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The Geek Freedom League – a Go Open Source initiative that aims to fight for "PC liberation" in South Africa through open source "conversions" – has drawn up its battleplan for the year. Richard Frank caught up with league manager, Thomas Black.

South Africa's biggest open source tender has jumped its final hurdle, with the State Information Technology Agency taking a decision on the award of the tender. But it may take weeks before the award is officially announced.

Last fall I wrote an article entitled "Critical Shortage of Linux Talent Slowing Adoption". I composed a parody, a spoof about the ignorance of human resource management. I wrote:

Most human resource people believe Linux is an air conditioner company. They get confused between the term Linux and Lennox. So, HR recruiters define their job profiles like this:

Linux programmer needed by enterprise. Skills required:

REFRIGERANT METERING DEVICE CALIBRATION
LEAK TESTING
LIQUID & SUCTION LINE SERVICE VALVES KNOWLEDGE
START-UP
CHARGING FOR TXV SYSTEMS

Five to ten years of relevant training and master plumbers' license required. Will accept equivalent for H1B applicants. Microsoft Certifications a plus.

The article title has become an urban myth and from the comments I have read about it, most people took the title to heart and never read the article. So, let's set the record straight.

On Digg.com

BEAVERTON, Ore., Feb. 16 /PRNewswire/ -- PolyServe today announced Novell has certified the configuration of Novell GroupWise 7 running on PolyServe Matrix Server(TM) V3 shared data clustering software.

An early Linux pioneer is about to be swallowed up by a bigger fish. Cyclades, established in 1991 as a provider of serial communications cards for Linux, was one of the first companies to commercially offer products designated specifically for the Linux platform. Now Cyclades has agreed to be purchased by Avocent Corp.

The Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) this week released a study countering claims by Microsoft that running a Linux-based computing infrastructure has a higher total cost of ownership than operating a Windows environment.

The Free Software Foundation Europe expressed outrage on Thursday at Microsoft's criticism of the European Commission, and of the UK expert appointed to ensure that Microsoft complies with the antitrust ruling.

After a decade of neglect and increasingly reluctant support from IBM, the manufacturer, the OS/2 community persists. Where users of GNU/Linux or FreeBSD have turned to free and open source software (FOSS) for political and philosophical freedom and software quality, the surviving OS/2 community has been turning to FOSS as a means of defending members' right to use the operating system of their choice. The result is a small but surprisingly diverse collection of projects that, to a GNU/Linux user, is a mixture of the familiar and exotic.

I do almost everything in text mode when working with Linux. Some tasks -- such as browsing the Web and reading email -- are harder to do satisfactorily at the console. I use Firefox to browse the Web, but finally I found a good tool to quickly access my mail in text mode.

System and network administrators and packagers alike may find a handy tool in y2pmsh, a shell interface for SUSE Linux's YaST2 package manager.

It is hard to imagine that a legal agreement can change an industry fundamentally. However, it is only a small exaggeration to say that the GNU Project’s General Public Licence (GPL) has reshaped the way that software is developed and sold. Seventeen years ago, the GPL helped launch the free software movement’s attack on proprietary software by using copyright law to make computer programs freely available to the general public.

When you think of Web-based e-mail, images of static text, clunky interfaces, and slow performance may come to mind. Until this week, that was the reality that many of us had to contend with. The release of Scalix 10 promises to radically alter that reality. Brian Proffitt reviews the demo and talks to Scalix founder Julie Farris.

If you want to play Windows games on your Linux desktop, you'll be glad to learn that Transgaming Technologies has enhanced its enabling software. Cedega version 5.1 adds support for three popular Windows games -- Civilization IV, FIFA 06, and Need for Speed -- among other enhancements.

Cedega, formerly called WineX, is a semi-proprietary program that sprang from the Wine project. Wine, in turn, is an open source program that enables some Windows programs to run on Linux. Unlike Wine, which supports general Windows programs, Cedega is designed expressly for running Windows games. In particular, it's meant to enable DirectX and other Windows graphics-heavy programs to run on Linux.

Commercial software giants such as Oracle and IBM are moving deeper into the open source community by snapping up the startups built to provide services around the free software, a trend that means corporate buyers should think carefully about future projects before making deployment decisions, experts say.

G-Tek has reportedly used Linux in a very basic, simple, dual-mode WiFi/quad-band GSM/GPRS phone that can provide Internet access to PCs and PDAs connected via USB or Bluetooth. The PWG500 can also provide "seamless roaming" between WiFi and mobile networks, when used with LongBoard's FMC software (fixed-mobile convergence), the companies say.

Canadian Linux certification body Linux Professional Institute (LPI) expects to certify 4,000 professionals in the use of open source software in Latin America in 2006, LPI's regional director Jos Carlos Gouveia told BNamericas.

Peace, love and information management

Red Hat Magazine, Issue #16

What lies behind Oracle's open source vendor buying spree? That question was hotly debated at San Francisco's Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) after news broke about Oracle's successful and attempted purchases of two open source database vendors -- Sleepycat Software and MySQL AB, respectively -- during that two-day event.

"Oracle stole the buzz at this show," said Douglas Levin, CEO of Waltham, Mass.-based Black Duck Software in an interview at OSBC. "People are trying to understand Oracle's motivations for buying open source software (OSS) companies like Sleepycat and InnoDB and, possibly in the near future, JBoss."

Levin has been working behind the scenes with prospective open source vendor buyers and sellers, because Black Duck specializes in compliance management and due diligence for software asset sales. In this interview, he offers an insiders' view of the levels of meaning behind Oracle's OSS deals.

Designers are turning to the Linux operating system to meet the escalating user-interface, networking, and multimedia requirements of today's consumer-electronics products.