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Mono project founder Miguel de Icaza claims that Microsoft prevented the open source project from holding a meeting at the company's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. Microsoft states on its conference Web site that its 'Birds of a Feather' sessions are proposed and voted on by the community. But the Mono BOF was never listed for voting and therefore received no votes, despite the submission being confirmed, according to De Icaza's blog.

Continuing a push to promote the use of Linux-based products in emerging world markets, IBM on Friday announced an initiative with Red Hat to jointly support third-party developers with technical resources, expertise, and implementation services. IBM announced a similar agreement in March with Novell aimed at supporting product development around Novell's SuSE Linux and IBM platforms. For use within both the Red Hat and Novell efforts, IBM has established 15 Innovation Centers across the world that will be used to provide developers with technical support. Included are centers are in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, China; Bangalore, India; and Moscow. A new center in San Paulo, Brazil is expected by year end , says Todd Chase, program director of IBM Innovation Centers.

One of technology's dirty little not-so-secret secrets is that Microsoft has been using open-source software since the early '90s in its TCP/IP network stack. Now, however, Microsoft has finally confessed to using open-source in a forthcoming product: Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition. The reason why Microsoft uses BSD-licensed TCP/IP for its network stack was the same reason almost everyone does: The BSD TCP/IP works well, and its socket-based API (application programming interface) was already becoming the accepted way for computers to work with each other.

Robert Kaiser writes: "The SeaMonkey Council is pleased to announce its first release, SeaMonkey 1.0 Alpha. Developed from the codebase of the previously successful Mozilla Application Suite, SeaMonkey 1.0 Alpha contains lots of new features, and numerous enhancements and bugfixes compared to the last Mozilla suite versions. Internally, much of the core code is shared with the current Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 browser, but from the outside, it represents the look and feel that long-time Mozilla and Netscape users have learned to love.

In San Francisco at LinuxWorld a few weeks ago, the newly formed Debian Common Core Alliance promised that it would soon deliver its first beta distribution. The group quietly did so late last week.

Overall usage of the open-source browser continues to climb despite several recent security-related hiccups; Camino 1.0 alpha 1 also ships.

Welcome to Security Alerts, an overview of recent Unix and open source security advisories. In this column, we look at problems in PCRE, the Linux kernel, SILC, Frox, MPlayer, pam_ldap, maildrop, lm_sensors, simpleproxy, backup-manager, Adobe Version Cue, phpGroupWare, and webcalendar

Indonesia's Ministry of Research and Technology Thursday said it will implement a Java Desktop System (JDS) on Linux as a national-standard desktop, customed-designed for its own culture. This desktop software will be a major component of the new Indonesia Goes Open Source (IGOS) program that aims to help eliminate the "digital divide in the world's largest archipelago," the ministry and Sun Microsystems said in a joint announcement.

NIKLAS Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the founders of Skype, which distributes software that lets people make free calls from their computers to other Skype users anywhere in the world, don't usually travel to America. Legally, they probably could. But they prefer to avoid that jurisdiction, since they also founded (and subsequently sold) KaZaA, a peer-to-peer software company whose product many people use to share copyrighted songs. So setting foot in America could invite some legal trouble. This does not mean, however, that they cannot appear at conferences in Silicon Valley, where Skype—which uses the same basic idea of KaZaA, but applies it mainly to voice communication—is considered the next big thing.

DCC 3.0 is an LSB 3.0 compliant, Debian 3.1 ("sarge") based core distribution designed to serve as the basis for custom Debian distributions. It is produced by the DCC Alliance, a diverse group of Linux vendors and nonprofits with strong Debian ties that have partnered to assemble a common, standards-based core for Debian-based distributions.

Citing two unnamed sources familiar with the matter, the Post said the talks concern Microsoft acquiring an AOL stake and then combining it with Microsoft's Web unit MSN. Microsoft would pay Time Warner for the AOL stake, leaving the two companies approximately equal partners in the venture, the Post said. A Time Warner spokeswoman declined to comment. Microsoft was not immediately available for comment. Richard Greenfield, an analyst at Fulcrum Global Partners who said he himself was not aware of the talks, said that he thought any such deal could be premature for Time Warner, even if a combination could reduce costs.

From details about beta 2 of IE 7 that Microsoft recently revealed at the Professional Developers Conference, it looks as if IE 7 has the chance to be a Firefox killer. The beta appears to have enough new features that it may stop people from flocking to Firefox. A new Quick Tabs feature, for example, will let you better manage tabs, and gives you a thumbnail view of all of your tabs -- something that Firefox doesn't do. Page Zoom will let you zoom in on text and graphics on Web pages. There's bigger news on the security front. "ActiveX Opt-in," will disable most ActiveX controls by default. You'll have to selective enable those controls you want to work. This is a very big deal and a big surprise. ActiveX is one of the browser's biggest security holes, and one that Microsoft, up until now, has been reluctant to plug. Let's hope this spells the ultimate death knell for ActiveX. (Have fun with this one -ED)

"Open source should be promoted to compete with the other software and I am trying to see if we can have some government departments migrating to use both proprietary and open-source software," Mangena said.

The success of Linux, the free computer operating system created in the early 1990s by Linus Torvalds and developers around the world, has paved the way for a growing open-source ecosystem. "The technology is evolving very rapidly," said Dan Kusnetzky, an analyst with research firm IDC.

South Africa-developed Linux distribution OpenLab, which is used extensively throughout Africa, will announce its next major release later this month. Richard Frank spoke to chief developer AJ Venter to find out what makes the distribution so unique.

Welcome to this year's 37th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community.

The Firemonger project has announced the release of the Firemonger 1.5 Public Beta. The Firemonger project produces a multilingual downloadable CD image of the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird, together with some selected plugins, extensions, themes, utilities and a beginner's guide. Tech-savvy users are encouraged to download this CD image, burn it to disc and distribute it to friends and family.

Codase is a new kind of search service for open source code. Rather than treating code as text, Codase understands programming languages, and treats code as code, the way it's supposed to be. This unique and syntax-aware approach provides the most accurate and detailed search results with fine granularity levels of controls. With Codase, developers can search functions, classes, strings, constants, macros, comments and other programming language constructs.

Cross-platform Competition Challenges .NET Developers to Port ASP.NET Apps to Linux

Proper planning for such migrations is also key, Becknell said. One positive move that Munich's Microsoft-Office-to-OpenOffice migration team made was setting aside time to make sure the entire system worked efficiently. It's better to spend extra time planning than it is to spend extra time fixing mistakes later, she said.