News

A controversial patch for the imminent kernel 2.6.25 is causing much debate in the developer community: in a similar move to one he made two years ago, the well-known kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman has submitted a patch that prevents closed source USB drivers from using the kernel's USB driver API.

According to market researchers, Gartner, Open Source is one of the biggest IT trends for 2008 and the years to come. The analysts also see green IT, home users as opinion leaders, software as a service, 3D printers and Apple corp. as the Top Ten developments for the next few years.

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) developers have now released version 4.2.3, which fixes a number of bugs.

The Linux Foundation has published part 2 of its interview with Linus Torvalds. The Linux founder talks about patents, Microsoft, Sun, Linux on the desktop and the future of Linux without Linus.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has come to a decision that could be crucial for standards and Open Source software in proposing a consent agreement in a patenting claim, says Andy Updegrove, the Linux Foundation's (LF) legal expert.

Chip giant Intel has released comprehensive documentation on its 965 Express and G35 Express chipsets.

US software vendor, Barracuda Networks, is looking to fight a software patent claim by Trend Micro with support from the Open Source community.

The new Debian "Etch and a half" sub-project is looking to improve hardware compatibility with kernel updates and drivers for Debian 4.0 Linux.

The Finnish cellphone manufacturer Nokia is looking to acquire the Norwegian software enterprise Trolltech for around 104 million euros.

Hewlett-Packard has launched a project dubbed FOSSology to investigate and monitor the use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in the enterprise.