Generally, I don't talk about the FSF (promulgators of the GNU "Free Software" license). The main reason is that I've spent most of my life writing software for a living and these folks are just plain wrong on how collaborative software should be done, in my humble opinion. However, this …

According to an article from MacWorld, Sun has committed some engineering resources to getting OpenOffice running on the Macintosh natively. OpenOffice is a multi-platform office productivity suite that acts as a substitute for Microsoft's Office products. Of particular interest is the rationale provided by Philip Lohmann, project lead at Sun …

So, given that we've now heard about 2 "defections" from the Macintosh to Ubuntu, I wanted to see what the fuss is all about, so that I could comment on things. So, I downloaded (via bittorrent) the latest (6.0.6) version of Ubuntu and gave it a whirl. My …

The State Services Commission in New Zealand has put up a briefing this month (OK, last month, but with the International Date Line, who knows) about Open Source Legal Issues. The policy paper is well thought out, if lacking a bit in depth, but covers such things as the key …

In an interesting move, Apple has decided to give the top 12 contributors to the Webkit open source project brand spanking new MacBook Pro computers and has invited five of them to come to Apple's WWDC as Apple's guest. This according to a posting on Surfin' Safari.

The venerable BBC has launched an open source site for hosting their (soft)wares created under a variety of licenses. Lots of stuff here, including CPAN modules, Apache modules, and their new codec.

An article on InternetNews quotes Andi Gutmans (one of the founders of PHP) as stating that they have no intention of moving their license to the GPL in the wake of a recent dispute over the use of PHP with MySQL. The issue stems from a recent change by the …

After this week's settlement with Microsoft, Sun has come under attack by some in the computing community about their willingness to "sleep with the enemy." Sun's venerable "java guy" has posted a blog entry wherein he gives his take on why the Java world should not fear the $1.6B …

After noticing the new IBM advertisements touting the benefits of open source (check out the IBM Open Source page), I was intrigued to see that it took only days for the ads to generate an article in BBC News. Maybe they were having a slow news day. Perhaps they were …

In the world of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt), it appears that SCO's CEO Darl McBride is planning on being right up there with certain political figures in his tactics. In a letter sent by SCO and later published on the OSAIA (Open Source and Industry Alliance) web site, McBride …

SCO, in its reply to IBM's suit, has basically declared that they believe that the GPL is bunk and that therefore they don't need to follow it, according to an article from net legal site, Groklaw. According to the interpretation by the folks at Groklaw, the SCO folks would like …

In the gathering storm against SCO's attempt to gather licensing revenues from Linux, IBM has upped the ante once again, filing an amended complaint against SCO asking for, among other things, a declaratory judgment that would explicitly prohibit SCO from imposing additional restrictions on software that it had released under …

Thanks to a pointer from SlashDot, I found my way to an article from GTW Associates (a firm that consults on international standards and trade policy) about a relatively obscure, but potentially important decision by the Supreme Court not to hear the appeal in a copyright case. The case deals …

An article from CNet details the efforts of Intellect (an industry group made up of IBM, Microsoft, BAE Systems, Intel and others to get the UK government to steer clear of allowing GPL licenses for government funded projects. It's pretty common for governments (including the UK and the US Federal …

The latest twist in the SCO UNIX case is an allegation (reported in an article from eWeek and made by a source "close to SCO") that SCO used Linux code in its "Linux Kernel Personality" feature without complying with the GPL, the license under which the software was developed). The …

Linux Journal has an article this week on pending open source legislation and the groups lobbying against it. Nobody will be surprised at the finger pointing against Microsoft, but it is good to know which organizations are funded by the company (such as the Initiative for Software Choice), which wants …

The project page on SourceForge claims that they have added Layer 7 (Application Layer) priority queuing and filtering to the Linux networking kernel, allowing for the appropriate prioritization of traffic with non- deterministic ports.

Taking its cue from the Creative Commons folks (dedicated to a strong open source model), the folks at OpSound have created a library of open source sound and music, free for use and modification as long as it is attributed and the eventual software/movie/music is released under the …

A (response)[http://www.catb.org/~esr/hackerlore/sco-vs-ibm.html] to the SCO vs. IBM lawsuit has been posted on the web site of the Open Source Initiative. It's lengthy, but an interesting read.

Thanks to Amanda for pointing me at the following article on FreshMeat that describes perhaps the most significant issue in the free software movement, quality. The barrier to entry being as low as it is (relatively), many free software providers would rather build it themselves than coordinate with other groups …