Behind the Debian and Mozilla Dispute Over Use of Firefox

  Submitted by brewin Mozilla, Gecko 15 Comments
As previously reported, Debian plans to release its newest version, Etch, in December, and wants Mozilla's Firefox Web browser to be part of the distribution. Mozilla, however, told Debian it couldn't release the software without its accompanying artwork. Now a legal expert says that the existing distinctions between copyright and trademark laws should have prevented this from becoming an issue in the first place. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols also discusses the issue.
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Police Charge Hans Reiser with Murder

  Submitted by JCooper In the News 55 Comments
We at OSNews have tiptoed around the following unfolding story for a while now, scared we would wrongly damage Hans Reiser's image. However, now that he has been arrested as a suspect in this case, we cannot ignore it any longer. "Oakland police today arrested the estranged husband of 31-year-old Nina 'Nenasha' Reiser on charges of murder even though in the month since she vanished, investigators have found no trace of her body. Hans Reiser, a man who has recently refused to cooperate with investigators, was arrested today along with two additional unidentified people around 11 a.m. at an acquaintance's home in the 6900 block of Simson Street, according to police."
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The Secret Failures of Microsoft

  Submitted by Moulinneuf Microsoft 22 Comments
Considering how many industry giants have partnered with Microsoft in WMA and PlaysForSure it would appear that Microsoft is a leader in successful consumer electronics technology. That's not the case. All of these partners hooked up with Microsoft simply because they had no idea of what to do on their own. Few even experimented with their own independent technology plans; they simply picked Microsoft because the company seemed like a safe bet at delivering technology. They obviously didn't do their homework. The big secret they missed is that Microsoft hasn't ever earned significant profits in the consumer hardware business, nor has its executives proven any business acumen in delivering what consumers want in hardware or creative entertainment, excluding, of course, Microsoft's impressive and highly sophisticated keyboard and mouse division.
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Linus Torvalds Gets Intel Mac Mini

  Submitted by george Apple 37 Comments
Linus Torvalds has picked up one of Apple's new Intel-based Mac minis to play with, but the Linux creator still prefers Apple's old PowerPC architecture for his primary desktop machine. "I'm actually still running a G5, but I also have a Mac mini," Torvalds revealed today in an e-mail to ZDNet Australia. "I like the design, and it's the right form-factor to be a replacement machine for my wife and daughter, but sadly, Apple screwed up the firmware in various stupid ways."
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IE7 To Debut in October

Internet Explorer 41 Comments
Microsoft has confirmed that IE7 will be released as an optional download later this month. The long-awaited next version of Microsoft's browser software will be pushed out as an automatic update a "few weeks" later, probably as part of Microsoft's regular Patch Tuesday update cycle in either November or December. Firms not ready to install IE7 will be able to temporarily block the update.
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Vista-Inspired Windows Mobile 6 Spied on Web

Wireless 19 Comments
Some nice-looking screenshots of Microsoft's next version of Windows Mobile - codenamed 'Crossbow' - have popped up on the web to show the upcoming operating system's swankier graphics. The images come courtesy of MSMobileNews, which has a selection of shots on offer. Meanwhile, the similarly names MSMobiles has a smaller pic showing Windows Mobile 6.0/Windows Mobile 2007's Vista-like folder icons.
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Microsoft Struggles with Patch Tuesday

Windows 11 Comments
Microsoft on Tuesday released a slew of patches for Windows and Office, but a glitch prevented the company from pushing the updates out automatically. The patches, which include critical fixes for both Office and Windows, can be manually downloaded from Microsoft's Web site, and the company said it hopes the more-automated tools will have the patch available later on Tuesday. Microsoft said that its technical teams "have been working around the clock" to solve the updating problems.
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Ballmer on PC’s Role in Web Services World

Microsoft 6 Comments
Microsoft's Steve Ballmer said on Tuesday that lines between on-premise software and Internet services are blurring, an industry shift the company is embracing. During his talk, Ballmer said many websites can be described as 'click to run', where a service is delivered via a Web site but runs on a PC. "I do think that we're in a transition where software goes from something that's in its pre-Internet day to something we call Live (Microsoft's hosted services), where you have click-to-run capability on a Web site... But software will still execute on a PC," Ballmer said in response to questions.
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Microsoft Promises Vista Security

  Submitted by snds24 Windows 44 Comments
A senior Microsoft executive has promised that its new operating system will be more secure than ever. Jean-Philippe Courtois, president of Microsoft International, said that beefing-up security was one reason behind delays to Windows Vista. Microsoft has been criticised for flaws in previous systems that left users vulnerable to attacks by hackers. Mr Courtois said Microsoft had done "tons of work to make Vista a fantastic experience when it comes to security".
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iXsystems Announces Acquisition of PC-BSD

  Submitted by Charles A Landemaine PC-BSD 90 Comments
"iXsystems, an enterprise-class hardware solution provider, announced today its acquisition of PC-BSD, a rock solid UNIX operating system based on FreeBSD. PC-BSD is a fully functional desktop operating system running FreeBSD version 6, with a KDE desktop interface and graphical system installer. Its PBI system, developed exclusively for PC-BSD, lets users download and install their applications in a self-extracting and installing format. iXsystems' acquisition of PC-BSD will provide funding to the PC-BSD project to increase distribution of PC-BSD and develop future versions of PC-BSD. Development is currently underway for a version of PC-BSD that will allow for easy installation and operation on servers, workstations, and laptops."
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Hakon Wium Lie: For Opera, Smaller Is Better

  Submitted by abdavidson Opera 13 Comments
Hakon Wium Lie must feel a special kinship with the "Band of Brothers" soliloquy that Shakespeare reserves for Henry V. "We few we, happy few, we band of brothers..." the king proclaims before his men head into battle. With all of Microsoft's riches and power behind it, Internet Explorer has dominated the Web browser market since Netscape's defeat in the late 1990s. But as CTO of Opera Software, Wium Lie's job is to figure out how to incorporate the best technology possible in his company's software - and in this he's stolen a beat on Opera's much bigger rival.
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Ray Noorda, The CEO Who Led Novell To LAN Dominance, Dies At 82

  Submitted by Moulinneuf Novell and Ximian 9 Comments
Ray Noorda, the son of Dutch immigrants who drove Novell Netware to become the dominant local area network operating system in the 1980s, died Monday at the age of 82 after a long bout with Alzheimer's disease. Noorda was the first to clearly articulate that the many interoperating parts of the computer industry meant that one company needed to cooperate with another to ensure their products worked together. In some realms, they might be both partners and competitors, he noted, in a relationship he summed up as 'co-opetition'.
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Developers Are from Mars, Programmers from Venus

General Development 36 Comments
Many of us use the terms "programmer" and "developer" interchangeably. When someone asks me what I do for a living I tend to describe my vocation as "computer programmer" rather than "software developer", because the former seems to be understood more readily by those unfamiliar with IT. Even when writing pieces for this site, I tend to swap back and forth between the two terms, to try and avoid sounding repetitive. But in truth, there is a world of difference between a computer programmer and a software developer (editor's note: aka engineer and there is also a difference with a software architect).
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Is Windows Still Relevant?

Windows 65 Comments
In the increasingly Google-YouTube-Web 2.0 age we inhabit, it's become fashionable to dismiss Windows as a relic. Ask around the office. You'll hear the Gen Xers sneer about how Microsoft's operating system is, well, so yesterday. Even a fair number of IT greybeards are warming to the notion that the times, they are a changing.
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Terra Soft To Build World’s First Cell-Based Supercomputer

  Submitted by Deacon N. Stanosheck Linux 7 Comments
Tomorrow, Terra Soft will officially announce the construction of the world's first Cell-based supercomputing cluster. Terra Soft will use the test cluster 'E.coli' to conduct advanced software development, optimization, and testing with emphasis on Y-HPC and Y-Bio applied to the Cell Broadband Engine. The production cluster 'Amoeba' will be made available to select University and Department of Energy laboratories to further life sciences research. The clusters will incorporate, in part, Cell-based PS3 systems.
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