Vietnam embracing open-source products, Oct 30, 2003

They are promoting a plan that would require all state-owned companies and government ministries to use open source by 2005. And they would require all computers assembled in Vietnam to be sold with open-source products installed on them.

The prime minister is expected to take up their proposal this fall.

To get young people comfortable with the free software, the government plans to distribute computers to 5,000 schools nationwide next year -- all of them equipped with open source.

2.4.23-pre9 has been released today.
See changelog for full details.

Files added: 201
Files changed: 1499
Files removed: 13

Yet the most surprising part of IBM's response is the revelation that Novell can waive all alleged violations of the UNIX licenses. For reasons I don't understand, this "silver bullet" defense has not been widely reported in the press. In a very unusual provision, Novell, as part of its sale of the UNIX licenses to SCO, retained the right to require SCO to "amend, supplement, modify or waive any right" under the license agreements (and if SCO did not comply, Novell could exercise those rights itself on SCO's behalf). At IBM's request, Novell employed this right and demanded that SCO waive IBM's purported violations. When SCO did not do so, Novell exercised its right to waive the violations on SCO's behalf. Basically, this defense destroys the core of the SCO case: IBM's violation of its UNIX license with SCO.

One of the organisations involved in the UK government's open source trials is Newham Borough Council, which was already evaluating open source software when the trials were announced, and earlier this year there was a considerable amount of publicity about the possibility of Newham switching its desktops to open source. Microsoft certainly wouldn't welcome any local government losses to open source, but the possibility of losing the desktop is particularly worrying for the company, because that's where it makes an awful lot of money.

The Malaysian government has created a fund worth US$36 million for start-ups developing open-source software.

The OSS-Platform Investment Program (OSS-PIP) is aimed at forming 40 commercially active open-source software companies over the next two years, according to news daily The Star.

Malaysian authorities hope that expertise in open-source software can help the country become specialty player in the global IT market, which it views as a field dominated by large Western multinationals.

Momentum to migrate from Microsoft Corp. products to open-source software is rapidly gaining in Germany, where numerous companies are reacting to the U.S. software giant's licensing policy.

Small and medium-size businesses, in particular, have begun to replace as much Microsoft software as possible with open-source options such as Linux in an effort to slash IT costs, according to IT managers at the LinuxWorld conference and exhibition in Frankfurt.

Xandros, inheritor of the software from Corel's ill-fated foray into the desktop Linux market, has named a new chief executive and plans to release a new version of its product in late November.

The Ottawa, Canada-based company's new CEO is Andreas "Andy" Typaldos, who through Linux Global Partners is an early investor in the company and in related Linux ventures Ximian and CodeWeavers, the company said Tuesday. He also is chairman of Enikia, a semiconductor company for distributing data over power lines.

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