Summer Schedule.
We meet each first Thursday on the month at 7 p.m. at Dooley's Pub,
We are NOT meeting this week. Next meeting is 03-SEP-09.

VMware buying SpringSource for $420 million.
Business software maker VMware Inc has agreed to buy privately held SpringSource for $420 million, its biggest-ever acquisition, to beef up a portfolio of programs that help companies run data centers. more... and VMware buys SpringSource for US$420M and VMware: $420 Million SpringSource Deal Pressures Red Hat.

Ohio LinuxFest 2009 Sept 25-26.
It’s only a little more than a month from now, the seventh Ohio LinuxFest. This year we will be celebrating 40 years of Unix! If you haven’t heard, we are very excited and proud to have Doug McIlroy give a key note address this year. Doug was the head of research department at Bell Laboratories where Unix was invented and is credited for the inventing Unix pipes as well as writing many of the Unix tools we still use in some form today. more...

You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again.
Wired looks at the use of Flash cookies implemented by Adobe's browser plugin. "Several services even use the surreptitious data storage to reinstate traditional cookies that a user deleted, which is called ‘re-spawning’ in homage to video games where zombies come back to life even after being 'killed,' more...

Red Hat celebrates its 10-year IPO anniversary.
Ten years ago today, on August 11, 1999, Red Hat saw its shares triple in an initial public offering that ushered in a new era of commercial open-source prosperity. Iain Gray, then a Sun employee and now Red Hat's vice president of Global Support, writes nostalgically: "I remember sitting in the Sun office in UK watching the stock skyrocket, thinking the world had gone mad." more...

One billion Firefoxes.
Let me give you an Internet history lesson. Five-years ago, unless you were one of die-hard Netscape Navigator users or a handful of Opera users, your Web browser choices were Internet Explorer or... ah... Internet Explorer. more... and Firefox 3.6 Alpha 1 Blows Version 3.5 Out Of The Water.

Microsoft acknowledges competition from Canonical and Red Hat.
Microsoft's latest 10K filing with the SEC sees the company officially acknowledging that it faces competition from Linux vendors on the client side of its business, namely desktop Windows. Citing Canonical and Red Hat as "competing commercial software products", alongside Apple's products, Microsoft acknowledges that partners such as Hewlett-Packard and Intel have been "actively working with alternative Linux-based operating systems" more... and Ballmer: We're cheaper than Apple! (but not Linux).

XML Patent for Microsoft.
The core of US Patent 7,571,169 which Microsoft was granted on August 4th refers to – "A word-processing document stored in a single XML file that may be manipulated by applications that understand XML". more... and Patent fun: Microsoft Word sales banned in the US.

Apache updates to 2.2.13 for security.
A new Apache HTTP server release is out, fixing at least 4 security issues in the popular open source web server. None of the fixed security issues look like show stoppers to me. more...

Misc.
F-Spot 0.6.0 is out!
Apple: iPhone jailbreaking could knock out transmission towers.
Perl6 Slated for Release by Spring 2010.
Review Update: Moblin 2.0 keeps getting better.
EFF on the RealDVD decision.
FreePBX 3.0 Debuts.

How To Tips.

KDE 4.3.0 Released.
The KDE Community has announced the immediate availability of KDE 4.3 "Caizen". "KDE 4.3 continues to refine the unique features brought in previous releases while bringing new innovations. With the 4.2 release aimed at the majority of end users, KDE 4.3 offers a more stable and complete product for the home and small office." more... and A first look at KDE 4.3.

CentOS back from brink of death.
CentOS is alive. Two days after a core group of developers posted an open letter to primary admin Lance Davis, threatening to fork the open source OS if he didn't discuss his apparent disappearance from the project, Davis has answered their call - and he seems to have quelled their complaints. more... and Progress at CentOS and Weirdness at CentOS.

Sony open sources digital effects software.
Film effects specialist Sony Pictures Imageworks has released five digital image-manipulation software tools under open source licenses. While Imageworks has released other open source software in the past, the release of five tools at once brings its involvement in open source to a new level, the company said on Monday, in an announcement marking the beginning of the Siggraph computer graphics trade show in New Orleans. more...

BIND 9 denial of service being actively exploited.
Internet Systems Consortium, the developers of the BIND DNS server, is reporting a denial of service vulnerability that is being actively exploited. "Receipt of a specially-crafted dynamic update message to a zone for which the server is the master may cause BIND 9 servers to exit. Testing indicates that the attack packet has to be formulated against a zone for which that machine is a master. more...

A first look at Eclipse 4.
As is already indicated by version 0.9, which has just been released, Eclipse 4 will incorporate several familiar web technologies and put them to new uses. The Eclipse development environment has become a very popular open source project. more...

Skype shutdown: where are free software and free protocols?
The Skype copyright issue: The problem is that when eBay bought Skype, they were in too much of a hurry to read the fine print. Skype’s original owners retained the copyright for some crucial portion of Skype, specifically the peer-to-peer side of it — the same code which is probably responsible of making sure that user A routes packets for user B without his or her knowledge of authorisation. more...

Company Receives Patent for Podcasting.
VoloMedia, a podcast analytics, advertising, and distribution company, just received a patent for "providing episodic media," including podcasts. According to the company, which filed for the patent in November 2003, U.S. Patent 7,568,213 covers all episodic media downloads, not just the RSS-dependent downloads that power today's podcasts. more...

Sweet Home 3D: Open Source, Cross Platform Design Application.
Though Sweet Home 3D tops Google's SketchUp in a number of areas, it's still not much help for someone with no design sense. more...

Misc.
Mono coming to the iPhone.
Open Invention Network starts buying patents
5 Excellent Downloadable eBooks To Teach Yourself Linux.
The grumpy editor's e-book reader.
Lucidor 0.6 E-Book Reader Can Handle Web Feeds.
myTouch 3G: Improved Droid Still Has Some Squeaky Joints.
The Book vs. The Kindle.

How To Tips.