A few Linux distributions emphasize license freedom as a goal, but Tom “Spot” Callaway says that there’s no such thing as a free Linux distro. Callaway, Fedora’s engineering manager, writes that “you’d need to do an incredibly thorough audit of every file in the system to be sure that every single file is under a known license,” and the evidence says that most distros haven’t actually done it.

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Just in time for openSUSE 11.1 RC 1, we’ve finished the new and improved license for openSUSE 11.1. The days of agreeing to a click-through EULA for openSUSE are over!

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If you’re a Linux user who’s just been issued an Apple computer, you might want to look into a virtualization solution for Mac OS X. VMware’s Fusion, which was officially released from beta at the beginning of the month, works well for running Linux (or other x86/AMD64 OSes) on the Mac desktop, and provides a great solution for multi-OS users who need simultaneous access to all their operating systems on the same machine.

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There’s no shortage of messaging and collaboration suites trying to unseat Microsoft Exchange, but many of the suites are still playing catch-up with Microsoft in terms of features. Zimbra, on the other hand, seems to be on par with Exchange in many ways — and ahead of Exchange for hosting providers and in collaboration features.

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Eben Moglen is a man who wears many hats: professor of law and legal history at Columbia University, general counsel for the Free Software Foundation, and chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC). Last week at the LinuxWorld Conference& Expo in San Francisco, I sat down with Moglen to get an update on the draft process of the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPLv3), his opinion on modified versions of the GPL, and the status of the SFLC.

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Major open source projects like GNOME, KDE, Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, and Apache all have something in common — they all have Planet feed reader sites set up to aggregate developer blog feeds. The Planet software was developed to power Planet GNOME and Planet Debian, but now it’s being used by dozens of open source projects. With just a few simple steps, you can set up a Planet aggregator to watch your favorite blogs or to help publicize your favorite project.

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You might want to be very careful before entering your username and password on any “new” services from Google. Developer Eric Farraro has uncovered a potential hole in Google’s Public Search Service that allows a malicious (or mischievous) person to put up a fake Google sign-in page to collect usernames and passwords for real Google services.

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The GNU General Public License version 3 (GPLv3) draft process took a hit today when a number of prominent kernel developers released a position statement deriding the “dangers and problems” with the GPLv3.

[Well, this surely ought to start some, er, discussion. - dcparris]

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GNOME’s Women’s Summer Outreach Program (WSOP) is underway, with twice the number of projects originally scheduled, thanks to Google’s generosity. The program has not only brought a few more women into the GNOME fold, but it seems to have jump-started efforts to actively recruit female developers within other open source projects as well.

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The PostgreSQL project released the first beta for PostgreSQL 8.2 for widespread testing on Monday. According to PostgreSQL core team member Josh Berkus, the 8.2 beta includes a number of new features, better support for the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) SQL:2003 standard, and numerous performance improvements.

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Unix text utilities were designed primarily for programmers and admins, but here’s a little secret: the utilities also work well for writers. Instead of using diff to see changes between programs, I often use diff utilities to see what has changed between one version of an article and another. A few weeks ago, I found dwdiff, and found it works even better.

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Sometimes it’s the simple ideas that produce powerful applications — like a terminal emulator that provides several shells side by side in a single window. A few days ago, I was looking for a way to split windows in Konsole when I ran across QuadKonsole, a program that embeds several Konsole instances in a single window, making it easy to switch between shell sessions and keep an eye on all of them at once.

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One thing most people are bad at is remembering things — anniversaries, deadlines, schedules. Computers, on the other hand, are very good at tracking things — so long as you have a way to tell them to do so. Remind, a GPLed calendar and alarm application from Roaring Penguin, is a good way to keep track of your appointments and commitments on your computer so you don’t need to worry about keeping them in your head.

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The other day I was browsing WordPress Planet and noticed a link to 31 free WordPress themes from WordPress Diva. Of course, the “free” is as in beer, and the license requires that you display two links embedded in the theme “as long as the theme is in use.” I don’t mean to pick on Diva in particular, but I would like to illustrate why these sorts of “linkware” licenses, or licenses requiring reciprocal links, can be a bad idea.

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A few weeks ago, I finally got my hands on a Linux-based Koobox Mini PCs. The Mini is a full PC in a very small, quiet package, and well worth a look.

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Many KDE users tend to take the Konqueror Web browser for granted, but that’s a mistake. Konqueror may not be able to replace Firefox as a Web browser for every site, but it does a lot more than just simple browsing.

[Konqueror alone replaced several of the programs I used when I ran Windows. - Scott]

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In this final report from the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS), held last week at Google’s offices in Mountain View, Calif., we’ll look at plans for the Ubuntu and Kubuntu desktops, the future of PowerPC, and how Ubuntu is working with local community teams.

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Until now, security-conscious email users could employ encryption with traditional email clients, but were out of luck with webmail services. Freenigma, a service to add encryption to third-party webmail services via a Firefox plugin, aims to add security to the convenience of webmail. My trial of the service indicates that it’s making a good start, but has room to improve.

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iTech Media announced today that it was acquiring Mad Penguin, a popular Linux and open source online magazine, for an undisclosed sum.

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iTech Media announced today that it was acquiring Mad Penguin, a popular Linux and open source online magazine, for an undisclosed sum.

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With the 5.1.12 release, MySQL will be dropping the Berkeley DB (BDB) storage engine from its list of supported database engines. Some observers have suggested that this move is connected to Oracle’s purchase of Sleepycat, and that InnoDB may be next. However, Brian Aker, MySQL’s director of architecture, says that they’re unlikely to drop InnoDB, and the Berkeley engine is being dropped for technical reasons. Aker also announced the first release of a memcache storage engine plugin for MySQL.

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Zimbra calls itself a “leader in open source messaging and collaboration,” but does it live up to the name? I spent some time evaluating the suite, and while Zimbra isn’t perfect, it’s a decent collaboration suite that is well worth looking at if you don’t already have something in place.

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More than 1,000 people turned out on Saturday for the Ohio LinuxFest 2006 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center (GCCC) in downtown Columbus, Ohio. The LinuxFest featured big-name speakers such as Jon ‘maddog’ Hall, Chris DiBona, and Jeff Waugh, and live penguins from the Columbus Zoo.

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In July, Konsole author Lars Doelle posted a note on the MotorolaFans.com forum about two programs that appear to violate the GNU General Public License (GPL), under which Konsole is licensed. GPL violations are nothing new, but in this case Doelle has not only put the violators on notice, he’s also telling users to stop using the offending programs as well.

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Ever feel like you’re not getting the most out of your multiprocessor machine? The xjobs utility allows you to schedule several processes to run simultaneously to make the most of your system’s resources.

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The announcement last year that Apple was moving to Intel-based hardware might have seemed like a fatal blow to Terra Soft Solutions, a company best-known for the Yellow Dog Linux distro. However, Kai Staats, CEO of Terra Soft, says that the move may be a blessing in disguise. The company has moved on to bigger and better ventures — including construction of the first Cell-based supercomputing cluster.

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What do you get when you combine OpenSolaris, the GNU utilities, and Ubuntu? Nexenta — a GNU-based open source operating system built on top of the OpenSolaris kernel and runtime. I took the Alpha 5 release out for a spin to see how well it’s progressing. It might sound like an odd combination, but after more than a year of development, it actually works well, and is shaping up to be a very interesting operating system.

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The Free Standards Group (FSG) is scheduled to announce today its answer to the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) — the Linux Standard Base (LSB) Developer Network. The LSB Developer Network (LDN) will combine community content with original content in one convenient location to provide developers with information on writing portable Linux applications.

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Slackware Linux 11 was released at the beginning of this month, which marks 13 years of continued development. Slackware Linux, while not the first Linux distribution, is the oldest surviving one, and is starting to show signs of aging.

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Yet another company is moving toward an enterprise/open source split. Last week MySQL AB announced that it would offer two distinct versions of MySQL: the MySQL Enterprise release for paying customers, and MySQL Community Server for open source users. What does that mean for the open source community?

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