Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader sends us to LinuxElectrons.com for an announcement from the Free Software Foundation Europe, in the form of a letter (PDF) sent to the European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes. FSFE offers to support a possible EU antitrust investigation of Microsoft, declaring that "Microsoft should be required openly, fully and faithfully to implement free and open industry standards." Opera Software issued a complaint to the Competition Commissioner based on anti-competitive behavior in the web browser market. FSFE president Georg Greve writes in the letter, "Although Opera Software does not produce Free Software, we largely share their assessment and concerns regarding the present situation in the Internet browser market."

eldavojohn writes "Red Hat has announced their release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, which includes integrated virtualization. Also of note, 'Red Hat Enterprise Linux is also available on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a web service that provides resizeable compute capacity in the cloud. This collaboration makes all the capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, including the Red Hat Network management service, world-class technical support and over 3,400 certified applications, available to customers on Amazon's proven network infrastructure and datacenters.'"

smallfries writes "US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has proposed much harsher punishments for copyright violations, including jail time. The Intellectual Property Protection Act [PDF Warning] doesn't appear to change the fundamentals of US copyright law but does allow more leeway for the police when investigating suspected crimes, and harsher punishments for those convicted. A response with a link to one site's look at the bill is up on Linux Electrons. Now that attempting the crime has such severe consequences, who will be the first to go to jail for running a p2p client?"

An anonymous reader writes "For $10 million, SpaceDev is offering a Linux-based microsatellite that can be controlled over the internet using any laptop or desktop computer. The Modular Microsat Bus utilizes such things as plug and play USB, Ethernet, and other standards, while providing critical features such as power, maneuvering, and communication for you. Up to 40 kg of project space are at your disposal"

Rollie Hawk writes "Microsoft's latest attempt to reconcile with the European Commission's antitrust rulings against the company may result in another victim. It seems their offer, if accepted, will strike a considerable blow at a leading competitor in the realm of file and printer sharing. The popular open source suite Samba stands to be the recipient of a backhanded slap from Redmond if the offer stands and the European branch of the Free Software Foundation is taking it personally. Though Microsoft is offering to make some information regarding interoperability available to competitors, it's only under the condition that implementations are not open source. According to FSFE president Georg Greve, "the proposal specifically precludes the information from being used in a free software implementation, such as the Samba workgroup server software." How is Samba being specifically targeted? Greve argues this is because "Samba is the only remaining major competitor of Microsoft in this market.""

An anonymous reader writes "FreeBSD 4.9 has become the first non-commercial open-source operating system to be supported as a VMware ESX guest. This allows enterprise users to benefit from a powerful open-source OS with the benefit of subscription free binary updates. This also solves a number of enterprise support issues around lack of hardware vendor support and issues around using non-commercial operating systems on SAN fabrics as the SAN access is abstracted through VMware, which the SAN supplier is more likely to have certified."

JimMarch(equalccw) writes "Our favorite crooked voting company Diebold has lost a MAJOR copyright case (click for ruling here or description here). Short form: Diebold's internal documents (key excerpts here and here and here) and code were floated all over the 'net last year, showing all kinds of horror. Diebold filed cease'n'desist notices under the DMCA (such as mine linked here); a court has now ruled that Diebold wrongfully abused the DMCA by issuing these takedown notices about materials that they knew were not covered by their copyright."

newentiti writes "We all know Microsoft paid $900,000,000.00 to Sun and they also signed a LIMITED PATENT COVENANT AND STAND-STILL AGREEMENT. The agreement basically states that Microsoft will not sue Sun for any patents for the next 10 years and vice versa. What's really interesting is that according to this story the agreement had a special provision that lets Microsoft sue anybody, including Sun, over OpenOffice.org. I wonder what Microsoft had in mind?"

yerdaddie writes "The just-released Transmeta TM8800 has been integrated into a new ultraportable from Sharp. The smaller 90nm variety clocks and performs better than the older 130nm TM86XX Efficeons. It also seems the Orion Multisystems personal clusters discussed earlier on slashdot will be built around this processor variant. Hopefully Transmeta will be releasing a developer kit soon for eager hardware hackers."

ben_ writes "According to this article on inq7.net, a Philippines company called SpecOps has revealed their Project David, a middleware layer that solves the problem Wine has been working at for years and will "enable all major Microsoft Windows applications to run on the free and open source Linux OS". Further (and more sceptical) analysis at Linux Electrons." I'm with Linux Electrons on this; as nice as it sounds, the information about David comes via Press Release which as we all know are founts of dependability *cough*.

lawrencekhoo writes "MySQL AB announced yesterday that software for building a MySQL Cluster will be available for download by the end of April. Articles available from Computerworld, Internetnews, Linux Electrons, and PHP Architect. Great! Now my website can finally have 99.99% availability ..."