In a spat over royalties, the European Commission has declared war on accepted global conventions regarding intellectual property rights.

In the article High Availability with Open Source, Josh Kuo looks at three of the popular Open Source projects to implement High Availability redundancy (failover): Heartbeat, keepalived, and CARP. The article talks about where each of these three excels and some implementation ideas. Josh also mentions the DRBD utility to sync two remote filesystems to aid in an advanced High Availability setup.

A lot of things have happened in the past few days concerning Zeta, BeOS, and Haiku. In order to create some order in the chaos, Eugenia and I have created a rough timeline of what happened the past 6-7 years. Read on for the timeline and some more thoughts on the matter. Update: Magnusoft ceases distribution of Zeta. Update II: Access answered the questions posed in the article.

"Sun has always been somewhat of a mysterious company, from its humble origins at Stanford University through the dotcom boom and out the other side. Its numerous changes of strategic direction have confounded attempts to pin the company down. One thing almost everyone agrees on, however, is that Sun still makes very powerful server hardware. So when I was offered the opportunity to get a guided tour of Sun's new 'Project Blackbox', I jumped at the chance."

"Hey Folks - this is Mike Reavey. We're all glad that MS07-017 - the Security Bulletin that fixes the vulnerability in Animated Cursor Handling - has been released, helping to block attacks on that vulnerability. While we released it within 5 days of being notified of attacks, we have received questions from customers about why it took us 3 months to develop and release the fix for this vulnerability. I wanted to provide some insight into the history of this vulnerability, and while doing so, hopefully provide insight into the overall security update lifecycle, including testing, which consumes the greatest amount of time."

Geeks.com were once more very kind to send us one of their products for a review. Geeks sells cheap laptops --among others-- and so we asked for a low-cost laptop without an operating system in it for the purpose of this review. They sent us the IBM T23, (currently selling for just $299) and an extra 256 MB stick of RAM ($30). We tested the laptop with three different OSes, read on for more.

The startup ZenZui is introducing a zooming user interface to facilitate web browsing on mobile phones. The company is commercializing technology that it licensed from Microsoft, in particular the AppLens and LaunchTile interfaces developed by ZenZui's founders while they were at Microsoft Research.

At the Black Hat Conference in Amsterdam, security experts from India demonstrated a special boot loader that gets around Vista's code signing mechanisms.

"Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz loves to splatter the media with the line that Windows, Red Hat Linux and Solaris stand as the only operating systems of significance in the server kingdom. We've spent the last few years struggling to appreciate the seriousness of that claim. Sun's declining system sales failed to inspire much optimism about the company conquering the data centers of tomorrow with a deflating 'venerable' OS. A couple of recent items, however, have tweaked our view of Schwartz's favored claim. It could well be that Solaris - of all things - provides the 'iPod moment' Sun seeks." In the meantime, Sun upped the speed of some of its SPARC chips.

"Like clockwork, the GNOME project released GNOME 2.18 six months after the release of GNOME 2.16. The new version carries a number of improvements over the 2.16 release, but doesn't bring many 'must have' features that would compel users to upgrade right away."

"We are very pleased to announce that Access, the current holders of the BeOS intellectual property, has responded positively to our request for permission to reproduce the BeBook and all the Be Newsletters. As a result, we will be able to release these BeOS legacy documents under a Creative Commons license."

"The Mugshot team has been off learning what we can about all kinds of not-traditionally-open-source technologies and audiences, but recently we've started thinking about how to roll the knowledge back into the Linux desktop. Here's an update (all heavily biased by my personal point of view)."

"The Free Software Foundation has published a third draft of the GPL3 license. The FSF had indicated leading up to this draft that it would be addressing some concerns it had with the Novell-Microsoft agreements in the draft. Here's Novell’s position on the new draft."

Contiki is an open source operating system for memory-constrained networked embedded systems. Version 2.0 of Contiki has just been released. The 2.0 release is the first release from the 2.x series, which brings many new features: dynamic run-time loading and linking of standard ELF object code files; Rime, a protocol stack designed for low-power radio communication; Cooja, a Java-based network simulator for Contiki; and an updated build system that makes cross-compiling for many platforms easy. See the Contiki website for details and downloads.