SCO Group's demands on fees may spark action, Feb 17, 2004

Asked if SCO ANZ's demands for licence fees could be a breach of the Fair Trading Act, Commerce Commission's spokeswoman Jackie Maitland says its preliminary view is that "no one should pay an invoice unless they are clear on the obligation to pay". Furthermore, Maitland says that "it is not clear that SCO are entitled to charge end-users who have downloaded a product on the condition they understood the product was free".

A person or a company falsely claiming to have ownership of a product or service or the rights to payment could breach the Fair Trading Act, said Maitland.

An enthusiast version of Linux built on the new 2.6 kernel has been released by Red Hat

Red Hat has released a test edition of Fedora Core 2, which is a version of Linux that incorporates the new 2.6 kernel at the heart of the open-source operating system.

The first beta of Fedora Core 2, introduced on Thursday, also includes new versions of two popular Linux user interfaces, Gnome 2.5 and release candidate 1 of KDE 3.2, Red Hat said. The 2.6 kernel the "test1" version is based on adds support for more powerful servers, a better ability to handle multiple software tasks simultaneously and other features.

While Red Hat and SuSe Linux are eyeing each other, Debian (which is also the base for a number of other distributions including Xandros and desktop Linux via Lindows), is plotting new growth for 2004 based on its darling status among Linux enthusiasts.

"The Netcraft survey clearly showed that Debian is a major player and that demand in Debian is increasing," current Debian Project Leader Martin Michlmayr told internetnews.com.

The concept that software can evolve by being developed, distributed to the community, improved and redistributed in a seemingly endless cycle is difficult for most commercially minded people to understand--let alone an organisation.

After all, we are all used to software being created, maintained and owned by an entity. Buying software means that the software is in a "final form" and we expect the owner to legally protect their software (source code). We patiently wait for updates and the software improves over time.

Yet while we have been doing this, the open software movement has been growing in the background, much like the Internet did in its early days. Software developed by this "new approach" circulates around the community and evolves at a pace incomprehensible to a traditional software development house. People in the community actually fix bugs, take the software to new levels and redistribute new versions.

Novell Inc today announced to offer a range of Linux applications from SUSE LINUX to enterprise customers in Hong Kong, China and Taiwan. Meanwhile, the company has also launched its Certified Linux Engineer (CLE) program, to provide customers and partners with the technical expertise needed for the Linux environment.

The applications and certification programs are expected to offer customers and partners the confidence they need to deploy Linux successfully and strategically.

A small team of developers in Rwanda was just beginning work on a project to produce a localized version of OpenOffice, an open-source alternative to Microsoft's market-leading productivity software, when they realized they had a problem.

Kinyarwanda, the language spoken by most Rwandans, has no words for many basic technical and computing terms, including the very word "computer," explained Steve Murphy, organizer of the project. After debating whether to borrow English or French terms or come up with their own native word, the group settled on "mudasobwa," which roughly translates to "something or someone that does not make mistakes."

IBM Corp. researchers are bringing text-to-speech capabilities to the Linux desktop.

Previously, production versions of IBM’s text-to-speech engine had been available only for the Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh platforms, said Rich Schwerdtfeger, an IBM software group accessibility strategist and chairman of IBM’s Accessibility Architecture Review Board.

2.6.3-rc4 has been released today.
See changelog for full details.

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