Ten big Dutch cities demand open standards, Jan 17, 2007

In the beginning of 2003, the Dutch government started a program called Open Standards and Open Source Software (OSSOS) to stimulate Dutch government agencies to use open standards in their software and to inform them about open source software.

I don't know about you, but suddenly I'm starting to think Debian ought to be my GNU/Linux distribution of choice, and that I should turn to Mac OS for those few tasks I cannot currently accomplish with Linux and Free Software.

Faced with a choice between adding more HP-UX and Solaris boxes, or moving to Intel hardware with Linux, CitiStreet chose the latter. Today the company is enjoying enhanced stability and security, and drastically lower costs.

Hans Reiser, the developer of the ReiserFS and Reiser4 filesystems, has been arrested in Oakland, California as a suspect in the disappearance of his estranged wife Nina Reiser. As the news of his arrest spreads in the free and open software communities, a growing concern is the effect that the case might have on Namesys, Hans Reiser's company, as well as the future of his filesystem work.

On Friday Several kernel developers issued a position paper criticizing the GPLv3 drafts. That prompted Software Freedom Law Center (SLFC) chairman Eben Moglen to issue a "renewed invitation" yesterday to kernel developers to participate in the GPLv3 process. Linus Torvalds responded to Moglen's statement by saying that his position on the license is clear and that he's "fed up" with the FSF.

As the second Google Summer of Code (SOC) winds down, most participants agree: the program, which pays selected students to work on a free or open source software (FOSS) project for three months, is a unique and exciting opportunity, but needs to continue efforts to become more organized.

But the real point here is that an entire medium-sized company's executive staff has learned a hard lesson about the dangers of proprietary software, and members of that staff who previously resisted open source are now ready to consider it

Last month the Croatian government adopted an open source software policy and issued guidelines for developing and using open source software in the government institutions. The Croatian government is concerned that proprietary software leads to too much dependence on the software suppliers. Open source software will make the government's work more transparent, according to the government's document, entitled "Open Source Software Policy."

GNOME's Women's Summer Outreach Program (WSOP) is underway, with twice the number of projects originally scheduled, thanks to Google's generosity. The program has not only brought a few more women into the GNOME fold, but it seems to have jump-started efforts to actively recruit female developers within other open source projects as well.

GPU is a Gnutella client that creates ad-hoc supercomputers by allowing individual PCs on the network to share CPU resources with each other. That's intriguing enough, but the really interesting thing about GPU is the license its developers have given it. They call it a "no military use" modified version of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Microsoft has seven "Microsoft Across America" trucks cruising the country, visiting Microsoft Partners at their request to show off the latest Windows wonders. At last count, there were exactly zero (0) "Linux Across America" trucks.

In 2003 and 2004, Jeff Schroeder served in the Iraq war, flying a tiny remote control spy plane and servicing Unix and Linux systems on the battlefield.

Now, open source messaging and collaboration software providers are a normal part of the IT business landscape. And, according to OpenXchange Executive Vice President of Marketing Strategy Dan Kusnetzky, their products' acceptance is increasing steadily -- and not just among hard-core GNU/Linux and open source devotees.

Linus Torvalds had harsh comments about the committees organized by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) to help it draft version 3 of the GNU Public License (GPLv3). However, so far as NewsForge can determine, none of those actually involved in the process agree with Torvalds' assessment that the FSF isn't listening to feedback.

It's been nearly a year since OpenOffice.org 2.0 was released, so I sat down with Louis Suárez-Potts, chair of OpenOffice.org's community council and community manager, at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, Ore., last week to see what's on the OpenOffice.org development roadmap.

Linux users are flocking to the stay-connected, work-anywhere contemporary lifestyle. R Cubed's LS1250-L Linux laptop is just right for these active mobile professionals.

Matt Zimmerman has responded to a recent NewsForge article that suggests that the maintainers of derivative distributions are unintentionally violating the requirements of the GNU General Public License (GPL). Ubuntu's technical leader says the project may be able to help.

Ryan Cloke's vision is to do business in a "better way." He's the owner of TheLinuxStore.ca, a Web site that sells low-cost Linux CDs, laptops, and custom workstations. This morning, to fulfill his vision, he began distributing free CDs of popular distributions like Fedora, Mandriva, Debian, and Knoppix. The response has been overwhelming.

Tremulous is the best free software FPS game I've had the pleasure of playing, and I'm not alone in this opinion. It also has a community growing up around it, which should aid not only in growing its popularity but also in continuing improvements.

National Lampoon, a venerated venue of collegiate comedy, stopped publishing its print magazine seven years ago, and needed an online home to make available its vast archive of articles, videos, graphics, and music.