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Today a man named Brian Connolly posted an open letter to users of the Mambo content management system, threatening them with civil and criminal action if they continue to use Mambo. He claims that the Mambo project contains proprietary, copyrighted code that belongs to him and is currently in use in his customized Furthermore CMS. Is this the little brother of the SCO debacle, or a legitimate copyright infringement claim?

Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday said that is looking for ways to work more closely with developers of the Open Office open source project, while at the same time, apparently reserving the right to sue them, according to a legal agreement between Microsoft and Open Office's major sponsor, Sun Microsystems Inc., made public this week.

Jonathan Schwartz looks to Wall Street as one of the few industries with the means—money and will—to regularly redefine the computer industry. So Sun's president and chief operating officer is making it a goal to get to know Wall Street a lot better, including a visit to New York next week trying to drum up some attention to this effort. Wall Street & Technology did a quick E-mail question-and-answer with Schwartz in which he, among other things, predicts a growing disillusionment with Linux. Sun has had to battle a cost-cutting mentality that prompted many financial companies in recent years to migrate off Solaris to Linux running on cheaper boxes. "I would say about one customer a month is telling me that the honeymoon is over because for all practical purposes, the Linux market has tipped to a single vendor—Red Hat," says Schwartz. Here's the full exchange:

OSDL said it is working with the nonprofit Free Standards Group on a Linux Standard Base to support software vendors developing applications for the Linux operating system. The San Francisco-based FSG is dedicated to accelerating the use and acceptance of free and open source software by developing and promoting standards.

Martin Taylor recently marked his one-year anniversary as Microsoft Corp.'s chief Linux strategist. Taylor, whose official title is general manager of platform strategy, recently spoke with Computerworld about his first year in that job. This is Part 1 of that interview.

Open source and free software licensing is generally associated with software development, and for good reason. The ideas underlying open source licensing were all developed in the context of software creation. The very name "open source" refers to the opening of the source code in which software is written.

Novell Inc announced a plethora of partner agreements at its BrainShare Europe conference in Barcelona, as it looks to apply its partnership muscle to the Linux products and services it acquired last year.

Some weeks ago, I heard of a new german distribution of Linux especially for older hardware, which is called 'DeLi Linux'. I own an rather old Notebook with a Pentium 90, so I ordered a CD of DeLi for use on my old Notebook. After some days, I hold the CD in my hands.

The last newsletter featured comments from readers on what their favorite Linux desktops are, and why. But if you want some hard numbers (or, as hard as numbers can be on a Web poll), Linuxdesktop.com has an extensive online survey running that shows the preferences of a large group of Linux users.

Jaluna has closed a $12M round of Series A funding, and will use the money in a worldwide marketing and sales effort behind its "platform virtualization" technology, which enables embedded Linux to run alongside other operating environments on single-processor systems. Jaluna's technology targets customer premises equipment (CPEs) such as IP-STBs (Internet protocol set-top boxes).

Shareholders of Mandrakesoft have approved a stock sale to raise as much as $7.3 million, a move that should make it easier for the Paris-based Linux seller to pursue its acquisition strategy.

More than 20 Linux vendors will use the new specs for their products

Businesses don't have to dump Windows to test drive free or low-price applications whose use may improve the bottom line.

Open source may have many benefits over closed systems, but don't count security among them--yet. This article looks at why open source software may currently be less secure than its commercial counterparts.

US Linux firm Gupta Technologies has released an embedded Linux database that it claims will allow easy transition of applications from a Microsoft Windows environment to the Linux platform.

2004 is set to be a breakthrough year for Linux on the desktop, with vendor strategies coming together to make it a potential alternative to Windows. Matthew Aslett assesses its prospects.

Lots of press on one of the biggest Firefox releases to date...

The Gentoo User Survey has been released. This survey is meant to get some feedback from Gentoo Linux users and give us a feel on how Gentoo is being used and what we can do to improve. The survey should take around 10 minutes to complete and will be available through the rest of September. You can register for the survey at our new Survey site at:

A company has written an open letter to the open source community, warning that the use of Mambo OS in any release after the 3rd October 2003 could result in civil litigation and possibly criminal prosecution.

Larry Rosen -- the attorney who has been negotiating with Microsoft on behalf of the OSI for changes to the restrictive patent licensing attached to Sender ID -- was asked recently to explain in a concise manner exactly what it is about the Microsoft licensing for its proposed standard that makes it unacceptable to the open source/free software worlds. Rosen's reply makes interesting reading for all of us.