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Today's headlines in the Java world herald the arrival of nothing less than a new era in Java ... licensing. The latest announcements from the innovative leaders in both proprietary and open source software license production, have been brought to the general blogging public today via a widely reported teleconference. Sun announced that they will announce yet another license for their source code later, maybe. In the long standing tradition of sweet license names like "scuzzle" or "cuddle", the new license will be pronounced "jewel", and written as JIUL. So what's wrong with the current license, SCSL, cuddly nicknamed scuzzle and a jewel in Sun's crown? Hailed by Sun on its arrival back in 1998 as a blend of the best aspects of the proprietary and Open Source license models, the license failed to gain support, and has been widely debunked as as far from being open source as it gets without explicitely writing a license that violates each and every clause of the OSI definition.

EDS' vice-president of Global Alliances, Robb Rasmussen, this week launched an extraordinary attack on the open source software. At an event in Sydney to spruik the benefits of the so-called EDS Agility Alliance -- a grouping of vendors which have nominated as preferred suppliers of their speciality technologies to the services company -- Rasmussen claimed that Linux had issues with security, scalability and a potential to splinter in the same way as Unix did.

MIT's Media Lab has recommended Brazil install open-source software instead of proprietary software offered by Microsoft on thousands of computers that will be sold to the poor, according to a letter obtained by Reuters on Thursday.

After failed experiments with Slackware, a few years of SUSE, and a brief flirtation with Debian, I've been working and playing on Gentoo. I don't care for endless optimisations, and I'm not especially bothered about the bloat of a few unnecessary extra features, nor do I enjoy waiting days to update KDE -- so why do I like Gentoo? Simple: Portage package management, the hands-off approach to configuration, the excellent documentation, and the unsurpassed community support forum.

With the advent of 64bit CPUs becoming more affordable and widely used, several Linux vendors now offer 64bit versions of their distributions. But among all the amd64, 64bit, and x86_64 platforms, is it worth choosing 64bit over established 32bit distributions? Read the article and join the discussion here.

Asa Dotzler has announced that Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.1 has been cancelled and Mozilla Firefox 1.0.2 and Thunderbird 1.0.2 releases are on the way. Asa explains, "We shipped the security update for Firefox 1.0 three weeks ago with the intention of shipping the Thunderbird and Mozilla Suite upates soon after. Well, just as we were getting ready to push out Thunderbird 1.0.1 and Mozilla 1.7.6 releases we came across a couple more issues that needed fixing in all three of our products."

Linspire Five-0 is so simple even a top managment can use it, according to chief executive Michael Robertson.

Some Irish open-source advocates are lobbying their Parliament members to fight software patents in the European Union.

An improved colour scheme and a tool that reads out text should make KDE Linux desktop more usable for those whose vision is impaired.

Linspire Five-0 boasts nearly 1,200 enhancements; a professional version is due later this year.

Linux kernel developer Harald Welte talks about the challenges of single-handedly tackling companies that violate the GPL.

Has Ireland's close relationship with IT giants such as Microsoft influenced its approach to software patents?

Created a forum for GoblinX's users. GoblinX is a bootable live CD distribution based on Slackware Linux.

His company is now called Digium. It provides Asterisk-based PBXes and telephone hardware, and sponsors the Asterisk open source project. He is competing in a world of office telephone hardware dominated by the big telephone equipment players, such as Nortel, Alcatel and Siemens.

Installing and using the Hauppauge WinTV Radio card to watch television, listen to the radio and more.

Smart handheld devices or personal digital assistants (PDA) extend our access to the information on our desktops, from addresses to telephone numbers. Unfortunately, when it comes to vendor support for synchronizing this information with a *nix operating system, the options are limited. In this article, we'll review the various GPL-based suites available for synchronizing PalmOS-based devices with Linux.

A new Linux version of Adobe Systems' Reader software for viewing Portable Document Format, or PDF, files is available on the company's FTP download site--but it's not the final product,

ZDNet Australia is reporting that Yahoo! plans to make all its features accessible to Mozilla Firefox users. In the future, all new services will be tested for compatibility with both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox before they are launched. The portal giant also plans to make sure all its existing products work with Firefox, though they won't give an exact time scale for this.

KDE (Ireland), the Irish Linux Users' Group and the Irish Free Software Organisation sent a briefing document to all Irish MEPs to explain the issues surrounding Software Patentability & EU Directive COD/2002/0047 as we see them and to impress upon them the importance of voting against this directive in its current form.

An open-source programmer stopped by the CeBit trade show in Hannover, Germany, this week to tell Motorola and 12 other companies he believes they're using Linux in violation of the license that governs the software.