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A large part of the software industry has never heard of the science of quality assurance - or if it has, it doesn't believe in it. Thus spake Alan Cox, Wales' most famous Red Hat employee and one of the most influential voices in the IT world. Currently wrapping up his MBA at Swansea University, it's clear that Cox has been spending a lot of time thinking about what the software world can learn from everyone else about quality.

Australia's open source software community appears set to lose one of its most powerful and outspoken champions in the wake of the federal election. Democrat spokesperson for information technology, Senator Brian Greig, today said that it appeared highly unlikely the party would retain its West Australian seat in the Senate.

MontaVista Software has launched an open source project aimed at bringing "hard real-time" performance to standard, native Linux, and has seeded a fledgling "Open Source Real-Time Linux Project" with a reference implementation claimed to improve real-time responsiveness of the 2.6.9rc3 Linux kernel by "orders of magnitude."

Portage hit 100,000 files last week, - a reason to celebrate, finds the new Gentoo Weekly Newsletter. Other news this week include donated desktop computers from Freescale, Inc., Gentoo penguins on the Antarctic Peninsula, and the usual community coverage, bug rankings and a quick introduction on setting up an OpenVPN tunnel to your home LAN. Finally, 'Gentoo in the press' has a remarkable volume of references this week.

Leading chipmaker chosen as partner in Chinese Open Platform Initiative; ST to co-develop hardware/software platform, based on Linux, for use in servers, PCs and mobile terminals

Steve Buer, resident coding hero at Secureworks, sure seems to be having a good time helping his company develop a little Linux-based security device called iSensor. Buer writes the software for the appliance, which sits between the network and the Internet, looks at the traffic, and filters out malicious packets, while at the same time sending alerts back to Secureworks' security operations center. While his boss now calls him "the father of our technology here," Buer didn't even know Linux until after he started working at the company after getting his college degree four years ago.

Do we want, or should we even tolerate a defacto standard GNU/Linux distribution emerging simply because hardware OEM's choose to back one Distribution over others for pre-installation ? Should marketing prowess, mergers, acquisitions, or having loads of cash be the determining factors in what is considered software excellence ?

Mozilla blocks those un-requested and annoying "pop-up" windows. It also has the ability to open new Web pages in a "tabbed" interface, as is common to most Windows-based programs. Rather than opening multiple copies of the browser itself you can instead open multiple Web pages within the single running copy of Mozilla itself.

Joe Pearce's Wyrmkeep Entertainment continues to tirelessly work to revive old adventure games. Wyrmkeep's first re-release, Inherit the Earth, now has a Linux version available for purchase to join the PC and Mac versions released in the past year. Also, a demo of the game is now available for download for Mac and Linux users as well.

Serge Hallyn offered an updated version of his bsdjail patch for LSM, offering "functionality similar to (but more limited than) the vserver patch." Andrew Morton offered a quick review of the code, however sounded unsure the functionality was needed in the core kernel, "I don't recall anyone requesting this feature. Tell me why we should add it to Linux?" He went on to explain, "we need to be able to demonstrate that the new code is sufficiently useful to a sufficiently large number of people as to warrant the cost of maintaining it in the tree for the rest of eternity."

Open source database server company MySQL's next production release of its open source MySQL database server will be sporting a new Windows installer, one partially built with an open source project courtesy of Microsoft.

Last issue, I talked about Novell's plan to roll out Linux on the desktop to 5,000 users and how, according to a news report, the company's target of 2,500 by this month had fallen short - by 1,000 users. I received a note from a reader last week, detailing his experience with Novell, a reseller, SuSE Linux and SuSE's OpenExchange product which might shed some light on Novell's problem in rolling out Linux to its users. Here's what the reader had to say:

The govt is shying away from endorsing the free software movement, though IBM is sponsoring a resource centre for Open Source software along with IIT Bombay and the C-DAC.

AT&T is studying Linux on the desktop as a possible replacment for its 70,000 Windows desktops, but analysts aren't sure that AT&T is all that serious about making the switch.

In a recent conversation with eWeek.com senior editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, we decided we both spent too much time writing about legal matters and not enough time writing about technology. "Why are we writing more about patents now instead of technology? The money's the same, but I'm happier talking to techies than lawyers," Steven said. I agree. Even though some of my best friends are lawyers, I prefer writing about technology to writing about law. But law seems to have a greater effect on technology every year.

A figure from the Web's mid-1990s heyday is hoping to commercialize another grass-roots technology trend: open source...SpikeSource plans to offer a range of services to corporations looking to use open-source software. Services will include support and product certification as well as consulting for corporate IT staff during the application development and installation process, according to the company.

A recent report from Gartner throws some cold water on recent gains Linux has made in desktop PC shipments. The research firms says that many of the Linux-based PCs that are being shipped to emerging markets in Asia and Latin American will end up running pirated versions of Microsoft Windows.

One of the biggest difficulties Linux and open source as a whole faces is standardization. One of the main purposes and selling points of Linux are its openness to endless possibilities and applications. Linux was raised on the principles of adaptability and configurability. How many other operating systems are flexible enough to record television programs on a TiVo, provide internet access through home routers, drive Spirit and Opportunity across the barren Martian terrain, and still be a desktop operating system to boot?

Linux is growing out of Unix's shadow and handling mission-critical tasks on its own. Check out its role at the National Stock Exchange.

The terms ‘free software’ and ‘open source’ are often used interchangeably, but those attending Richard Stallman’s presentation at the Australian Computer Society Victorian branch forum last night were left in no doubt about his view of philosophical difference.