"The third International Forum on Free Knowledge brought together many groups and individuals interested in the development of free software worldwide to the city of Maracaibo. One reason Venezuela choose to host this event is because starting in January (2006), their new free software law, directive 3.390, comes into effect, which mandates all government agencies to migrate to free software over a two year period. I was invited to speak about Telephonia Libre: the use of free software in telecommunications."

No Starch Press sent me a review copy of The Book of Postfix (long ago!) and I was pleasantly surprised to find it ranks among the best technical tutorial books I've encountered. Correction: I did miss the SQL database integration section, which is well-covered, in my original review.

Even though I ordered Zeta from an official US reseller store, the product box I received was in the German language (at least part of it was). I recognized the company name, yellowTAB, and the name of the operating system, Zeta. But all other information printed on the box, including the system requirements, were printed in German.

Yesterday, VNUnet.com published a story claiming that there was unrest within OpenOffice.org over Sun's continueing ownership of the underlying code. IBM, Sun, and now the OpenOffice.org community manager himself all say 'no way'.

GNOME 2.12.3 has been released. This will be the final release in the 2.12 branch, as GNOME 2.14 is already on its way. Read the release notes (platform, desktop, and bindings), download the source code (platform, desktop, and bindings), or just wait until your distributor of choice packages it for you.

"This interview with Opera Software CEO and co-founder Jon S. von Tetzchner covers the Norwegian browser company's history, products, and roadmap. It sheds light on the growing importance of Linux in the embedded market, and the growing importance of the embedded market to Opera."

"At the recent ShmooCon hacking conference, an unknown hacker took control of researcher's computer, disabling the firewall and starting up a file server. While such compromises have become common in the Windows world, this time the computer was an Apple PowerBook running the latest version of Mac OS X. The compromise underscores a number of trends that has already caused a shift in focus among flaw finders and could result in more attacks on Mac OS X. "This is almost certainly the year of the OS X exploit," said Jay Beale, an expert in hardening Linux and Mac OS X systems. "The OS X platform may be based on a Unix platform, but Apple seems to be making mistakes that Unix made, and corrected, long ago."

Big Blue announced it would use the Cell processor designed by it, Sony and Toshiba in a range of high end servers. Applications that need good processing power and can render graphics are the target of Big Blue's desire. The first systems will become available in the third quarter of this year.

Someone claims to have found Vista's release date by using a clever trick. "How do I know? Well, Microsoft EMEA has put up a website where you can guess the launch date for Windows Vista. After you submit a date, it plays a hint video. There’s actually a bunch of videos, some of which are quite funny. Anyway, here comes the interesting part: If you take a look at the page source, the videos are hosted on a Microsoft server in Switzerland. And depending on your guess, they are being loaded either from a subdirectory /early/ or another one named /late/. By simple iteration I quickly found that 'early' ends Nov 30th while 'late' starts Dec 1st. So either one of these will be the launch date. If this all is not a dirty little trick from the webmaster, of course..."

Virtual Iron Software continued on its quest to push Linux and virtualization further into the heart of enterprise data centers today with an announcement that Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 would support its virtualization and data center management platform. Novell will now ship a preconfigured kernel with SLES9 and has guaranteed that all existing independent software vendor certifications will not be affected.

"Today Borland announced plans to seek a buyer for our IDE product lines that include Delphi, C++Builder, C#Builder, JBuilder (and Peloton), InterBase, JDataStore, nDataStore, Kylix, and our older Borland and Turbo language products and tools. The goal is to create a standalone business focused on advancing individual developer productivity using the people inside Borland who are focused on the success of these award winning products."

"Serenity Systems International is pleased to announce the publicly available beta of eComStation 1.2R German. The eComStation 1.2 Media Refresh resolves known issues and provides the latest codebase. This version does not significantly change functionality. This release includes fixes to many reported problems, as well as significant enhancements migration and installation."

"Assuming that 'because it's a Mac, it's safe' is no longer wise" is probably one of this book's most important themes. It has been my experience that too many Mac users "know" that OS X is secure and therefore they have nothing to worry about. This book shows just how wrong that attitude is.

"Linus Torvalds doesn't want to change the Linux kernel's software license, and he said so again last week. For good measure this time, he threw in some inflammatory remarks. "I literally feel," wrote Torvalds, "that we do not, as software developers, have the moral right to enforce our rules on hardware manufacturers. We are not crusaders, trying to force people to bow to our superior God." Since the crusades were a foreign adventure responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands, that's not the most diplomatic response, and FSF counsel Eben Moglen refused to be drawn into retaliation when we contacted him for comment."