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Alan Cox, one of the leading Linux kernel developers, has told a House of Lords hearing that neither open- nor closed-source developers should be liable for the security of the code they write.

Sterling PCU sells refrigerant systems to the automotive and appliance industry. It names among its customers Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, General Electric, and many others. Sterling had an extensive collection of customer information, but much of the data was stored in disparate locations: email, spreadsheets, and incompatible databases. When Sterling decided it was time to consolidate, its first choice was Salesforce's customer relationship management (CRM) product. However, high costs and restricted access to the company's own data forced a reassessment, and this time, Sterling chose an open source product.

It's been about a year since I wrote a program. I've written snippets of code since then but have mostly focused on managing other developers. This is partly because, as a business owner, my spare time is scarce; I have many tasks to juggle. It's also because programming stopped being fun for me. I have been fascinated with computers and telecom systems since I was a child, but in the past several years, coding has become more of a chore, in large part because the task of actually designing something useful is a small one compared with the much less interesting work that's now required.

There is a fascinating article on Groklaw calledSearching for Openness in Microsoft's OOXML and Finding Contradictions. One of the most relevant comments in the article is"So, they plan to be the only one in the Linux world that can actually interoperate with Microsoft. How do you think they will achieve that? By sharing? On the contrary, they already market themselves as uniquely interoperable, which means they get to interoperate and you don't, unless you are their paying customer." There is also the Novell comment,"Only Novell has Microsoft’s endorsement as its partner to drive Linux-Windows interoperability."

Last month, Toronto-based civic activists at The Citizen Lab released a new open source secure Web browsing tool designed to let people in repressive countries tunnel through government Internet filters. Known as Psiphon, the program allows users with unfiltered Internet access to provide a private, SSL-encrypted Web proxy for use by individuals in firewalled countries.

The new year has brought a new release of the Knoppix live CD. Along with the usual updates to application software, the most noticeable change in version 5.1.1 is the inclusion of the Beryl 3-D desktop with the Emerald theming engine.

The initial version of OVIS -- a software tool developed by Sandia National Laboratories that provides intelligent, real-time monitoring of computational computer clusters -- is now available for free download from the Sandia Web site.

By its own developers' admissions, Linux supports more hardware devices out-of-the-box than any other operating system but that won't stop a slew of new drivers being added in upcoming releases. Two years after his 2005 Kernel Report, Colorado-based Linux developer Jonathan Corbet returned to Australia's linux.conf.au conference in Sydney this week to discuss recent enhancements to the open source operating system.

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a venerable protocol which allows people to type messages at each other across the net. Your editor remembers a fascinating day in 1991, when observers in Moscow used an IRC channel to report on the Soviet coup attempt; it was an early example of the power the net would come to have. In subsequent years, however, your editor has had little time for IRC. Getting LWN together every week requires a strong focus on getting things done, and IRC can be a real productivity killer. Pretending that IRC does not exist has been most helpful in getting the Real Work done.

Linus fans, get your diaries ready. The annual developers' conference of the Debian Project is to be held on 17-23 June in Edinburgh. Debian is one of the largest volunteer-supported Linux distributions, with over 15,000 software packages available for it, which can be used on a total of 14 different computer architectures, ranging from IBM's s390 mainframe and PowerPC through to the ARM processor at the other end. In the middle, of course, is the x86 architecture.

The next issue of the weekly Amarok newsletter is out. This issue covers the fine tuning of the scoring algorithm, new fadeout options, configurable playlist color, as well as new handy tool for editing filters. Traditionally, with tips included.

There is much work to be done to bring the Firefox and Opera communities closer, there’s no need for the trolling and bickering among our fans. We both make fantastic browsers, strive for standards compliance, and have security as our number one goal. Hopefully this interview will show the best of what our communities have to offer. I’d like to personally ask to keep the trolling away – let’s set an example here.

Builder AU, the official media organ for the Australian Linux conference, which is underway in Sydney, has released video clips of Linux creator Linus Torvalds talking about kernel development. But GNU/Linux users, the intended target audience, are finding it difficult to view the same.

So, you got the new iPod that you wanted for Christmas, but you're no fan of iTunes. No problem -- you can cast off your iTunes chains and manage your music entirely with Linux using Amarok. Amarok gives you everything you need to manage your music, from playing to burning music CDs to managing your portable music player.

A while back I was trying to set up kpropd on a Debian system, and came across a problem whereby one of my hosts was identifying itself as host/localhost.localdomain (this was Not Helpful).

For the next interview in the fortnightly People Behind KDE series we meet a developer who has unfinished business with midges, someone who prefers bullets to stars -- tonight's star of People Behind KDE is Daniel Molkentin.

What do NASA, MTV, Tim Berners Lee and Mozilla all have in common? They use the open source Drupal content management system (CMS). The Drupal project celebrates two major milestones this week: the release of Drupal 5.0 and the sixth anniversary of the project. It's a long way away from the project's humble beginning in founder Dries Buytaert's dorm room. Drupal 5 introduces a long list of improvements to the venerable open source CMS, including retooled administration pages, a Web-based installer, more logging reports and performance improvements.

The draft information technology (IT) policy released by Chief Minister V.S. Achuthanandan here on Wednesday proposes to make Kerala a cradle of knowledge workers. It aims to upgrade the productivity, skill and knowledge levels of the citizen. Proposals include establishment of an International Centre for Free Software and Computing for Development, ITES Training Centre (in Kochi) and extension of Internet to all educational institutions and villages by 2010. Around 3,000 broadband-enabled information hubs called Akshaya e-Centres will be set up in difference parts of the State.

SCO, which today released financial results for its Q4, said it burned about $10m in cash in fiscal 2006, which ended in October. About $12.3m of that was consumed funding lawsuits against IBM and Novell, which are contesting SCO's claim to intellectual property rights of Linux. That leaves the struggling company with about $12.6 in cash. (Some of the legal fees came out of an escrow account, explaining why legal fees were higher than over all cash burn.)

Some folks who like to plan ahead are wondering if Linspire is going to host its Desktop Linux Summit this spring in San Diego, as it has for the past four years. It looks like we'll have to wait a bit longer to find out. By many accounts, last year's April confab at the Manchester Grand Hyatt was a big success, with nearly 1,000 participants causing a few standing-room-only crowds at some presentations.

[Last year's event was great, I hope they have another for me to go too. - Scott]