Martin Fink, Hewlett Packard's Linux vice-president, yesterday slammed the open source community's complex licensing schemes, suggesting that there are too many open source licences for developers to manage properly. Closing a presentation at the Linux World Conference and Expo in Sydney yesterday, Fink said, "If there's one thing that you take home from my speech today it is: do not make more open source licences."

The KOffice team is proud to announce the release candidate of KOffice 1.5. Read the full announcement, the changelog, and download the release. In this release, the OASIS OpenDocument support is improved even more, especially in KChart. Krita has gotten faster and more stable and KFormula has a new maintainer who has really come up to speed quickly. Across the board all applications have been improved and polished. Or so they say, in any case.

Speculation is in the air again that Palm, Inc (not just PalmSource) is working on their own operating system for future mobile devices. David Beers is reporting on his blog that a analyst "in the know" privately confirmed that Palm is experimenting with developing its own Linux based operating system.

Today, we have something special on OSNews, something that's actually a first-timer on OSNews. Already common on other websites, we today hand the microphone to you, so you can ask questions to someone from the tech industry. Read on for the details!

"This is the second in a series of two articles on Tux's move into retail. Last week's article described some of the mechanics of how free open source software is getting into retail. Today, Mad Penguin interviews Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony; Xandros CEO Andreas Typaldos; Mepis Linux founder Warren Woodford; and Kevin Jones, Micro Center Vice President of Merchandising, to get their take Tux's jump into big box retail."

The European Commission said on Wednesday it told Microsoft that it had competition worries about the firm's new operating system, Vista, another antitrust concern that the software giant must answer in Europe. "We are concerned about the possibility that the next Vista operating system will include various elements which are currently available separately from Microsoft or other companies," Commission spokesman Jonathan Todd said. More here. My take: Enough already. Seriously.

Microsoft has acknowledged that a planned update to the way Internet Explorer renders multimedia on Web pages could cause some serious problems, and promised to give developers an extra two months to modify their pages to ensure a smooth transition. The company was forced to make the changes in response to a patent dispute with Eolas Technologies. The fix would affect the way ActiveX controls are displayed on Web pages, according to experts. If no changes were made, a user would have to 'activate' an ActiveX or Java control before it would be usable. More on IE here.

Ars takes a quick look at GNOME 2.14. "The GNOME team recently announced another excellent release. GNOME 2.14 includes a variety of spiffy enhancements, bug fixes, improvements, and new features that make it the best GNOME desktop environment ever. Already available in Ubuntu Dapper and the recently released Fedora Core 5, GNOME 2.14 awaits your use and abuse. I've poked and prodded it and now I'm ready to talk about it."

Asus will begin shipping a dedicated physics processing board based on Ageia's PhysX PPU in May, the company said today. The card contains 256MB of memory dedicated to environment calculations designed to make virtual worlds feel more real to game players. Ageia announced PhysX last week. It claims that 60 developers - including UbiSoft, Cryptic Studios, NCSoft, Epic Games and Sega - are working on 100 games with support for the company's physics calculation API.

"Over 500 million people use the Internet, and over a billion computers are deployed around the world. It has become impossible to ignore the issue of content management and access. Call it Digital Rights Management if you will, or call it working out how to manage copying in the digital realm. We need to solve the problem of how digital information will be shared, and an equally important need to set open and wide reaching standards. It has been more than ten years since computers and the Internet really started to take off, and there is still no coherent approach to restricted (or unrestricted) information sharing. This is a serious problem."

"Security company Trustware has a product that takes a new approach on protecting the end users. BufferZone is centered on a concept of virtualization technology, that creates a whole new secluded environment on your computer. After installing the software, you are guided through a mini presentation that introduces you to the process of setting up your BufferZone. Although usage of terms like 'virtualization' and 'buffer' might be a bit complicated for the average PC user, the concept is very easy to comprehend and to setup."

Red Hat is going through a growth spurt as companies become more comfortable with its software as an alternative to Windows and profits fuel the expansion, executives with the developer of open source software said Tuesday. Profitability expanded even as Red Hat grew to more than 1200 employees.

Andy Tanenbaum has released 3.1.2-B2 of MINIX, a preview version of 3.1.2. We reported extensively on the initial release of MINIX3 last year. The most important new feauture of this release is the inclusion of the X windowing system.

"Theo de Raadt is the project leader for OpenBSD, a Unix-like operating system. We spoke with Theo about the upcoming release of OpenBSD, 3.9, the financial state of the project, and about companies that profit from free software without contributing back."