Dutch Parliament Considers Revoking Support for Patent Directive

The battle about Software Patents in Europe seemed as good as lost. The Council of Ministers voted for a directive that basically slapped the European Parliament in the face because they shamelessly put aside a democratic decision taken by the European Parliament. And even though the Parliament still has a second reading where it will have to go trough a lot of trouble to repair the damage done by the Council, it is a serious matter that the Council of Ministers seems to have no idea how sloppy their directive is. It does allow general, broad softwarepatents, practically without restrictions even though several explanations by the Ministers say they don't.

Most Common Screen Resolution is 1024×768 for Surfers

OneStat.com today reported that more and more internet users choose for screen resolution 1024x768 (54%) which is the most popular screen resolution for exploring the internet. While 800x600 has fell from 32% last year down to 25% this year, it is still holds a huge share among users and so developers should still be considering these users when designing their desktop applications. Other resolutions include: 1280x1024 14.1%, 1152x864 4%, 640x480 0.6%, 1600x1200 0.8%, 1152x870 0.1%.

The State of Enterprise IM and VoIP

Just days after Yahoo canned the enterprise version of its free instant-messaging client, AOL announces that it is halting sales of its own enterprise IM offering. This pretty much leaves Microsoft and Sonork playing ball alone in the Enterprise IM'ing market. Skype is an interesting VoIP alternative to Enterprise IM'ing (no ads/spyware according to them) and it now has a version for Linux (Qt-based).

One Sun Engineer’s View of Why Open Sourcing Solaris

Andy Tucker (who OSNews interviewed almost a year ago to the day) has posted some thoughts on his reasons for wanting to open-source Solaris. Speaking for myself, I share many of Andy's reasons and I suspect many of our other engineers do as well. As Andy requests in his blog entry, we want to hear from the community specific requirements and ideas (and not just about the license).