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With the aim of promoting the free flow of ideas and supporting knowledge sharing in the public domain, Taiwan launched a "Creative Commons" network yesterday, to join 23 other countries already leading the drive in this international movement.

Last week in my Wired Windows column I took Novell to task over a promotion, the Novell Linux Technical Resource Kit. This was a package of goodies intended to showcase Novell?s new Linux offerings.

So, if Mandrakelinux is so user-friendly and powerful, why is it not a household word -- even compared to other Linux flavors? In a word: marketing. There is a widespread, if not universally shared, perception that Mandrakesoft's marketing efforts are far less sophisticated then its technical attributes.

The current Microsoft Royalty-Free Sender ID Patent License Agreement terms are a barrier to any Debian package which wants to implement Sender ID or include Sender ID support.

One of the big reasons enterprise IT users eye Linux hungrily is that it offers a chance to break the ties that bind them to Microsoft. It's bad business to rely on anything, whether it's a truck or an operating system, that can only be repaired by one supplier. Indeed, one of Microsoft's big sales advantages when PCs were just starting to become popular was that it freed companies from hardware vendor lock-in by offering an operating system that would work with PCs and peripherals made by many companies. Now we need to ask how we can keep from getting locked in by Linux vendors. There's simply no getting around the fact that, from the vendor's point of view, customer lock-in is wonderful no matter what product that vendor sells.

Longhorn's delay may be Linux's gain, according to Linux vendors and analysts.

eWEEK Labs tested two trusted operating system products: the National Security Agency's SELinux, which makes Linux into a trusted operating system, and Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Trusted Solaris 8. Both have access controls that are much more fine-grained than those in mainstream operating systems, limiting the damage that can be done by an attacker who takes control of a process running with root privileges by minimizing the permissions of that process.

A draft study released this week by the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) looks at the various policies and legislation being considered by various levels of government around the globe. The 33-page document provides an exhaustive list of various initiatives and their current status. More than 45 nations have had some level of public-policy initiatives or discussion about open source according to the report. However, the report's authors note that, "slightly more than half of the initiatives never went beyond the proposal stage."

I thought I would tell you about how I do my remote backups. The program I use is rdiff-backup, with a perl script to sort out e-mail notification and logfile generation.

Users looking for an easy way to set up a public Wi-Fi hotspot might find help from an open source project called ZoneCD. Offered by a group called Public IP, ZoneCD is a CD-based Linux distribution that can turn any PC into a Wi-Fi access gateway for a public hot spot. The gateway runs off of a PC’s CD player, requiring no installation or hardware configuration, according to the software’s developers.

Longhorn's delay may be Linux's gain, according to Linux vendors and analysts. With Longhorn shorn of most of its most important features, such as WinFS (Windows File System), Linux supporters are hopeful that the Linux desktop can finally make inroads into the hearts and minds of corporate desktop users.

Free and open-source software is making a splash in the world of databases. But is it reliable enough for your critical applications? Builder AU contributor Simon Sharwood investigates.

Last February, a team of patriotic geeks was assembled by Uncle Sam to test out the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE) system for military and others stationed outside the Untied States. The team's conclusions, unfortunately, were that the system was as wide open as a Windows box in terms of vulnerability and totally closed in terms of code, calling the mostly-Accenture software of the system into question.

Linux is evolving as the predominant operating system of the new millennium, and legacy operating systems such as OS/2® are being gradually phased out. This series of articles helps the developers involved in the tedious process of migrating/porting the OS/2 system drivers and applications to Linux. In this last of three installments, the authors focus on how to do timer calls and DLL calls in OS/2 and Linux, with a view to mapping between the two systems.

Day nine of aKademy saw the start of the Users and Administrator's Conference, and the celebration of the international Software Freedom Day. With the end of the developers' section of the summit, the hacking rooms began to thin out, but the loss in numbers was accommodated by (for the most part local) crowds of users filing in to hear from developers and other users and administrators. And for those following the SUSE-Novell developments, a keynote from a Novell employee was not to be missed.

Nine of ten companies developing Linux claim that their systems have never been infected by a virus, while four of five companies assert that their systems haven't ever been down due to hacking.

Governmental bodies have approved at least 90 initiatives involving open-source software, a Washington think tank has found.

Microsoft has filed a report with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) - and it looks like the Redmond giant could be in for a lean year ahead, even going as far as to hint that Linux and other open-source rivals might be to blame.