Survey Says That Linux Desktop Is Ever More Popular

The first thing we can say about the Linux desktop in 2007 is that there are more users than ever. The Linux Foundation 2006 survey had fewer than 10,000 people signing in. This year more than 20,000 Linux desktop users reported in.

read more at DesktopLinux.com

An emerging understanding of Open Standards from FSFE

" [...] five criteria that have emerged from dialog between stakeholders, and constitute a concise and balanced definition of what an Open Standard should be. Such a standard is

1. subject to full public assessment and use without constraints in a manner equally available to all parties;
2. without any components or extensions that have dependencies on formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an Open Standard themselves;
3. free from legal or technical clauses that limit its utilisation by any party or in any business model;
4. managed and further developed independently of any single vendor in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third parties;
5. available in multiple complete implementations by competing vendors, or as a complete implementation equally available to all parties.

[...]"

Read the whole story from Georg Greve's blog.

Five Common Misconceptions About Linux

Digg link
Original link http://www.mi80.com/node/1760

1. Linux is Behind the Times

2. Linux is Hard to Use

3. Linux isn't Compatible with Anything

4. Linux isn't Enterprise Ready / No One Uses Linux

5. Linux isn't Professionally Developed or Supported

AFP: Microsoft loses landmark EU antitrust case

A top European court on Monday handed Microsoft a surprise defeat in its epic antitrust battles, backing the European Commission's 2004 record fine of 497 million euros (690 million dollars) against the software giant.

read more at Agence France Presse

ISO says no to OOXML

The first round in the fierce battle of document standards has ended with a no to the fast track procedure to OOXMl pushed forward by Microsoft. The saga will probably continue since the normal procedure will probably go forward in 2008. Meanwhile the only office document standard recognized by ISO that has a real implementation is ODF Open Document Format.

See the official ISO press release.

Microsoft one vote short of fast-track OOXML ISO standardization

Executive board members of the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS), the organization that represents the United States in ISO standardization deliberations, recently held an internal poll to determine the position that the United States should take on Microsoft's request for Office Open XML (OOXML) approval. With eight votes in favor, seven against, and one abstention, the group was one vote short of the nine votes required for approving OOXML ISO standardization. This does not mean that OOXML is dead in the water, however.

read more at Arstechnica

Google To Join Group To Protect Linux From Possible Patent Challenge

The Open Invention Network members share their Linux patents with each other and offer the prospect of a joint defense if Linux is confronted with a legal challenge.

read more at InformationWeek.com

Shuttleworth: Microsoft Fracturing the Open-Source Community

Microsoft has succeeded in fracturing the Linux and open-source community with the patent indemnity agreements it has entered into with several prominent vendors, Ubuntu leader and Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth told eWEEK.

The strategy behind that was to drive a wedge into the open-source community and unsettle the marketplace, Shuttleworth said. He also took issue with the Redmond, Wash., software maker for not disclosing the 235 of its patents it claims are being violated by Linux and other open-source software.

"That's extortion and we should call it what it is," he said.

read more at eWeek. com

Lenovo Hops On The Linux Bandwagon

Wired writes: "Lenovo, the third largest maker of PCs, announced this morning at the ongoing LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco, that it will start selling laptops preloaded with Linux instead of Windows."

read more at Wired

Microsoft to Submit Shared Source Licenses to OSI

Tim O'Reilly writes: "In his keynote at OSCON, Microsoft General Manager of Platform Strategy Bill Hilf announced that Microsoft is submitting its shared source licenses to the Open Source Initiative. [...] Bill also announced that Microsoft has created a new top level link at microsoft.com, microsoft.com/opensource to bring together in one place all Microsoft's open source efforts.[...]"

Read more at O'Reilly Radar.

Six questions to national standardisation bodies

The Free Software Foundation Europe asks 6 very to-the-point questions related to the OOXML / ODF debate:

• Application independence?
• Supporting pre-existing Open Standards?
• Backward compatibility for all vendors?
• Proprietary extensions?
• Dual standards?
• Legally safe?

Read more at http://fsfeurope.org/documents/msooxml-questions

Lifehack.org: Open Source Life - How the open movement will change everything

Consider this: in just a few short years, the open-source encyclopedia Wikipedia has made closed-source encyclopedias obsolete — both the hard-bound kind and the CD-ROM or commercial online kind. Goodbye World Book and Brittanica.

This is but one example of how the concept of open source has changed our lives already. Over the next 10 years or so, we’ll be seeing many more examples, and the effects could change just about every aspect of our lives.

more

Dell unveils Feisty Fawn Ubuntu

Computer giant makes second attempt to sell PCs running open source Linux in response to customer survey.

read more at the guardian

Check what Michael Dell's own computer is running!

Microsoft is dead

Paul Graham says: "A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead. I was talking to a young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo. I said that Yahoo had been warped from the start by their fear of Microsoft. That was why they'd positioned themselves as a "media company" instead of a technology company. Then I looked at his face and realized he didn't understand. It was as if I'd told him how much girls liked Barry Manilow in the mid 80s. Barry who?"
More

Berners-Lee tells Congress why the Web succeeded: open standards

Universality—the ability for disparate hardware, software, and languages to coexist in the same medium—has been one of the drivers of the Web's massive growth in the last decade, along with the availability of open and royalty-free standards that make such universality possible.

more

Firefox 3.0 opens door to Web apps, Mozilla says

Perhaps most exciting could be Firefox's ability to support writing an e-mail in, for example, Gmail while offline, with the data sent later when a user is connected to the Internet again. Ultimately, Mozilla engineers are aiming for an integration between the browser and Web-based services that is as smooth-running as a desktop application.

more

Patenting Life

Op-Ed New York Times contributor Michael Chrichton on Patenting Life:

YOU, or someone you love, may die because of a gene patent that should never have been granted in the first place. Sound far-fetched? Unfortunately, it’s only too real.

more

Vista successor "Vienna" planned for late 2009

Now that Microsoft has freed Windows Vista from the shackles of a five year development process, the company is attempting to the wow starts now us by revealing that it plans to have its next major operating system ready within the next two-and-a-half years, giving Vista's successor an expected release date of late 2009.

more

LIFT 2007

I am currently at LIFT 2007 a conference about the challenges and opportunities of technology in our society held 7-8-9 February 2007 Geneva, Switzerland. The 2006 version was great and the program for 2007 also looks enticing.

LIFT 2007

A great blog about standards

Andy Updegrove is keeping an amazing blog about standards at http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/. If you are into the saga of ODF vs MS OOXML read more here.
A great read!

The Economist on Vista (II)

The launch of a new version of Microsoft Windows, called Vista, is not quite the event it used to be. Has the software giant reached the pinnacle of its power?

more

The Economist on Vista and Office

Microsoft's latest upgrades should make PC users happier. But users have little reason to upgrade immediately: the benefits are largely cosmetic. Besides, Vista requires so much computing power that most people will probably be able to run it only when they buy a new machine.

more

WIPO Creating New IP Rights Over Web Content

The WIPO is currently engaged in negotiating a new treaty on digital IP rights, but they're having trouble agreeing on the particulars.

more

The Contradictory Nature of OOXML

Andy Updegrove writes: "The Microsoft Office XML-based format specification, OOXML, is now in the adoption queue at ISO/IEC. That process takes six months, and has two steps. During the first one-month step, any member may submit 'contradictions,' which means aspects in which a proposed standard conflicts with already adopted ISO/IEC standards and Directives. Those contradictions must then be 'resolved' (which does not necessarily mean eliminated), and these resolutions are then presented back to the members to consider during the five-month voting stage that follows."

more

Daylight Sought For Data Mining

Key senators introduced legislation yesterday that would require the government to disclose data-mining programs to Congress in an effort to protect Americans' privacy and prevent misuse of personal information.

more

OpenID and the Identity Systems of Yahoo, Google & MSN

You may've heard of OpenID - it's a distributed identity management system, a.k.a. a decentralized single sign-on platform. We prepared a screencast to better explain the idea (see Flash movie below). After that we present a more detailed explanation, focusing particularly on Yahoo and Google.

more

Amsterdam and the Linux desktop

Amsterdam has decided to give the Linux desktop and OpenOffice a try. In late December, the city -- previously a Microsoft-only operation -- announced plans to spend 300,000 Euros (roughly $400,000) on testing Linux and other open-source software in its housing department and in the Zeeburg borough office in 2007.

more