News Bytes

Legislation and More Legislation

Jon Johansen

The trial in Norway of Jon Johansen regarding his involvement in the development of software to circumvent the content encryption used on DVD movies has ended ... again ... for now. As was reported before, Jon was already acquitted of the charges, but an appeal against the verdict was quickly filed by state prosecutors. Happily for Johansen, the appeal court has upheld the earlier acquittal. Less happily, there is the possibility of further appeals to higher Norwegian courts. A detailed report on the story is available at Aftenposten.

Linux Links

Linux Weekly News has released a timeline for the past year.

RMS has written a personal account of his experiences at and opinions of the recent World Summit on the Information Society

Helping to introduce charities to free software [NewsForge]

Using a Linux desktop for graphics and media production

How the WorldVista software is to be used to affordably help medical systems in the less-developed world [NewsForge].

Linux Mobile System's GNU/Linux system boots from a USB pendrive

NewsVac highligted an interesting article at OSNews about the state of video editing on Linux/Unix.

VNUnet reports on the use of Linux in the earthside systems behind the (possibly ill-fated, it now appears) Beagle Mars lander.

An interesting article from O'Reilly.com Myths Open Source Developers Tell Ourselves

The Economist on regional Linux variants

Upcoming Linux conferences and events are listed on Linux Journal's Events page.

News in General

Linux Kernel 2.6 Released

The Linux kernel has a new stable version. Version 2.6.0 was released on the 18th of December. The Changelog can be read here, while a more conversational announcement can be read here. LG has an article in this issue about the changes.

Open Source in Israel

The Register reported earlier this month that the Israeli Treasury was following earlier moves by the Department of Commerce and investigating the possibility of using open source software in place of Microsoft offerings. As noted by Zuri Dar in Haaretz, this could well be no more than a ploy to gouge a better price out of Microsoft for their software. However, there does appear to be some real momentum behind the open source initiatives as the government has instigated plans to distribute free OpenOffice.org CDs to the Israeli public.

Distro News

CollegeLinux

As plugged at NewsVac the CollegeLinux project has released version 2.5 ObiWan

Debian

Debian Weekly News highlighted the publication of the Debian Timeline for 2003.

Lorma

OSNews recently reviewed Lorma linux 4.0. This distribution is based on Fedora (itself related closely to Red Hat), and uses a trimmed down set of packages such that it ships on a single CD. The focus is largely on desktop applications.

Software and Product News

MySQL

Version 5.0.0 of MySQL has been released.

EMC acquires VMware

NewsForge has reported that EMC has acquired VMware

Mick is LG's News Bytes Editor.

[Picture] Born some time ago in Ireland, Michael is currently working on a PhD thesis in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, University College Dublin. The topic of this work is the use of Lamb waves in nondestructive testing. GNU/Linux has been very useful in this work, and Michael has a strong interest in applying free software solutions to other problems in engineering. When his thesis is completed, Michael plans to take a long walk.

Published in Issue 98 of Linux Gazette, January 2004

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