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LinuxFilter is an Linux news system based on the look and feel of digg.com.

With all the talk and excitement of Web2.0, blogging, and specifically participation & community it is with my own great excitement that I announce that OSDir has moments ago launched a tech blogging network - GrepBlogs.

In this month's mock celebration of technology evil Danny O'Brien gives a lot of us a good thwacking about the head for our eagerness to judge. "the evil award this month will given to an abstract idea: that of being too quick to judge others without knowing the burdens they bow to. The poor (though only in spirit) folk at Google, trapped by their own corporate culture and SEC regulations from being able to speak freely, or look after their own. The poor benighted downloaders of the Google Toolbar, who think that this is all the choice they get. And the poor providers of content, who given the choice between allowing others to improve on their work - even when enacted by companies like Google - and keeping it all to themselves, would rather 'opt out', hoard up their treasures, and forbid anyone else from touching it."

Howard Wen has conducted an interview with Daniel Quinlan of SpamAssassin. In it he explores what keeps Daniel motivated in the face of the unrelenting torrent of spam and new spamming techniques, as well as, what is working - what is not, and what he predicts spammers have up their sleeves next for defeating spam detection.

W. McDonald Buck, retired CTO of World Bank, finishes his four part essay on the subject of why Corporate Desktop Linux is an unrealistic goal in the short term for Linux advocates. "The hard truth is that the benefits that are most important to individual technical people are simply not important to those lacking technical skills. When you couple this with the relatively meager hard dollar cost savings, the prospect of some extra costs of migration, and the large risks of such a move, is it any wonder few corporate customers are making the transition?"

Russell Nelson, newly appointed President of OSI (Open Source Initiative), is proposing the addition of three new terms to the Definition of Open Source. The move comes after drawing fire over the growing number of licenses the OSI approves as meeting the definition and a long acknowledged problem of the proliferation of vanity licenses & incomprehensible legal jibberish.

In this month's mocking toast To Evil! Danny O'Brien finds evil within Sun's Hotspot Java Machine, Sun's CSL (the other license), and the foolhardiness that is the "secret" email filtering techniques of our ugly American Verizon.net in Europe: "... banning email coming from countries outside the USA. Given that most spam comes from American companies, this sounds a bit like fighting stings by locking yourself in a beehive, and smearing yourself with royal jelly. But mostly, it's odd because eventually those foreigners are going to find someone they *can* communicate with. And once they snap out of that crazy bloo-bloo language they all speak, and talk proper English to a journalist, Word Will Get Out."

W. McDonald Buck, retired CTO of World Bank, believes we need to take a more honest and frank look at the Cost Analyses it will take to put Linux on the corporate desktop. In Part I of Corporate Desktop Linux - The Hard Truth he begins with one of the most common misconceptions... that a business can buy a computer without Windows and save money in the transaction.

With KDE 3.4 beta just announced a few days ago spokesman George Staikos has written about the new RSS/RDF/Atom Aggregator included in the new relase, aKregator, in his column KDE: From the Source. "In contrast to a news ticker style of RSS application, you don't need to constantly look at aKregator to see if there is new news. I have found that with news tickers such as the applet in KDE, I was constantly staring at the news feeds as they scrolled by and re-reading the same headlines over and over. With aKregator, I find I never look at old news as headlines that are read are conveniently grayed out and pushed down the list." This is a much better way to track news in KDE than the somewhat outdated news ticker.

In this month's mocking toast To Evil! Danny O'Brien laments the holiday habit of trying to hide one's evilness from Father Christmas, but finds those evil proprietary software people can't help being who they are. '...let's see whose been evil and not so evil down there in the chained world of proprietary software. That sorry place, where slipshod users cannot hide their sin, distracted as they are by demons only the unfree suffer: the draconian wiles of restrictively-licensed media companies, the constant hammer of pop-up ads and malware, and - most dread of all - closed-source software with hard-coded integer limits, running on AIX.'

One of the greatest hurdles for people wishing to 'switch' to FOSS and Linux is finding a good replacement tool for what they are accustomed to using. In Open Source Alternatives to Dreamweaver Templating Mark Stosberg investigates what open source solutions are available to replace Dreamweaver's powerful templating capabilities. Suppose there are a few website-centric people out there reluctant to make the switch?

In the aftermath of our last interview with Tom Lord, regardless of personalities, it became apparent that the idea of decentralizing CVS is a big deal. Many mentioned darcs as an alternative to Arch. Mark Strosberg has interviewed project head-hancho David Roundy about darcs, his "theory of patches", what's next, and on using Haskell for the project.

A lot of Linux distribution reviews are centered around the ease of installation, new applications or versions of included, and generally how the reviewer 'feels' about it. Naturally, this is somewhat flawed by bias. While this is part of a review process wouldn't these reviews be better served with some number comparisons? What are your thoughts on how to more quantitatively benchmark linux distros?

OSDir has begun a weekly discussion topic forum where this week's topic of conversation is Discribe Your Ideal "Open Source" Presentation: "...I think there may be good reason for a few, on topic, open source presentations that advocates around the world could use to do a good & interesting presentation that hits the major points depending on who the audience is. So, if there were going to be such a thing.. what would you include, not include, do, not do, etc etc?"

In this month's toast.. To Evil!, Danny O'Brien's mock celebration of the foibles within the open source world, he lances and skewers Diebold, quite easily too; pops CherryOS's cherry; and lays bare Ubuttnakedness in hedonistic fashion. 'By their fruits ye shall know them, we are told. Time once again to look at last month's open source devilry, select three nominations for Most Evil Conducted This Month, and ask: how about *them* apples?'

While firefox is getting a lot of entirely due attention these days, there is a lot of really interesting extension work happening underneath the hood. One such extension that has a lot of potential is Wikalong examined in Wikalong - Margin Notes for the Web. It essentially is a wiki that sits in your firefox sidebar and changes depending on what site you're looking at. Great for annotating web pages while the Microsoft and SCO pages are naturally great fodder for gaming wikalong too.

In this month's KDE: From the Source, entitled Breaking the Network Barrier George Staikos takes us on a walk-through of KDE's desktop networking protocol handlers in the vein of sftp:// webdav:// and a few really nifty ones I wasn't aware of like info:/ perldoc:/ and tar:/. The entire KDE desktop environment is decked out like this, and as George puts it, "Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X have a long way to go to catch up with the robust, transparent functionality that KDE has provided since version 2.0."

Version control systems are a tool close to any programmer's heart and a lot has been made of advancements in Subversion, but there is another version control system out there that completely redefines the boundaries of how such a system should work. Tom Lord is the author of the Arch Revision Control System. OSDir interviews Tom on the story behind Arch and just how different it is from what you're likely using today.

Gnome 2.8 was released yesterday & Ubuntu Linux 4.1 was shipped with it so we've taken a number of screenshots for you to peruse through & decide if you want to upgrade though we all know you will.

Kompose' is an Expose'-like (OS X) full screen task manager for KDE that has just gone to release 0.4.1 in two months. You really have to see it to understand, but imagine that tiny little box in your taskbar that indicates all our running windows blown up and on the entire desktop. Then add a tiny screenshot for each app.