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Sun's Java Desktop System (JDS) has faced a lot of flack from the Free Software community. People object to Sun's naming scheme and branding, and have cried out in angst about JDS's complex and unattractive end-user licensing agreement. It seems odd that strident objections are being directed at the very best, most complete, and thoroughly integrated GNU/Linux distro on the market. Upon close inspection, the discrepancy is about the different objectives of individual open source developers and enterprise software vendors. And in the end, the high quality of Sun's new desktop system stands firm as a testament to our shared values for open standards and competitive functionality.

'Red Hat and the open-source community should be ecstatic,' says Matthew Szulik

Open-Xchange Server—the engine behind Novell's SuSE Linux Openexchange Server—is a modular, standards-based communications tool that provides businesses with groupware functions including e-mail, calendar, contacts, tasks and real-time document storage.

RealNetworks has signed up a new Linux partner to distribute its audio and video player, China-based Red Flag Linux, the company announced Wednesday during the LinuxWorld conference in London.

The company unveils SuSE Linux Professional 9.2, which features wireless networking support, at LinuxWorld Expo in London, and says it will deliver its desktop Linux software by the end of the year. Also, HP's head of Linux says advances in security and high-performance computing are pushing Linux into new realms.

Richard Stallman from the FSF, Ray Saunders from the World Scout Bureau and the author discuss the connections between free software and Scouting philosophies.

Email has gained acceptance as a quick, easy way to communicate. Some have even gone as far as to say that the time-honored custom of writing letters and sending them via postal mail (or snail mail, a reference to the lack of speed some perceive from the U.S. Postal Service's delivery times) is a dying one. For those who still need it, however, a new service based on open source software makes it possible to send actual hard copy "snail mail" directly from your Web browser.

There are some changes that are so big that you need a collection of events to happen in order to make the change - no single stimulus is enough. So it has been for me this month with my decision to abandon something that has been a central part of my daily working life for over ten years. I'm talking about Microsoft Office.

The BBC has announced an open-source video compression project which it hopes may one day give Windows Media Player a run for its money. The BBC didn't make a particularly big show of its open-source video compression project at LinuxWorld in London on Wednesday, but if the codec lives up to expectations, it could soon be challenging Windows Media Player.

Popular open source virus scanner Clamav has been hastily updated this morning to remove a 'false positive': the scanner was detecting the GNU Public Licence as a virus. Thousands of Open Source programs, including Clamav itself, include a copy of this licence, and since it is a plain text file it is incapable of containing a virus.

Making open-source applications available for .NET will enable Microsoft to elicit interest from developers, who may otherwise be enticed by the ongoing attention to Java, PHP and Perl (Practical Extraction and Reporting Language), which dominate open-source development today. FlexWiki should also help to soften Microsoft's anti-open-source image, and enable the company to gain deep insights into a key open-source issue: the trade-off between the benefits of greater developer and user-community engagement and the drawbacks of decreased control over intellectual property. Gartner believes these issues are driving Microsoft's open-source efforts.

When AOL opened up some of its ICQ instant messaging APIs last April, there was criticism that the open source move was bogus. But the latest IM code contribution from Jive is no jive, according to Jabber open source developers.

Operating system Linux has a total cost of ownership that is nearly a third cheaper than Windows, according to an independent study. The study, by Research and Markets, claims to provide a more detailed total cost of ownership calculation than previous efforts.

One year after the first Mandrakemove, the second edition - just called "Move" - has been released! With this LiveCD, Linux becomes a viable and affordable option to millions of first-time Linux users: they can use the full system and applications without any installation! The new Move also offers unequaled autodetection and support of hardware, and with the use of a dedicated USB key, it provides advanced users a full Linux system they can take anywhere.

Software patents are bad for both open- and closed-source developers, not to mention for anyone who buys software. Isn't it time we get rid of them once and for all?

The never-ending TCO debate between the software industry’s greatest rivals in history -- Microsoft & Linux -- has got nastier. OSIA claims that Microsoft has its ‘facts’ on TCO comparison all wrong, and the IDC report was secretly funded by the Redmond giant, producing doctored results. The real evidence it claims, is the industry’s first concrete independent survey, which has delivered results strongly in favor of Linux.

Welcome to this year's 39th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Robert Millan reported that GNOME basically works on kfreebsd-gnu. The AGNULA Team has released version 1.2.0 of DeMuDi using the Debian installer and supporting Custom Debian Distributions. Santiago Garcia Mantinan noticed that current Debian CDs don't provide the required files to start the installer from within DOS.

- SUSE LINUX Professional 9.2 comes with latest open source functionality, including 2.6 Linux kernel enhancements, KDE 3.3 and GNOME 2.6 desktop environments

The World Wide Web was conceived as a medium for people to easily share information. With its wide adoption, it was only natural that it would be used for accessing and retrieving data by machine-based processes. In an intent to standardize a common approach to programmatic consumption of Web-based information, the World Wide Web Consortium has been working toward the new generation Web, dubbed the Semantic Web.

Replace Adobe FrameMaker with OpenOffice.org Writer? Most people's first reaction is amused disbelief. "FrameMaker is a hugely capable publishing product," my editor admonished me. "OOo is a marginally competent word processor." However, a functional comparison of several important desktop publishing features in both products shows that the products are more comparable than you might think.