Stories about: Verbatim

Like the future, open source is already here, it's just unevenly distributed. In particular, Latin America is emerging as a real hotbed of not only free software coding, but free software uptake by governments - to an extent that puts the UK's pathetic bumblings in this area quite to shame.

A British online retailer "runs" its Web site using a bunch of obsolete home computers from the early 1980s, according to Internet monitoring company Netcraft.

Anyone who has participated in the blogosphere in the past two months knows the troubling story of Kathy Sierra, a prominent blogger who was the victim of online threats that included violent sexual acts and murder. When the harassment spread beyond her own blog to two others that were affiliated with other prominent bloggers, Sierra became so terrified that she canceled an upcoming speaking engagement and took a hiatus from blogging.

You see it sprinkled liberally in mailing lists and forum discussions: IANAL. "I am not a lawyer." Of course, legal analysis often follows -- sometimes well informed, but often wildly incorrect or outdated. Debates about GPL enforceability are no different. Copyright law, though, has evolved to shrink the gray areas significantly.

Though the company he founded has been drawn into a legal dispute between The SCO Group and IBM, former Red Hat Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Bob Young has not had much to say about the SCO dispute. At least, that was the case until Wednesday, when Young published an open letter to SCO CEO Darl McBride criticizing him for his management of SCO and countering McBride's recent claims that the open source community is attacking intellectual property laws in Europe and the U.S.

Analysts are balking at The SCO Group's offer to view its proof that there is illegal Unix code in Linux, with one calling the move a publicity stunt. Meanwhile, Linux creator Linus Torvalds last Friday said that he has no plans to look at the code and that the battle between SCO, IBM Corp. and Novell Inc. is on par with a rancorous episode of the Jerry Springer Show.

The DVD+RW Alliance displayed a united front Thursday promoting its standards for DVD+RW (DVD+rewritable) for PCs and video recorders. The group also announced DVD+RW/+R (+recordable) products from some of its members, including Hewlett-Packard (HP), Koninklijke Philips Electronics, Sony and Ricoh.