Linux Game Company Opens Doors, Nov 09, 2007

Sixth Floor Labs LLC, a Linux game development company, has launched their business today. Founded by Ethan Glasser-Camp and Carl Li, the company aims to improve Linux's desktop feasibility through the creation of high-quality games. Games are "sold" to the Internet community through the "ransom model" -- for one large payment, the product is released under the GPL and freed forever.

Mandriva, the leading European Linux editor, announces that its Club is open to all Linux users, free of charge.

Chris DiBona started using free software on his home PC when he was at college, and for the same reason that Linus wrote Linux: because he couldn't get on the machines in the computer lab. Later, DiBona joined VA Linux, which sold open source-based hardware systems, and ended up as one of the editors on Slashdot.

... we have unwittingly neglected to honor the terms of the GPL which requires us to obtain permission from the copyright holders of any software component for which we have modified the code in order to deliver our product.

Purpose-built Fedora distributions, called "spins", are a recent addition to that community in an attempt to reach additional users.

... we are delaying the full archive freeze for a few days. We haven't chosen a date yet, but you can still expect it to happen in October or early November.

With these changes done, we are now on the home stretch for the sarge release. We are now only waiting on the arm buildds to recover and catch up to a reasonable extent, and on one last glibc upload -- and then sarge is FREEZING.

The Ubuntu Team is proud to announce a release candidate for Ubuntu 5.04: Ubuntu 5.04 RC - codenamed "Hoary Hedgehog"

At this point, with 563 ballots resulting in 491 votes from 482 developers, "Choice 2: Re-affirm support for non-free" has carried the day. "Choice 1: Cease active support of non-free [3:1 majority needed]" failed to even win simple majority (more people preferred further discussion than option 1).

The netfilter/iptables project (http://www.netfilter.org/) announces out-of-court settlement with Allnet GmbH (http://www.allnet.de/) on Allnet's infringing use of copyrighted material.

Allnet was offering two products, a wireless access router and a load-balancing DSL router, both including software developed by the netfilter/iptables project.

However, Allnet did not fulfill the obligations of the GNU General Public License covering the netfilter/iptables software. Specifically, Allnet did not make any source code offering or include the GPL license terms with their products.

So...SCO's code demonstration, the one that it put up to convince its resellers of its case, comes from a version of Unix which first came out in 1979. The code was publicly circulated in the 1980's, and explicitly released under the BSD license by [the company now known as] SCO at the beginning of 2002. SCO might well have a complaint that SGI did not properly give credit for the code it used. But there is no possible way the company can argue that this code's presence in Linux is an infringement of its copyrights.

Linux Weekly News has published the text of SCO's "Linux License". Some interesting commentary follows.