Red Hat Expands Legal Firepower, Mar 06, 2008

It's a sign of the times when a Linux vendor issues an announcement about the hiring of legal talent.

Yes, I was quick to jump on the SCO gets $100 million lifeline story. And yes there is always more story to tell.

Make no mistake about, the Linux 2.6.x kernel is a *large* undertaking that just keeps getting bigger and bigger. Apparently it's also getting harder to maintain as well in terms of ensuring that regressions don't occur and that new code is fully tested.

Nearly every year for the last decade I've heard some pundit or vendor proclaim from the rooftops: This is the year of the Linux desktop. Yet, year in and year out, the proclamations don't materialize.

With a new visual interface including new themes sounds and effects as well as a semantic file manager, speed and multimedia handling improvements, KDE 4 is a major release for the Linux desktop.

The newest version of the popular RPM package manager is now out with improved performance and functionality. But there's a bit of a catch with RPM version 5.0.

2007 is a year that will long be remembered in the open source and Linux communities. It was a year in which the twin underpinnings of what makes open source successful and what could serve to destroy it made the headlines.

Software licensed under the GPL open source license is considered to be Free Software but that doesn't mean it's free as in beer and that developers don't have rights.

Six months ago, Linux vendor Red Hat acquired the closed source Exadel Studio Pro IDE and pledged to turn it into a fully open source Red Hat product.

For the last several years, Red Hat has been pushing forward the development of real-time enhancements for Linux. Yet the company has made no formal product announcement of how it would attempt to productize its real-time Linux innovations.

Millions of people rely on the Mozilla Firefox Web browser, but now some of them might not be able to access the content they want, thanks to the latest update.

The GPL is the most widely used open source license on Earth, yet it has never been tested in a U.S. courtroom.

Microsoft is a tremendous competitor in every market in the world. And according to a letter written by Mandriva Linux CEO Francois Bancilhon, it's so bent on winning that it undercut a deal between the Nigerian government and the Linux vendor.

If cost is your primary driver for choosing a low-end PC, let me give you a tip from my own personal archive. Pick up a PC from the trash -- literally or figuratively. I've actually done both.

HP today released new Multi-Level Security (MLS) Services for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 in support of the open source OS vendor's government push.

Ubuntu Linux and its corporate sponsor Canonical claim to be ready for the enterprise challenge on the desktop and the server.

The nation's first Linux patent suit currently facing Red Hat and Novell isn't about open source at all. Or so the plaintiff says.

The SCO boogeyman has now been exposed to be a straw scarecrow with no real substance.

This is the year that Linux is so mature, so stable, so tried and true, that it's actually, dare I say it? Boring.

The other big change this year is the GPLv3. The discussion is no longer about what should go into the GPL but rather about who should be using it and what it's all about.