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"The day of the open-source license as tribal flag or corporate monument will have to come to a close," the Open Source Initiative's board says about its new guidelines on granting new licenses and classifying existing ones.

roseman sent us a link to an InformationWeek article that says Mozilla Thunderbird is finding it hard to emulate the success of Mozilla Firefox. The report cites research from the Radicati Group, which says that Thunderbird is unlikely to make significant gains against rival software like Microsoft Outlook. Radicati rates the security of Thunderbird highly and believes its overall feature set compares well with competitors. However, the lack of integrated calendar functionality is named as a major weakness (the Lightning project intends to address this). The Radicati report also notes that Outlook has a wide range of third party add-ons available, which may discourage some users from switching.

Wants replacement for BitKeeper system that houses and manages global programming effort. Development could slow as result.

Car company Volvo, which has been using supercomputers for vehicle crash test simulations for years, has selected IBM to build a powerful, new Linux supercomputer for its safety tests.

The OSI has issued a statement on license proliferation. "OSI's approach on the development and distribution problems involved building as many different bridges as possible between developers and the corporate world. In doing this, we accepted a proliferation of new licenses. This is a problem in that although physical bridges between communities don't interfere with each other, licenses do. Interference between different open-source licenses is now perceived as a sufficiently serious problem that OSI has become as a victim of its own earlier success."

Next Tuesday, non-profit organizations and Open Source experts and advocates in the San Francisco Bay Area will gather together in honor of "Penguin Day" 2005. The event aims to "demystify open source, frankly address the challenges of developing open source tools, and learn about specific promising open source applications," say event supporters.

Move along, nothing to see here. Some Firefox preferences are just too technical for end users. Oh, you're a Linux Journal reader? Come on in.

The government shouldn't regulate software development through patent enforcement, Lawrence Lessig says.

Who says open source can't measure up to commercial software for mission-critical applications? Far from being a mere quick fix or low-cost alternative, open source software is helping real-world companies solve their most pressing IT problems. Perhaps no more dramatic example exists than pioneering social networking site Friendster. When Friendster launched in March 2003, no one imagined that within two years the site would reach 60 million page views per day. Unfortunately, as the site's traffic increased, so did its performance issues. The problem, in essence, was that Friendster had unexpectedly become a phenomenon.

Computer Associates is talking to fellow software vendors including Sun Microsystems and IBM about creating a common commercial open source licence for future projects.

The software vendor will add to the 20 products it now offers for source-code inspection under its Shared Source Initiative.

You may be familiar with Blender 3D, the open source modeling, animation, rendering, and post-production package from the Blender Foundation. If you have used Blender for longer than a few weeks and miss some aspects of the old pre-2.3 user interface, or if you are looking for some interesting features to improve your 3D experience, you should get to know instinctive-blender, a fork created by the small German company instinctive mediaworks.

"The Linux desktop has come a long way," says O'Reilly publishing in its promotional announcement of Linux Desktop Hacks, a new book by Nicholas Petreley and Jono Bacon. "Flocks of would-be users who were put off by its early lack of polish or aesthetic flaws are now revisiting Linux and finding an operating system and applications that give Windows a run for its money," adds O'Reilly.

Linux doesn't stand still, whether it's the kernel or GNU/Linux distributions. If you're a developer or a hobbyist who likes to stay up to date, you can't stand still, either. Upgrading isn't always easy, though. Kevin Farnham recently switched distributions several times; here are some hard-earned lessons from the process.

Accused of incorporating code from PearPC and two other open-source projects, Maui X-Stream has decided to make its Mac emulator open source.

The Array is pleased to announce the second release of Ubuntu!

The Kubuntu team is proud to bring you our first release hot on the heels of Ubuntu's Hoary Hedgehog.

A review of one of the world's biggest tech gatherings.

I have been using Linux since Red Hat 7.x back in 2000. I have tried Lycoris, Debian, Knoppix, Ubuntu, Mandrake, SUSE, and other distributions, but I've always found myself coming back to Red Hat. When Red Hat stopped development of its free operating system, I was disappointed, but I ended up liking the Fedora Core series, including the latest FC3, even better. Why do I like it so much?

Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig has claimed that Microsoft is preparing "an all-out war" on the open source community, specifically Linux. The controversial proclaimer on copyright issues and member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation made his claim at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco.