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When I was in college in the early 1980s studying mathematics and computer science, I had the opportunity to correspond with Len Adleman of RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) cryptosystem fame, who sent me a thick envelope by parcel post with some of his results in extending the Diffie-Hellman encryption algorithm (this was in the days before email and URLs dramatically simplified such correspondence).

Jon 'Maddog' Hall, the president of open-source organisation Linux International, told the LinuxWorld Expo in London on Wednesday that open-source voice-over-IP (VoIP) will be bigger than Linux. "I predict that over next three years, VoIP using an open-source solution, such as Asterisk, will generate more business than the entire Linux marketplace today," said Hall.

At aKademy I had the chance to talk to Chris Schlaeger about SUSE, its relationship with the KDE community, his view of the Linux enterprise desktop and the speed of development of several key features in KDE (a Dutch translation can be found at Bart&David).

Novell plans to release in early November a new version of its open-source operating system for desktops.

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.

Novell's Nat Friedman, vice-president of its desktop technology group, said open source vendors work off a modular, flexible development model that allows them to deliver new features to customers more regularly than Microsoft. Novell has also said Microsoft's Longhorn delay will give it more time to push iFolder, which, like WinFS, stores data in a user's real file system and tracks metadata in a separate location.

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.

This years largest Pike event will be the Pike Camp in Essen, Germany from October 13th through the 19th. Users and developers of the Pike Language will be arriving in Essen from all over the world, including Sweden, USA, Latvia, Hungary, Austria, France and Germany for a week of talks, technical workshops and tutorials. Included in the week's events are the 3rd annual Pike Conference, 2nd annual Caudium conference, sTeam developer day and PSYC MODIv: the 5th PSYC modification event.

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.