Because OSNews is technically a site from the US, and because the technology industry is decidedly a US-centric industry, we often talk about US politics having adverse effects on technology - or, the other way around. That's why I've been detailing the political movements here in The Netherlands with regards to net neutrality. After a lot of positive news, I've now got some bad news - bad news that involves the largest political party trying to block net neutrality - because one of its members of parliament, Afke Schaart, is a former KPN employee. And yes, KPN is the carrier that first announced it was going to block and throttle traffic.

"Today we welcome Oracle's donation of code that has previously been proprietary to the Apache Software Foundation, it is great to see key user features released in a form that can be included into LibreOffice."

If there is one organisation that I hold in very high regard and have a lot of respect for, it's the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The EFF formed after a US Secret Service raid on Steve Jackson Games' office, back in 1990, which owned the Illuminati Online BBS and later the IO.com domain. As Slashdot reports, the IO.com domain has been sold, and all email, shell, and homepage services will be transferred. A piece of internet history, right here, and a landmark in the fight for online freedom and free speech.

Well, I have to say this: Lodsys got some balls. After Apple threatening them with legal action, Lodsys has gone on the offensive, and has proceeded to sue third party iOS application developers. While Lodsys had first given developers 21 days to negotiate an agreement, due to Apple's legal threats, the company has now moved its litigation timing to an earlier date.

"Apple CEO Steve Jobs and a team of Apple executives will kick off the company's annual Worldwide Developers Conference with a keynote address on Monday, June 6 at 10:00 a.m. At the keynote, Apple will unveil its next generation software - Lion, the eighth major release of Mac OS X; iOS 5, the next version of Apple's advanced mobile operating system which powers the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch; and iCloud, Apple's upcoming cloud services offering." Right-o.

Canonical Ltd., the company behind Ubuntu Linux, estimates that the product has over 12 million users worldwide. And why not? Ubuntu is free and it runs more than ten thousand applications. It has a vibrant user community, websites covering everything you might ever need to know, good tutorials, a paid support option, and more. Yet I often hear friends and co-workers casually criticize Ubuntu. Perhaps this the price of success. Or is it? In this article I'll analyze common criticisms and try to sort fact from fiction.

Well this makes a change. Linus Torvalds has announced that the next version of the Linux Kernel release is to be '3.0'. "I decided to just bite the bullet, and call the next version 3.0. It will get released close enough to the 20-year mark, which is excuse enough for me, although honestly, the real reason is just that I can no longer comfortably count as high as 40."

It turns out that a lot of people haven't been paying attention. Over the weekend, a story about how Microsoft is earning more from HTC's Android devices than from its own Windows Phone 7 sales spread all across the web, with surprised reactions everywhere. Anyone who has been paying attention to Microsoft's recent patent trolling regarding Android could've seen this coming.

There's a new REBOL like programming language in town. It's called Red, it's BSD licensed and contrary to REBOL and Boron, Red is a compiled language. The Syllable project is proud to announce that Red programs now run on Syllable Desktop. Here is a screenshot from a demo program. Syllable is the third Red target platform, after Windows and Linux.

It's funny how trying to have a consistent system design makes you constantly jump from one area of the designed OS to another. I initially just tried to implement interrupt handling, and now I'm cleaning up the design of an RPC-based daemon model, which will be used to implement interrupt handlers, along with most other system services. Anyway, now that I get to something I'm personally satisfied with, I wanted to ask everyone who's interested to check that design and tell me if anything in it sounds like a bad idea to them in the short or long run. That's because this is a core part of this OS' design, and I'm really not interested in core design mistakes emerging in a few years if I can fix them now. Many thanks in advance.

You don't need a Chromebook to try Google's Linux-based Chrome OS. Here's how to give it a try today.

After having an interesting discussion with Brendan on the topic of deadlocks in threaded and asynchronous event handling systems (see the comments on this blog post), I just had something to ask to the developers on OSnews: could you live without blocking API calls? Could you work with APIs where lengthy tasks like writing to a file, sending a signal, doing network I/O, etc is done in a nonblocking fashion, with only callbacks as a mechanism to return results and notify your software when an operation is done?

"KDE has released a first beta of the upcoming 4.7 release of the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, the KDE Applications and the KDE Frameworks, which is planned for July 27, 2011. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing new and old functionality."

It seems that the fight between Amazon and Apple has just entered into a new phase. The two companies are already in the world's silliest tussle over the trademark for the term 'app store', and now Amazon has kicked it up a notch by launching a competitor to the Mac App Store. While not nearly as large as the Mac App Store, it contains a number of big-name titles which are not available through Apple's offering - such as Microsoft Office.