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The Hebrew and Arabic OpenOffice.org teams have cooperated on local versions of the open-source productivity application, which celebrated its fourth birthday on Wednesday. Similarities between the Arabic and Hebrew languages have enabled groups of Israeli and Arab developers to assist each other in solving common problems developing local versions of OpenOffice.org software.

Metrowerks has set out to drive Linux further into the automotive telematics market by launching what it calls "Automotive Grade Linux," a version of the open source operating system enhanced with non-traditional features to address the specific requirements of automotive telematics. In entering the automotive telematics market, Metrowerks can expect to face stiff competition from Microsoft, which has aggressively pursued that market for several years; but Metrowerks is counting on its close relationship with parent company and automotive telematics chip leader Freescale to help its Linux-based solution succeed.

Consider the options with open source certification.

Gentoo's next release is being prepared, with previews to be expected this week, writes the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter. Other things in motion reported this week are the translation lead role for the Japanese GWN that is being transfered, a particularly rich community and press coverage, international news from Germany and Italy, and a little Q & A game about Gentoo's initscripts and how to deal with them properly.

Security experts disagree over how well the U.S. government and the nation's industries have protected and defended the critical infrastructure of North American networks, but one thing they agree upon is the increased vulnerability inherent in both control systems running Windows and connections with the Internet.

Large European companies benefit the most from using open-source software for servers and on the desktop, while small and midsize companies see very little financial benefit, an analyst firm said Monday.

The SpreadFirefox campaign has hit a "5 million downloads" milestone.

Local government offices in the French capital will be moving to open source software, but they'll be doing it slowly.

For the past year and a half, I've been a co-sponsor of the KDE Quanta+ project helping Eric, Andras and the entire Quanta+ team deliver one of the best web development applications in the world -- Free or otherwise. It has been my pleasure and an honor to be part of bringing Quanta+ to you.

A Darwinian-like post in response of the "Open Source and Post Capitalistic Society" article, that may show how to reach this conclusion while being fairly capitalist.

In a recent LinuxWorld Magazine article, entitled "The Power of Mozilla Firefox and OpenOffice on Windows," I observed some of the causes and practical implications of market share gains being made [by Firefox and OpenOffice.org]. Equally alluring are the strategic implications, which may conjure images of a few heroic Englishmen in pursuit of the Holy Grail--way back in the 1970s.

Last issue, I mentioned that a number of readers were leery of moving to Linux servers because they feared they might lose NetWare's traditional highly granular file and folder permissions matrix. As I also mentioned, Novell assures me that Novell Storage Services would be ported to the SuSE Linux server platform in the upcoming release of Open Enterprise Server. So that's one major hurdle overcome. But there is one other (at least; I'm sure you'll tell me about more as time goes on).

With the growing use of open-source software, businesses may find themselves using someone else's intellectual property without knowing it.

Softmaker has fully released its Microsoft Windows-compatible office suite that runs on the Linux operating system. The German software maker's SoftMaker Office 2004 includes Textmaker for word processing, and Planmaker, a spreadsheet program.

MontaVista Software Inc's plans to boost the real-time capabilities of Linux via a new open source project have been dismissed by both Linux creator Linus Torvalds and fellow embedded operating specialist Wind River Systems Inc.

Open source activists need to get Linux into schools if Windows' pre-eminance on the desktop is ever to be seriously challenged, a panel discussion at LinuxWorld conference in London last week concluded.

A French company that claims to be the world's largest manufacturer of portable DVD players has added a unique capability to its medallion-shaped portable MP3 players. New "Z2" models of Shinco's "Medaillon" (French spelling) line can be used as USB storage devices that boot PCs into embedded Linux.

More than half of all developers are using Eclipse, with the bulk of those users developing Java applications—and the biggest reason why Eclipse is being adopted is because it’s an open-source platform, according to a recent study conducted by BZ Research.

Management guru Clayton Christensen has a paradoxical answer for Microsoft to the challenge posed by open source: Invest in Linux applications for handheld devices.

Wind River Systems Inc's turnaround under chairman and CEO, Ken Klein, looks set to continue thanks to improving market conditions, a new management structure, and its recent conversion to the Linux operating system.