Microsoft is to enhance the product-activation programme in its Office software to make it more like that in Windows. And it will extend its 'Windows Genuine Advantage' programme to send alerts directly to users of pirate software, the company said yesterday.

"This research report by a third-year graduate student examines the growing use of desktop Linux among governments in the US and globally. Drawing on published research and comments from industry analysts, the author hypothesizes that desktop Linux may be nearing a tipping point within government settings, after which adoption can be expected to accelerate."

For the last few years, a coalition of technology companies, academics and computer programmers has been trying to persuade Congress to scale back the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Now US Congress is preparing to do precisely the opposite. A proposed copyright law seen by CNET News.com would expand the DMCA's restrictions on software that can bypass copy protections and grant federal police more wiretapping and enforcement powers.

"One of the main reasons that I'm so involved with open source is that I've always been fascinated by figuring out how things work. In this interview, John Baldwin of the FreeBSD project gives some insight on what it is like to be a FreeBSD developer and some of the things that happen behind the scenes of a large open source project."

"With a bit of C and microprocessors knowledge, this article shows it's possible to write your own device drivers in Linux. It might not be the easiest thing to do, but it's great to see that writing device drivers doesn't require black magic - it's just a matter of talking to the Linux kernel!" And a matter of praying that Linux's driver interface doesn't change while writing your driver, of course.

VMware has unveiled a technology consortium of hardware, software and service providers, with the aim to jointly-develop virtual desktop products. Called the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Alliance, the new consortium counts several technology vendors as members including Altiris, Atos Origin, Check Point Software Technologies, Citrix, ClearCube Technology, Fujitsu-Siemens, Hitachi, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sun Microsystems and Wyse Technology.

The firewall in Windows Vista will, by default, have half its protection turned off because that is what enterprise customers have requested, according to the software giant.

Version 0.62 of Visopsys was released today, including Qemu support, initial USB support, and some little games and bits of flair, in addition to the usual tweaks and bug fixes. Meanwhile, the offshoot project, "Partition Logic" continues to gain converts in the market for free partitioning tools. Detailed change log and downloads.

Starting Tuesday, the Microsoft will push out a test tool that checks whether the copy of Windows a PC is using is properly licensed. It will be sent to millions of people in the United States, United Kingdom, Malaysia, Australia and New Zealand.

LinuxPlanet reports - Once known as a community-supported alternative to the Linspire distribution, the Freespire name is about to rise again from the ashes of obscurity--only this time as a distro completely sponsored and endorsed by Linspire itself... Freespire will be a Debian-based, community-driven and -supported project tied to the commercial Linspire distribution, Carmony outlined, in much the same way as Fedora Core and openSUSE relate to their parent commercial distros, Red Hat Linux and SUSE Linux, respectively. OSDir has some screenshots of Freespire in the Freespire 5.0 Screenshot Tour.

Thanks to Apple's Boot Camp beta, long-time Mac users are trying out Windows XP, and Windows users are starting to pick up Macs. Trying out the "other side" can be confusing at first. ExtremeTech has a simple little guide that makes this trasition an easy one. Some things discussed are what programs are great for each OS, as well as how to get around your new environment.

"Mac OS X includes many open source projects that contribute to the stability and robustness of the system. While Apple provides working versions of these for both PowerPC and Intel architectures, sometimes you want to build your own to tune performance or enable custom features. Plus, distributing a single binary is often preferable to keeping track of separate, architecture-specific binaries. These objectives can be accomplished by building the project as a Universal Binary, a file that contains code for both the PowerPC and Intel architectures." This article shows how to use Xcode (using Xcode 2.2.1) to construct a make-based project that builds OpenSSL as a Universal Binary."

"This evening we released IE7 Beta 2. This release is not the preview or the update to the preview, but the real Beta 2 of IE7 for Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1, and Windows XP 64-bit Edition. Simply: please try it."

Many people responded to the call for OpenBSD and OpenSSH donations by purchasing an OpenBSD CD set. Those CDs are beginning to arrive in the mail, and when they do, how are you going to use them? If you're a software enthusiast who has never used OpenBSD before, you might enjoy installing it by yourself and figuring it out as you go. If, however, you're looking for a more practical approach to using OpenBSD as a desktop or server operating system, here's a guide to get you started.