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The State Services Commission has bowed to the open source community by altering the language in a briefing paper that is designed to guide departments on the legal issues involved in using open source software. The original guide, released in March, raised the hackles of the open source community and Green MP Nandor Tanczos by describing open source software licence terms as "infectious".

Savvy Interop attendees last week walked away from the show in Las Vegas with more than a pocket full of USB flash drives and retractable Ethernet cables — they also took home free software.

The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has licensed free anti-spyware software for all government employees and armed forces personnel for use on personal computer systems.

For those living inside the Debian or Ubuntu worlds, the issue of their relationship is an old topic, but it it will continue to evolve as they learn what works.

An astonishing thing has happened at Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW) Latest News about Sun Microsystems. A company built on high margins from hardware sales is now turning upside down and going soft. The face of this transformation is the freshly minted CEO and former McKinsey consultant Jonathan Schwartz. Originally a numbers guy turned software evangelist, Schwartz is almost certainly committing Sun to a future with a business model centered on software -- open source Latest News about open source software.

More of a King Cobra, really

Comment The next release of IBM's DB2 (for both z series and distributed systems), which is code-named Viperâ, will be generally available in the not too distant future: A mid-summer for distributed systems, according to IBM. It is therefore appropriate to consider some of the new features it will introduce, and its impact on the market.

The GP2X has been bandying around Europe for several months already, and finally it’s about to hit UK shores. Not before time either. Rather predictably for a new pretender to the handheld gaming throne, the GamePark GP2X will play games, movies and music, view photos and read eBooks. But its choice of operating system is relatively exotic.

At LinuxTag on Saturday, a meeting of Kubuntu and KDE contributors was held in order to improve the collaboration of both projects. The aim was to to talk about the common future of both projects. Jonathan Riddell and Mark Shuttleworth from Canonical attended the meeting. Later in his keynote speech to the conference, Mark publicly committed to Kubuntu as an essential product for Canonical and showed his commitment by wearing a KDE t-shirt.

If you don’t think the virus threat to your Mac is dire enough to spend any money protecting against it, ClamXav will get the job done. It’s based on a well-established open source project (clamav), and provides a decent level of protection (thanks in part to daily updates of its virus definitions). It costs nothing to buy or update (though the author does request donations), so ClamXav is about as cheap as it gets.

Leading open source systems and network management vendors Qlusters and Emu Software announced the industry’s first Open Management Consortium (OMC). The Consortium will promote the benefits offered by open source and open standard technologies and will provide a forum for product development collaboration among open source IT management projects.

Bon Echo Alpha 2, the second development milestone of Mozilla Firefox 2 aimed at developers and testers, is now available. Changes include inline spell checking in text boxes, automatic session restore after a crash and changes to the default tab behavior. The Bon Echo Alpha 2 Release Notes have more information.

Recently there has been a fuss over monolithic and micro kernels - specifically the direction of the Linux Kernel development. Free Software is about "freedom of choice", and we should be able to choose to compile the Linux Kernel as either a monolith or a microkernel. To help accelerate this process, could someone please steal Linus' laptop, install l4linux overnight on it and give it back to him?

Software freedom vs. software utility is an ongoing battle, and I've ended up in the middle of it since I started producing training videos. I strongly prefer free software and GNU/Linux over the alternatives, and for the years when my main computer tasks (besides email and Web viewing) were writing, editing, and lightweight photo editing, I happily used nothing but Linux and free software. Now I use a proprietary operating system and proprietary software for some of my work. This galls me, but I feel I have no choice.

Java father

I've said it before (four years ago, to be precise), and I'll say it again. Software is in the ascendant at Sun Microsystems. Last time I said it, the then up-and-coming Jonathan Schwartz had been appointed software executive vice president.

In this week's InfraSpectrum podcast: Peter Coffee examines a plug-compatible alternative to Microsoft Exchange, hosted on Linux and working with standards-based management and collaboration tools, is the proposition offered by PostPath, which emerged on May 9 from stealth mode after two years of development.

Documentation is a necessary evil of software development. While Linux lacks standard Windows tools such as FrameMaker, RoboHelp, and WebWorks Publisher, it's still a viable environment for technical writers. Linux users can take advantage of a number of documentation tools, including both free or open source software (FOSS) and proprietary software. All of them give technical writers the ability to author and publish professional documentation.

Motherboard and chipset maker VIA is again taking some heat over its open source efforts that, according to one open source developer, now "instigate" violations of the GNU General Public License (GPL).