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According to press reports, some 90 Australian companies have been told they will have to pay between 2000 and 5000 Australian dollars if they want to keep using the Linux brand. According to Jon "Maddog" Hall, CEO at Linux International in the US, Linux Australia handles brand rights issues for Australia and sent out these letters. He added that similar letters could be sent out in the US soon by the Linux Mark Institute (LMI), which handles the brand rights for Linux there. Linux Torvalds has held the rights to the brand "Linux" since 1997. He has specified a number of rules for the use of this name.

Progress Software Corp. announced that it has joined the open source community, Eclipse Foundation, and will base future tools on the Eclipse platform.

Linux Australia will organise the country's first Software Freedom Day on September 10, the organisation's president, Jonathan Oxer, said today. The Day is a global initiative in 63 countries to take free and open-source software to the public.

Welcome to our issue number 10 of Fedora Weekly News.

PCHDTV.com's $170 HD-3000 PCI high definition television tuner card supports over-the-air HD broadcasts and even some HD cable, as well as standard US television. You may remember this product from when the company announced it would ignore the now defunct broadcast flag. Politics aside, how well does it perform? Fairly well on standard broadcasts, but I had less success with HDTV programming -- through no fault of the hardware.

Government officials and software specialists are meeting this week to thrash out a formal plan for the use of open-source software in government departments. Free-to-use open-source software is a way for SA to develop its own technology skills rather than rely on imported products, internet billionaire Mark Shuttleworth said last week.

Although their strikes against the tightly stretched drum head are much more graceful and powerful than the strokes of the keyboard, taiko players of North America have battled some of the same issues as open source software developers, including patents and the desire to share their innovations.

The Linux operating system, when combined with available personal productivity software, packaged application software, and development tools, has reached a level of capability that arguably positions it to be an acceptable alternative client operating environment (COE) solution for many users of personal computers. Making a leap from being an acceptable alternative to capturing the role of a mainstream solution is the chasm that Linux must cross today. We see opportunities for Linux to make inroads in the COE market in the following ways...

Linux founder defends his protection of the trademark and insists that sublicensing is a loss-making operation.

The K Desktop Environment was pleased to see its users recently at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo. Users were excited to learn about KDE 4.0, some of the hot new stuff in KDE 3.5, and thousands of Linux users got out of the house for a change!

Welcome to this year's 34th issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The long awaited KNOPPIX 4.0 live DVD was finally released last week - with a large collection of great software, but also with a few nasty bugs. In the meanwhile, the openSUSE project continues its fast-paced beta testing process of SUSE Linux 10.0 with more great software and an easy way to upgrade to the latest version. Our featured project of the week is aLinux - a distribution with amazing eye candy, unparallelled multimedia support, and many bleeding edge software packages. Happy reading!

The global momentum behind open source is now unstoppable and SA could be at the front of this trend, Mark Shuttleworth told journalists on Friday, ahead of the Go Open Source Task Team Conference taking place in Johannesburg today and tomorrow.

Recently, some media have reported on licensing fees that are charged to companies using the Linux brand name, which belongs to Linux creator Linus Torvalds. Those reports originated from Australia, where new licensing terms were announced and a lawyer sent out letters to users of the trademark. Subsequently, open-source activists in various parts of the world raised the question whether one could simultaneously oppose software patents and enforce trademarks.

Last week we looked at the at command, which will run a set of commands once and once only. For more complex regular scheduling, get to know your crontab file.

Profiting from open source software is foremost on Mark Shuttleworth's mind and this time he is looking at how the country can make its mark as a global open source software leader. He is doing this by spearheading a gathering of business, government and technology minds in the hope of building an open source action plan for the country which he will present later this year to South Africa's president Thabo Mbeki.

In the old days, Microsoft Corp. executives scoffed at Linux, the upstart operating system some businesses were beginning to try out. Microsoft’s technology was obviously superior, they reasoned. But as Linux has grown more popular, Microsoft has changed its attitude.

A Redmond executive says he wants to get past the hype and let the chips fall where they will. The OSDL declines comment.

A group of former high-level execs from Red Hat are planning to launch a startup called rPath that will support customized Linux distributions.

This is a mail to the global Ubuntu community, to ask for your help in formulating a national government strategy on Free Software for South Africa. We hope this work will also be used as a model for many countries world wide.

The award-winning, open-source Mambo Content Management System's executives and developers disagree on how to manage the project, so the developers are taking the code and going their own way.