Certified Customer Relationship Management solutions to meet the requirements of companies that want Fortune 500-class infrastructure at a price that will please ‘Series A’ Investors.

Exadel, Inc., provider of business applications software based on open source and Java technologies, announced version 1.0 of Ajax4jsf, an open source project to combine the benefits of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and JSF (JavaServer Faces). Ajax4jsf was sponsored by Exadel on Java.Net, a web-based Java collaboration project.

KDevelop is the premier Free integrated development environment. The project is currently working towards KDevelop 3.4 with a bunch of new features and a major new version KDevelop 4. To find out what's coming up in one of KDE's most important projects KDE Dot News spoke to three of the authors about their current work and future plans.

For Hewlett-Packard, the measures taken to combat software patents in the revised proposal for the third version of the GNU General Public License (GPLv3) go too far.

Foreword -- This article describes a way to build web applications that follow the "Model, View, Controller" (MVC) software architecture popular nowadays among enterprise web application developers, yet are capable of running on a 130MHz ARM processor. The method is based on several popular open source software components.

Blake Ross writes: "In honor of the 200 million milestone, we're pleased to announce The Fox Tales, which tells the stories of other famous underdogs who were challenged, ridiculed and doubted and invites you to contribute to our own underdog story — the Firefox story.

After rave reviews as a desktop OS, Ubuntu Linux is finally attracting the support of developers as a server platform. The expanded sphere of influence for this free operating system is due in part to a renewed effort by developers like Benjamin Mako Hill -- he goes by Mako -- who promote the server side components of the latest Ubuntu release, version 6.06, as a viable alternative to its proprietary counterparts.