The Software Freedom Law Center has announced the end of the Monsoon Multimedia GPL compliance lawsuit. "As a result of the plaintiffs agreeing to dismiss the lawsuit and reinstate Monsoon Multimedia's rights to distribute BusyBox under the GPL, Monsoon Multimedia has agreed to appoint an Open Source Compliance Officer within its organization to monitor and ensure GPL compliance, to publish the source code for the version of BusyBox it previously distributed on its Web site, and to undertake substantial efforts to notify previous recipients of BusyBox from Monsoon Multimedia of their rights to the software under the GPL. The settlement also includes an undisclosed amount of financial consideration paid by Monsoon Multimedia to the plaintiffs."

The GNOME Foundation has recently taken some grief for its participation in the ECMA committee which is working on the standardization of Microsoft's OOXML document format. But there has been remarkably little information on just what the Foundation is doing. This article looks at what is going on and whether it is appropriate for the Foundation to be participating in this exercise. Click below (subscribers only) for the full text.

LinuxDevices looks at the iRiver Unit2. "iRiver is readying a Linux-based media recorder/player comprised of a detachable mobile unit and tethered docking station. The Unit2's base station offers a DVD/CD player, TV tuner, and PC-style I/O, while the detachable display features a 7-inch WVGA (800x480) touchscreen, WiFi, and USB."

The latest Fedora Weekly News, number 107, is out. It has updates on the status of the Fedora 8 release, including blocker bugs and testing needed for the ALSA kernel. Lots of other information of interest to the Fedora community is also included, click below for the issue.

full circle, the Ubuntu community magazine, has released issue #6 with articles on upgrading Feisty to Gutsy, using Photoshop plugins in the Gimp, an interview with John Phillips about Open Font Library, and more.

CNET has a review of the Asus Eee laptop, which is a small, lightweight system running Linux. "The Eee PC doesn't use a Microsoft operating system, which is part of the reason it's so inexpensive. Instead, Asus supplies its own Linux-based graphical user interface. The laptop also ships with some 40 applications, which is arguably more than you'd get with a standard Windows laptop. It includes Firefox for browsing the Web, Skype, OpenOffice and SMPlayer for video playback."

The first cut at the speaker list for FOSS.IN has been announced. The conference will be held in Bangalore, India, December 4-8. "This year, I simply do not have the energy to make a separate post about all the famous names who are coming to FoSS.IN, but let me wave to Rusty Russel, Mitchell Baker, James Morris, Jim Grisanzio, Thomas Gleixner, Harald Welte, Sam Hocevar, Danese Cooper, Andrew Cooper Cowie, Josh Berkus, Till Adam, Ulrich Drepper and many others who are coming this year." Click below for more details.

Linux-Watch takes a look at an IDG server report that shows Linux losing in the server market. "Let's look closer at what IDG is really doing. First, the actual number of Linux servers is still increasing. What's "decreased" is its rate of increase. Despite the impression you may get from Microsoft ads, almost no one is turning in Linux servers for Windows servers."

Jonathan Roberts interviews Dimitris Glezos. "Free software is used all around the world, and as such it needs to be translated to all kinds of different locales. Fedora has a very active translation community, and they decided it was time that some better tools existed for contributing translations and integrating with upstream. To find out more about this, I talked with Dimitris Glezos, discussing the new Transifex project, what it was like to work on a Google Summer of Code Project, and much more..."

Foresight has updated initscripts (information exposure).

Gentoo has updated qt (buffer overflow), sylpheed (format string vulnerability).

Red Hat has updated php (multiple vulnerabilities), httpd (denial of service, cross-site scripting).

Slackware has updated firefox, seamonkey (multiple vulnerabilities).

SUSE has updated fetchmail, flac, opera 9.24, util-linux, openssh (various issues).

Ubuntu has updated libpng (several vulnerabilities).

No Starch Press is holding an auction to benefit the FreeBSD Foundation. "Open source software depends on community support and the efforts of countless non-profits, like The FreeBSD Foundation. In an enlightened example of a for-profit company acting to benefit a non-profit organization, book publisher No Starch Press of San Francisco, California will auction the first copy of the second edition of "Absolute FreeBSD" to the highest bidder. All proceeds will benefit The FreeBSD Foundation."

The Software Freedom Law Center has landed firmly in Sun's corner in its patent dispute with NetApp. ""NetApp, in bringing this litigation, has announced that it wishes to prevent Sun from sharing ZFS with the community. This conduct is a misuse of questionable patents to prevent the spread of valuable technology. Using patent threats and litigation against free software and open source communities is an abuse of the public interest the law is supposed to serve."

Fast on the heels of the newly release Gutsy Gibbon, the Ubuntu project begins work on Hardy Heron. "The doors are now open for uploads to Hardy Heron, the next in the Ubuntu line of releases, due for release in the first half of 2008. We are ready and waiting for your contributions to what is certain to be our best release yet!"

Judith Myerson compares the latest versions of KDE and GNOME on O'Reilly. "With the new features that Gnome and KDE (K Desktop Environment) are adding, each desktop environment is challenging the other for a larger share of the market. If Linux-like operating systems come with one desktop environment, the user has the option to add to the other. Because of the ever-increasing sophistication of the new features, some latest versions of the operating system are including packages for both desktop environments, allowing users to have the option of switching from one desktop environment to another. In this article I will briefly talk about the new features of both Gnome and KDE, and then look at some similarities and important differences between the two desktop environments."

Linux-Watch reports that York Capital Management is interested in buying parts of the bankrupt SCO. "No one would buy this plot element in a TV drama like Boston Legal, but The SCO Group claims it has a buyer lined up, a subsidiary of York Capital Management that wants to buy its Unix business and associated Linux lawsuits. One might well ask, "What business?" SCO is in danger of being delisted from the Nasdaq stock exchange; it's filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy; it's lost all claims to the Unix IP (intellectual property) to Linux rival Novell; and its Unix business continues to decline and lose money. Who would want to buy such a company's assets?"

Debian has updated zoph (SQL injection) and xen-utils (insecure temp files).

Gentoo has updated mldonkey (privilege escalation), hplip (privilege escalation) and imagemagick (multiple vulnerabilities).

SUSE has updated firefox (multiple vulnerabilities).

Doc Searls covers an ICANN debate on the future of the whois command, the comment period closes at the end of October. "Raise your hand if you use whois every day. Even if your hand isn't up, and you just regard whois as am essential sysadmin tool, this post is for you. Because if you're interested in keeping whois working for the those it was made for in the first place, you need to visit the battlefield where whois' future is being determined right now. That is, you must be Beowulf to the Grendel that is the Intellectual Property Community. Worse, you must confront him in the vast cave that is ICANN."

The 2008 Linux storage and filesystem workshop will be held in San Jose, California next February 25 and 26. There is a call for proposals out there for those who would like to participate. "This year we're trying to concentrate on more problem solving sessions, short term projects and joint sessions."

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 25, 2007 is available.