"A year ago this month, the SCO Group exited the Linux business, announcing it would cease sales of the open source operating system and claiming it would have a 'stronger focus on Unix and the company’s growth strategy around Web services.'

The good fight has been lost.

"The Irish Presidency's proposal was passed, with support from Germany, France and most of the other countries whose ministers had publicly promised to oppose or at least abstain. The only no vote came from Spain (to be confirmed), Italy and a few others abstained.

This means that the ministers have allowed their patent office administrators, who actually hold the key to the dossier, to destroy the directive project (by inserting paragraphs into the Commission proposal that make any finding of common ground with the Parliament even more difficult than in the first reading of the Codecision Procedure).

"My Windows Internet gateway was running slower than a snail going uphill, even on a pretty speedy machine (a 1.3GHz Athlon), but when it started crashing regularly, I knew I had to do something. I downloaded and burnt Mandrake 10.0 Community, opened up a very old computer (with a CPU clock in the low three figures), and took care of the problem once and for all."

"Novell Inc., which last year bought SuSE Linux and Ximian, is working on a single desktop product to ship before the end of this year.

"Can Linux improve the lives of millions of people too poor to own a computer?

e-Governance is improving the lives of billions of people worldwide and is integrating government services in a way never seen before. Linux with its low cost, high security and open standards is rapidly becoming the driving force behind this revolution.

"The Jakarta Commons team is happy to announce the release of Commons HttpClient 3.0 alpha 1. Please see the release notes for a list of changes made since the 2.0 release."

"RC1 of Loom is now available.

Loom marks the first public release of a container based upon the un-released Apache Avalon Phoenix 4.1 development branch."

"As a follow-up to Mandrakesoft's latest flash regarding the upcoming decision of the European Council to legalize software patentability in Europe, here are some fresh news and information on what everyone can do to help.

If nothing changes, tomorrow, Tuesday May 18, the European Council, that is, the European body which represents all the governments of the European Union, will vote in favor of a directive that will legalize software patents in Europe. Last September, faced with a similar choice, the European Parliament voted major amendments to the directive text drafted by the European Commission, actually rejecting software patentability. However, the Council, ignoring all of these amendments, is going to vote in favor of a text that is even worse than the initial version of the Commission.

"Open source presents a large potential competitive advantage for hardware and software vendors, and vendors of complementary or substitute services. Linux has contributed greatly to the adoption and success of OSS. Companies such as IBM, HP, Red Hat, Oracle, and recently, Novell, have invested in, and legitimized the use of Linux for enterprise applications -- including datacenter operations.

"This almost turned into a 'State of the Wine Project' discussion, but that's where your highest-moderated questions led, and Jeremy responded with his usual wit, wisdom, and candor."

"ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/2.6.6/2.6.6-mm3/

- A few VM changes, getting things synced up better with Andrea's work.

- A new kgdb stub, for ia64 (what happened to the grand unified kgdb
project?)

- The backing-store-for-sysfs patches need redoing, and have been
temporarily dropped

"Bob Muglia, senior vice president of Microsoft's Windows Server division, last week spoke with Computerworld about a range of issues, including the competitive threat posed by Linux. Excerpts follow:

"Dassault Aviation, world's leader in top-of-the-line business jets, joins ObjectWeb, a consortium of leading companies and research organizations from around the world who have joined forces to produce advanced components for distributed software infrastructures.

"The technology at the heart of one of the most popular Web-logging tools is about to go open source.

On Monday, the founder of UserLand Software Inc. said an open-source release of the Frontier platform, which serves as the underlying engine and runtime for the Manila and Radio UserLand blog-publishing tools, would become available within the next few months.

"Andrea Arcangeli is well known for having completely rewritten and stabilized the virtual memory subsystem in the 2.4 Linux kernel. Many were surprised when Linus Torvalds merged Andrea's VM into 2.4.10, but the new memory subsystem has long since proved itself. Andrea is a 27 year old Linux kernel hacker living in Italy and working for SUSE.

"New Features and Fixes:

# Official Mozilla 1.7 RC 2 builds for Windows, Linux, and Mac all contain the Talkback crash reporting utility. Help us make 1.7 the most stable release yet; please submit your crash reports.
# A new option to prevent sites using Javascript to block the browser's context menu.
# A new set of icons for files that are associated with Mozilla on Windows.

"Astaro Corp., developers of the most popular Open Source-based security product, today announced it has raised a Series B round of USD6.7 million from co-investors Insight Venture Partners of New York and Wellington Partners of Munich, Germany. The same group of investors co-led the company’s Series A round of USD6.2 million in May 2003, bringing the total amount raised to date to USD12.9 million.

"Three open source application servers are expected to be certified J2EE-compatible by year’s end, meaning that lower-cost alternatives to commercial products from BEA Systems, IBM, and Oracle are on the horizon.

"Several people ask us this question all over again and again, so it may be worthwhile to answer it once and for all.

What is the problem? The problem is that some people have fanatical approach to various technologies: they think that if we are fans of Microsoft powered cell phones then we should prefer to use for our servers Microsoft Windows Server (like for example NT, 2000 or 2003) instead of Unix (like for example Linux, BSD Unix or AIX). We are therefore being accused of amateurishness and lack of consistency in our convinctions.

"In one of the most highly anticipated Linux Distribution releases in years, Red Hat's Fedora Project launched its Fedora Core 2 (FC2), the company said.

"What's new in the latest beta (1.92, Test 3) of Fedora Core 2? Plenty, and I'm not talking about new versions of this or that package (they're there), a slicker installer (it is), or a prettier desktop (it isn't). Nosireebob, the changes in Fedora Core represent what might amount to the biggest set of changes in the Linux distribution world since Caldera (yeah, I know, hiss, boo) introduced a graphical installer back in the dark ages of 1998. Fedora's changes include a new, fundamentally different security model, a new X implementation, the 2.6 kernel, GNOME 2.6, and KDE 3.2.2.

"You meet the nicest people at the command line: no posturing, no nonsense, just a 'get the job done' mentality that seems to get lost when the focus moves away from real functionality to making pretty windows. Get too far away from computing's core values and you could end up with a bug-ridden, security-free, viral infection magnet of an environment. Oh, wait. That's already been done. This week we'll meet one of those nice people you can meet at the CLI and take a look at a command line tool for the most fundamental -- and the most overlooked -- part of personal computing: making backups."

"The number of Windows administrators who are seriously considering migrating to Linux has fallen off considerably over the past year, according to the results of SearchWin2000.com's 2004 Microsoft Report Card survey.

"Ok, I admit it. I was just a front-man for the real fathers of Linux, the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus."

Thus begins a characteristically Torvaldsian e-mail to LinuxWorld News Desk sent by Linus Torvalds in response to our invitation to comment on the sensationalist claims this morning that he isn't, after all, the inventor of Linux."

"These are rough notes, and due to the the moving target nature of everything, very unlikely to stop working at some point in the future.