News Archive - November 2006 - News Post
Novell and Microsoft, Fedora Core 6, Vista, Flash and Patents
Saturday 4th November 2006
Category: News
Plenty of things have happened in the past couple of weeks, but perhaps the most intriguing is the event is the announcement of Microsoft working with a GNU/Linux company. Despite calling Linux a cancer, Microsoft have decided to work with Novell, as evidenced by the press release. Will this give GNU/Linux a boost, or will it let Microsoft get the upper hand? Or is it quite inconsequential? Time will tell.
Next up is the release of both Fedora Core 6, known as Zod, and Ubuntu 6.10, known as Edgy Eft. This time around, Fedora wins the interesting release announcement competition, whereas Ubuntu have stuck to the standard fare.
Vista is ever looming closer (although, for a moment, Vista was very far away indeed), with some prospective users unhappy about the EULA. Fortunately for them (although perhaps not so fortunately for others), Microsoft relented and changed the licensing. Of course, another piece of Microsoft has been set loose - Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, although there's always bugs.
Speaking of software releases, we have the good news of a Flash 9 Beta release for GNU/Linux, including both a browser plugin and standalone player. Hopefully, the final release won't be too far behind.
Although you might think that we don't need to hear any more about argument for or against software patents, one article puts the case forward rather well - What's wrong with software patents?. There's also an article including responses from Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, entitled GPLv3: What the hackers say. On the topic of opinions, here are Mike Hommey's words on Firefox and Debian.
There's also news of a developer website set up for GNU/Linux, designed to rival MSDN. There are some benchmarks for ext4, which is already showing some nice performance gains in certain areas. Finally, we are told that Java will open-sourced in 2007.
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