Who said a public outcry - even if it's just on the internet - never helped anyone? Yesterday, we reported on The New York Times' findings that Microsoft lawyers were taking part in raids on opposition groups in Russia. Today, Microsoft has announced a number of steps to fix the situation - the most significant of which is a unilateral software license extended to all NGOs in Russia and several other countries.

InfoWorld's Neil McAllister offers 20 questions to test your knowledge of the open source and free software movements. Which was the first commercial Linux distribution? How many separate clauses make up the typical BSD-style open source license? What is the difference between the GPL and the LGPL?

Piracy is a big problem for large software vendors licensors like Microsoft. As such, the Redmond giant is undertaking several anti-piracy efforts all over the world, and, of course, it attempts to make its software harder to crack through activation and validation. As The New York Times has discovered, however, the prevalence of pirated Microsoft software in Russia is giving the Russian authorities a pretence to raid the offices of outspoken advocacy groups or opposition media - supported by Microsoft lawyers. Update: Microsoft responds with a blog post that says all the right things, including "Microsoft will create a new unilateral software license for NGOs that will ensure they have free, legal copies of our products."

Technologists fear (and loathe) that which has no purpose. Why must some insist in deriding an operating system like Haiku that doesn't fit their particular needs or precepts of what has a purpose, when, it's advanced enough to have a decent web-browser and productivity software? Today I shall be further offending these people's tastes with a look into LoseThos--a pure 64-bit, preemptive-multitasking, multicored PC operating system that is intended to be used as a secondary operating system for user's recreational programming on their best PC while dual booting a primary system such as Linux or Windows where they do networking and other modern activities such as multimedia. Yes, LoseThos has no networking, no security of any kind, and VGA graphics; but it certainly has a purpose: to be fun! (for programmers, at least)

EULAs, and whatever nonsense they may contain, are legally binding in the US. Have a great weekend!

Yesterday's back-pedaling from Apple has been very well received in the industry. Two companies who were bitten pretty hard by Apple's policies - Google (through AdMob) and Adobe - have both responded to yesterday's changes, and as you can expect, they're both pretty happy.

Python programmers shouldn't get too smug. While many people agree that Python is designed in a way that makes it a highly readable language, there can still be problems with legacy, untested Python code too. Porting legacy Perl to Python can be a daunting task. In this article, learn some of the theory behind dealing with legacy code, including what not to do.

This one doesn't come as a total surprise: Nokia has replaced its CEO. Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo is on his way out, and he's being replaced by Stephen Elop, head of Microsoft's Business division. This will be the first time someone from Foreign (from Nokia's perspective) will lead the company, but some fresh, outside blood may be just what the doctor ordered.

Four months ago, amidst a backlash from government regulators and privacy advocates, Google stopped collecting Wi-Fi data with its Street View cars. But that doesn't mean Google has stopped collecting wireless data altogether, and neither have other companies such as Apple.

Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister sees recent experiments enabling a resurgence for JavaScript on the server, one likely to dent Java's role in the data center. 'Today, projects such as CommonJS and Node.js are extending JavaScript even further, allowing it to take on Java's traditional role in the data center. In a fascinating role reversal, JavaScript is becoming the versatile, powerful, all-purpose language for the Web, while Java risks becoming a kind of modern-day Cobol," McAllister writes. And though such experiments have a ways to go, the benefits of JavaScript as a server-side language are clear and striking.

Very good news out of Cupertino just now. It took quite a bit of negative press, but Apple has finally caved in: the company is dropping its restriction on third-party development tools for iOS. Also, the company has published all its App Store review guidelines out in the open for the first time. It took a little too long, but very good news nonetheless.

So, we have Intel and AMD. These guys are doing pretty well in laptops, servers, and of course desktops, but when it comes to mobile devices, they've so far been unable to adapt the x86 architecture to the stricter requirements that come with those devices. ARM, on the other hand, pretty much owns this market at this point. And you know what? It's time for Intel and AMD to get worried - really worried. ARM has just announced its Cortex-A15 MPCore chips - which will reach 2.5Ghz in quad-core configurations.

Remember the Kno dual-screen tablet we talked about earlier this year? The massive dualscreen tablet, aimed at the education market, is supposed to change the way students carry around textbooks - by eliminating textbooks altogether. The company behind the Kno has secured another boatload of funding, and the device will ship before year's end.

"Yesterday's release of iOS 4.1 was good news for iPhone gamers and iPhone 3G owners who had performance issues post-4.0, but bad news for jailbreakers, with the Dev Team themselves warning users not to upgrade to 4.1 as there was no known way to reverse the baseband post-update. As usual, though, what's true in the cat-and-mouse jailbreaking scene one day is not true the other, and now there's good news for jailbreakers, at least in theory. iPhone hacker pod2g has revealed on Twitter that he has successfully discovered a new bootrom exploit, and even better: all the new iOS hardware including the iPhone 4 and new iPod Touch is vulnerable to it."