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Linux is no threat to Microsoft and any claims to the contrary are simply a misconception created by sensationalism and media hype, Microsoft Australia's platform strategy manager Paul Roworth said this week.

Open Source Development Labs, a Beaverton, Ore.-based consortium devoted to improving Linux, has hired an attorney to handle intellectual-property matters and has opened a branch office in Beijing, the group said this week.

If you look around the pews in your church next Sunday morning, you may see a few GNUs in the pews. They are software developers, system administrators, and church leaders. They believe in God. They believe in Jesus. And they believe in free and open source software.

California lawmakers and administrators got an earful on open-source software Friday: A state government panel considered proposals that would boost government use of Linux and other technologies.

California is trying to make Microsoft pay--again.

Two U.S. Department of Defense installations last week received 256-node Linux clusters from Linux Networx for work in battlefield simulations.

For the last 20 years, Unix has been the platform of choice for mission-critical applications. The OS has proven itself in telecommunications, banking, databases, and data warehousing, among others. But the recent emergence of Linux has prompted some press and industry analysts to predict the decline of Unix. According to IDC, Linux had a 16 percent market share in server OS shipments in 2003 and the number will rise to 27 percent in 2007.

In October 2003, Randy Lastinger, director of network operations for National Background Data, made himself so valuable to the company that it had to quit using Linux. That's right. His bosses hired Lastinger, a seasoned open source veteran, to rescue them from the typical security woes associated with Microsoft products. They wanted out of the closed source environment. Lastinger fixed them up -- but then the company realized that if Lastinger went away there was no one there who could do anything with the Linux configuration.

A recent disagreement on the linux-usb-devel mailing list ultimately led to the removal of the Philips webcam driver known as 'pwc'. The driver contains two modules, an open source module that has long been part of the mainline Linux kernel, and a closed source module which ships separately. Craig Rogers explained on the lkml that the closed source module ships in object format and "provides decompression services for proprietary codecs that are used for higher-resolution modes in some Web cameras based on this chip family." A hook in the open-source module allows the compression module to register with the kernel.

Wednesday at aKademy provided KDE hackers with their first day without a special focus. The KDE PIM (Personal Information Management) developers had a discussion session, I led a Quality Team session on media and promotion work, and the usability playing ground continued; otherwise, developers roamed around chatting, hacking, partying and sleeping (a little). And if that didn't satisfy the KDE developer, he could always take some time out for one of three consecutive dinners or celebrate his exam results.

XPde is a Linux desktop that looks so frighteningly close to Windows XP I didn't recognize it as other than XP itself. From the XPde website: "It's a complete desktop environment for Linux on x86. It tries to make easier for Windows XP users to use a Linux box. Nothing more, no clipboard compatibility between Gtk and Qt applications, no emulation of Windows applications, no unification on the widgets of X applications, just a desktop environment." Well, you just have to see it to believe it. Here come the screenshots.

Novell Asia has urged the Philippine government to take a closer look at Linux, citing that adopting the open source operating system would be crucial to safeguarding the security and integrity of its computer networks.

ActivMedia has increased the computing power in its Debian Linux powered surveillance robot between 4 and 6 times, while raising power consumption marginally, according to SBC (single board computer) supplier VersaLogic, which will demonstrate the $30,000 "PatrolBot" at the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston next month.

Developers of KDE have announced plans to simplify searching for files on the open-source Linux desktop environment by adding a Google-style search feature.

Peripheral maker LaCie released on Thursday a mobile hard drive loaded with MandrakeSoft's version of the Linux operating system.

There are a number of promising technical papers under consideration by the Internet Engineering Task Force which deal with the ever-growing problem of spam. Most of them seek to attack the spam problem obliquely rather than head on. These techniques avoid looking at message content in an attempt to determine if an email is spam or not. Instead, they focus on authenticating the sender. Since most spam comes from forged email addresses, eliminating such forgery would be a big step up in the fight against spam. In this article we'll look at the evolution of the current Sender ID proposals, and we'll also examine some of the non-technical barriers which might prevent any of the proposed solutions from ever working.

Telstra's recent cut-price desktop software deal with Microsoft has rapidly made its way into the marketing arsenal of at least one enterprising open source vendor.