Linux/Open Source News

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp plans to pay software maker Novell Inc up to $100 million in additional subscription fees due to strong demand for Novell's open-source Linux software that partners with Microsoft's proprietary Windows software.

San Francisco - Microsoft on Wednesday is expanding its agreement to supply Linux support certificates from Novell, which originally was part of a controversial arrangement set in late 2006.

A new beta software development kit is out for Android, the open-source mobile operating system backed by Google. Version 0.9 of the SDK was announced Monday on the Android Developers Blog.

San Francisco - Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, has joined the Linux Foundation, the foundation said Monday.

Commercial software developers, listen up: If you think open source is a free toolkit from which you can borrow at will, take a good look at Wednesday's legal ruling. A U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in New York City, where many intellectual-property cases are heard, overturned a Northern California court decision in Jacobsen v. Katzer, a pivotal case in open-source and Creative Commons law.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A U.S. federal appeals court has ruled that the holder of a copyright to a computer programming code made available for free public download can enforce an "open-source" copyright license to control future use of the work.

The open source community – and tech-savvy model railroad enthusiasts – were handed a victory Wednesday when an appeals court ruled that people who use open source content can be found guilty of copyright infringement if they do not adhere to the license terms set out by the creator.

San Francisco - A beta release of the open source NetBeans 6.5 IDE is being offered by Sun Microsystems on Wednesday.

On this week's EIC Squared podcast, ZDNet's Larry Dignan and I talk about the big story of this month--the Olympics.

According to a Web report, there may be some problems with integrating the Google-led open-source mobile platform Android into devices, delaying the release of an Android phone until early next year.

Petite laptops with small screens and even tinier price tags may do more than shake up the computer hardware industry: They might loosen Microsoft's grip on the computer operating system.

Years ago, the Linux open-source operating system seemed ready to offer a nonproprietary alternative to Microsoft Windows. But "Linux on the desktop" never took off.

The developers of Firefox have unveiled an experimental project, Snowl, designed to gather all your inbound communications, whether they're in the form of email, RSS, Twitter, or social network updates.

IBM is joining forces with Linux OS vendors Novell, Red Hat and Canonical, the distributor of Ubuntu, in a global effort to deliver what they tout as a "Microsoft-free" computing experience.

PC OEMs offered a halfhearted endorsement of the Linux desktop on Wednesday, claiming that the operating system was mainly suited for low-cost appliances and PCs designed for education.

Like cars, buildings and airplanes, browsers can have concept models. That's the idea behind Aurora, a new "concept browser" from the Mozilla Foundation.

Intelligent Enterprise - Synaptic Hosting will allow companies to host Windows Server or Linux client-server applications and Web apps in AT&T's data centers, rather than in their own data centers.

The Linux Mobile Foundation has announced that 11 new companies have joined the global consortium for the open-source mobile platform.

InformationWeek - The group announced Monday that it has signed 11 new member companies in recent weeks and said that the number of mobile devices running the LiMo OS now totals 21.

San Francisco - If the phrase "open source software" continues to conjure images of impassioned programmers selflessly collaborating for the common good, it may be because, even as commercial interests are behind many of the most prominent projects, the results are no less inspired ??? and typically no less free.

Mozilla developers are edging closer to releasing a new version of Firefox that could drive the use of open-source software to...

Open-source content management vendor Alfresco can now stand in for SharePoint server.

I'm still sorting through the last bits of my OSCON trip notes, but one striking conversation I had was with Byrne Reese of SixApart about people who violate the end-user licensing of for-pay editions of OSS apps. Do we sic the open source cops on them? I'd like to think not.

Though it's been less than a month since Firefox 3's blast-off into the Internet and a software download record, Mozilla developers have already distributed a very early preview of the next upgrade to the increasingly popular browser, code-named Shiretoko.

InformationWeek - We round up our coverage of the open source OSCON 2008 conference. Don't miss Q&As with Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth and The Linux Foundation's Jim Zemlin. Check out the photo gallery, too.

San Francisco - Mobile computing has become a dominant focus in the open source arena, a theme on prominent display at a major open source technology convention last week.

InformationWeek - Schroepfer brings with him years of experience as CTO of Sun's data center automation business, not to mention his role overseeing the launches of Firefox 1.5, 2, and 3.

Facebook is boosting its engineering team by hiring a high-ranking Mozilla official.

RealNetworks has issued four critical patches for several versions of its RealPlayer running on Windows, Linux and Apple's Mac...