SCO keeps disputed code secret, Dec 16, 2003

The code at the heart of SCO's legal action against IBM will be revealed only in a closed court

When the SCO Group finally lays its cards on the table in its upcoming lawsuit against IBM, the open-source community won't be given the opportunity to see them.

ChessBrain announced the appointment of the Distributed Computing Foundation as the official organizer of its first official world record attempt

Two years later, it was clear for me that Linux had the potential to be an excellent alternative to Windows, or maybe even a full replacement, and at the time I thought that it would be good to provide a Linux distribution that would be as easy to use as Windows. So I started to "play" with Slackware, and later with a Red Hat. It was also the time of the first versions of KDE. After a few months of work, I released the first Mandrake, in July '98, and was the first distro to ship with KDE 1.0 as default graphical environment.

In the original UserLinux white paper, I made it clear that the project would play favorites among the software choices available to it, and that the resulting process would be painful. You can't say that you weren't warned. But it turns out not to be particularly painful, except for one issue: the selection of the GUI used in the system. The selection of GNOME as the GUI of the UserLinux project has raised a good deal of opposition from KDE supporters.

"Free and open-source software development is faster, better and cheaper in building a community and at reinforcing and institutionalizing a culture for how to develop software," said Scacchi, a senior research scientist at UC Irvine's Institute for Software Research.

"We're not ready to assert that open-source development is the be-all and end-all for software engineering practice, but there's something going on in open-source development that is different from what we see in the textbooks."

A Chinese company based in Shanghai named "E28" has quietly been selling Linux-based smartphones in China since August, and today launched its Linux device in Hong Kong. The company also claims to be in talks with US and European companies to bring the device to those regions, according to one source.

Federal Opposition IT spokesperson Kate Lundy and Democrat member of the South Australian legislative council, Ian Gilfillan, are among the keynote speakers for the conference on Linux and Open Source in Government to be held in January in Adelaide.

The conference is being organised on the sidelines of Australia's national Linux conference, linux.conf.au, and will be jointly hosted by Linux Australia and the Australian Unix and Open Systems User Group.

The latest beta of KDE's 3.2, beta 2, was released a few days ago. I installed the provided Fedora RPMs and had a look in this early pre-release version of the popular X11 desktop environment. Six screenshots are included. We look at both the strengths and the weaknesses of the DE.

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