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Microsoft has announced a partnership with Novell and will help promote Linux. This is stunning. This is like Red Sox fans announcing they're going to root for the Yankees. Microsoft has spent ten years bashing the free-of-charge open-source Linux operating system and trying to kill it. Now Microsoft is making nice.

Legal Open source project adds "no military use" clause to the GPL Monday August 14, 2006 (04:01 PM GMT) By: Tina Gasperson Printer-friendly Email story GPU is a Gnutella client that creates ad-hoc supercomputers by allowing individual PCs on the network to share CPU resources with each other. That's intriguing enough, but the really interesting thing about GPU is the license its developers have given it. They call it a "no military use" modified version of the GNU General Public License (GPL). Tiziano Mengotti and Rene Tegel are the lead developers on the GPU project. Mengotti is the driving force...

The annual security conference traditionally focuses on hunting for bugs and attacking computer systems. At the 2006 event this week, however, an entire track will be devoted to the security--rather than the insecurity--of Windows Vista and Internet Explorer 7. The series of sessions will be hosted by Microsoft, a major sponsor of the event this year. It's an unprecedented and comprehensive first-look at the security in Vista and its associated Web browser, Black Hat Director Jeff Moss said in an interview Monday. "Even if attendees are not getting three different ways to hack into IE 7, they get the back...

Sun Microsystems is in deep trouble. So say a number of analysts, most recently Brian Richardson from Meta Group who says the company has got it all wrong, with its hardware seen as proprietary and expensive. Richardson said that it was hard to see any upside for Sun -- and he's not alone. Merrill Lynch analyst Steve Milunovich wrote last month to CEO Scott McNealy and the board: "The company has gone from being pure in vision and predictable in financial performance to an underachieving, bloated, unfocused reflection of its former self." Sun has lost money consistently ever since...

Picasa is a photo organizing and editing tool from Google that does most of what most people need to do with their digital pictures. Now Picasa, previously a Windows-only program, has binaries available for most popular GNU/Linux distributions. The Linux version of Picasa is still a beta release, but it's ready to handle photo storage, organizing, and light photo editing on your Linux computer. Even if you don't want to use Picasa, Google's creation of the Linux version may help make your Linux computer more versatile. The Picasa Linux port is being made with Wine, and in the process more...

While the beta 2 of Windows Vista is available, the consumer version of the new OS could be pushed back past the stated January launch date, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said at a news conference in Tokyo.

Sun Microsystems plans to offer support for the Ubuntu server Linux distribution on its T1 server line, the company said at the JavaOne industry conference in San Francisco. "We will be aggressively supporting the fork that Ubuntu has been doing," Sun chief executive Jonathan Schwartz said at the conference. "The ideals of that community are relatively familiar to us." The Ubuntu Linux distribution is based on Debian. The operating system currently provides only a desktop version that has a strong following among software developers. A first server system is scheduled for release on 1 June. The distribution is sponsored by...

At http://www.no-lobbyists-as-such.com/florian-mueller-blog/ballmer-linux/ we're reminded that Microsoft wants Linux dead. Ballmer is once again making noise about patents. Unfortunately, Microsoft likely does have patents it could use against Linux. IBM can probably be replied upon to fight back on the side of Linux with its own patents - supposedly they've called Microsoft patent bluffs in the past just by pointing out that they also have stacks of patents and idle lawyers ready to look for violations by Windows code. However, Microsoft might now be willing to risk the battle. Microsoft is not in a happy place right now. Vista is delayed,...

Unpatched Firefox flaw may expose users By Joris Evers, CNET News.com Published on ZDNet News: September 9, 2005, 3:53 AM PT A new, unpatched flaw in that affects all versions of Firefox could let attackers surreptitiously run malicious code on users' PCs, a security researcher has warned. The problem lies in the way Firefox handles Web links that are overly long and contain dashes, security researcher Tom Ferris said in an interview via instant messaging late Thursday. He posted an advisory and a proof of concept to the Full Disclosure security mailing list and to his Security Protocols Web site....

 Opinion: New Linux study suggests fundamental Microsoft credibility problems Nov. 17, 2005 Another day, another lame attempt by Microsoft to show that Windows is better than Linux. This time around, Microsoft commissioned a study to show that Windows does a better job of serving e-commerce applications than Linux. Of course, in the study, they didn't use the same e-commerce or back-engine DBMSs. OK, right there, without saying another word, anyone who really knows anything about benchmarking knows that the study is fundamentally flawed. You're not comparing apples to apples; you're comparing apples and oranges. It would be a different story,...

IBM today announced free software and educational resources to help developers in Russia build and deploy innovative applications based on open standards and open source. Tapping into the booming software development market in Russia, IBM is giving software developers, architects and students free access to software and hundreds of new tools and technical and educational resources that will enable them to more easily build open standards-based applications. With a few clicks of a mouse, developers can download free versions of IBM middleware, IBM WebSphere Application Server Community Edition and IBM DB2 Universal Database Express-C, as well as access trial code,...