Monsoon Multimedia, which was subjected to the first US lawsuit on non-compliance with the GPL, has published a press release in which they agree to make any modifications public and thereby complying to the requirements stipulated in the GPL license. "Monsoon Multimedia today announced efforts to fully comply with the GPL. Monsoon is in settlement negotiations with BusyBox to resolve the matter and intends to fully comply with all open-source software license requirements. Monsoon will make modified BusyBox source code publicly available on the company web-site in the coming weeks."

"Computers in the European Union should be sold without a bundled operating system, according to this submission to the European Commission. It says that the bundling of Microsoft Windows with computers is not in the public interest, and prevents meaningful competition in the operating system market." This is the conclusion of the Globalisation Instute, a think tank located in Brussels. Please note this is not a(n) (official) statement from the European Commission.

Just like Eugenia yesterday, I also upgraded my laptop's Ubuntu Feisty installation to Gutsy a few days ago. The upgrade process went completely awry, though, so I was forced to do a fresh install. Not a bad thing, as it gave me the opportunity to take a look at Ubuntu's soon-to-be-released Gutsy Gibbon with GNOME 2.20

Linux users want two things for their hardware: drivers; and easy access to those drivers. The first is finally happening; and now, thanks to a Dell Linux project called DKMS (Dynamic Kernel Module Support), the other is on its way. Dell and Linux distributors have been working on DKMS for about five years now. Its purpose is to create a framework where kernel-dependent module source can reside, so that it is very easy to rebuild modules. In turn, this enables Linux distributors and driver developers to create driver drops without having to wait for new kernel releases. For users, all this makes it easier to get up-to-the-minute drivers without hand compiling device drivers.

The Software Freedom Law Center has filed the first US infringement case to defend the General Public License version 2. The case has been brought against Monsoon Multimedia, a specialist in video viewing and capturing devices, which has offices in Silicon Valley and in New Delhi. SFLC legal director Dan Ravicher told The Register: "This case could have far-reaching implications because it's the first case in the US to enforce copyright in GPL."

A new release of dwm is available, dwm 4.5 "dwm is a dynamic window manager for X. It manages windows in tiled and floating layouts. Either layout can be applied dynamically, optimizing the environment for the application in use and the task performed."

Ian Murdock took the stage in one of the small rooms at the Moscone Center West to talk about the OpenSolaris Binary Distribution that is currently known as Project Indiana. We captured all of the slides Ian had shown, and while most of the information he shared was just reiterated from his past talks, there was some interesting details worth sharing. Among the advantages of Project Indiana is that it will use Sun's ZFS as the default file-system, and Project Indiana will be taking full advantage of its abilities to create snapshots and perform rollbacks if something with the system's software goes wrong. With Sun's past work with the GNOME project, GNOME will be the desktop environment in Project Indiana said Ian Murdock.

"For at least a decade, the standard advice to every computer user has been to run antivirus software. But new, more commercial, more complex and stealthier types of malware have people in the industry asking: will antivirus software be effective for much longer? Among the threats they see are malware that uses the ability of the latest processors to run virtual machines that would be hidden from antivirus programs." Note: Please note that our icon contest is still running! So if you have an idea on how to rework this story's icon, read this.

The second KDE e.V. quarterly report is available, covering topics like KDE's involvement in the Google Summer of Code, the SQO-OSS project (Open Source Software Quality Observatory), akonadi, ODF, and Oxygen meetings, as well as reports from marketing, HIG, and sysadmin teams.

"Purpose-built Fedora distributions, called 'spins', are a recent addition to that community in an attempt to reach additional users. The idea is to use tools like Revisor to create a custom collection of software that work well together for a particular set of tasks. This collection can then be installed or run from a live CD, providing an easy means to have the right collection of tools immediately, rather than after a lengthy yum install pass."

Mandriva Linux 2008 RC2 'Kepler' was released today. New features since the release of RC1 include the final release of GNOME 2.20, the inclusion of the new 8.41.7 version of ATI's proprietary driver in the non-free repository to support Radeon HD cards, significant kernel updates that improve support for certain ATA controllers and many audio chipsets, some new features in the urpmi and rpmdrake package management tools, and over 500 bug fixes since RC2. Download information and more is available on the full release information page here, the overall Mandriva Linux 2008 release notes are here, and a guide to the new features of Mandriva Linux 2008 is here.

"For a while now, Clearlooks has been the default theme in Fedora; in fact, for a long time, Clearlooks has been the default theme in a number of distros thanks to its place as Gnome's default. Aiming to give Fedora its own distinct and modern appearance is Nodoka: based on its own theme engine it's extremely fast, and when seen in combination with the rest of the artwork for Fedora 8 is beautiful. Read on for an interview with Martin Sourada and some screenshots of the theme."

In a statement published this week, SCO Group blames the success of Linux and 'negative publicity', as causes for its decline - the company may need to wind up its operations after its copyright case against Novell collapsed, prompting it to file for bankruptcy. My take: In Dutch, we have a saying: hij die kaatst, kan de bal verwachten.

For cost reasons the space agency is more and more interested in using Java for safety-critical missions. Until recently the lack of a time-predictable standard library has been a major hurdle to Java adoption in that particular field. It is no more the case as demonstrated by this AIAA (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics) paper presented the first day of the Space 2007 conference (Long Beach, CA) and introducing the first fully time-deterministic (and open-source) library for Java: Javolution.