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Submission + - Microsoft’s Got Nothin’ – The Pa (everydaylht.com)

An anonymous reader writes: In the last three years, Microsoft claims to have entered into over 600 licensing agreements with companies small and large over alleged patent violations in "Linux". One consistent feature of all these agreements is that their contents are unknown. No one, other than Microsoft and the relevant "licensee", knows which parts of "Linux" violate which patents. Another consistent feature is that most of the "licensees" are small companies without the resources to take on Microsoft in a patent claim. However, there are a number of larger or more high profile companies that have also entered into such agreements, including Amazon, Novell, Xandros, Turbolinux, TomTom and most recently HTC. The whole situation is clouded in mystery under a veil of PR speak and mumbo jumbo. So what the hell is going on? What can we deduce from what we know so far?
Government

Submission + - Library of Congress to Release OS Software (digitalpreservation.gov)

An anonymous reader writes: The Library of Congress has established an internal process to start creating more open source software which will make it easier for software developers and sponsors within the Library to produce software that can be freely redistributed to users worldwide. The Library has released some open source software to this point, concentrating on developing tools that support digital preservation processes, including the secure transfer of digital files. This includes the release of a full suite of digital content transfer tools that support the Bagit specification.
Software

Submission + - 6 of the Best Free Linux Office Suites (linuxlinks.com)

An anonymous reader writes: An office suite is a collection of related software for business and other uses. The software is distributed together in a single package, with a consistent graphical interface, and with strong interaction between the different components.

The types of software included in an office suite typically consist of word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database and much more. For many users the office suite (together with a web browser and email client) represents the cornerstone of their computing day. A high quality office suite is therefore a necessity for any computing platform.

The market heavyweights in this software field are Microsoft Office (non-free proprietary software available for Microsoft Windows and Apple's Mac OS X) and OpenOffice.org, the latter of which is released under a freely distributable license and is available for Linux and many other operating systems. However, there are a number of other strong office suites that are available for Linux.

Read more

Censorship

Submission + - Sourceforge Bans the "Evils" from Free Software 7

neo00 writes: "Syrians, Sudanese, N. Koreans, Cubans and Iranians will now be prohbitied from downloading or contributing to FOSS projects hosted by Sourceforge.net. According to sf.net terms of use, persons residing one of the countries on which the US government imposes sanctions, will be banned from accessing the site contents. An act that violates the Freedoms of Free Software and the "No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups" from the OSS definition.
US sanctions on these countries were initiated or hardened during the administration of Bush who called them the "Axis of Evil"."
Intel

Novell and Intel Team Up For Moblin On Netbooks 29

ruphus13 writes "The Mobile and Netbook space already has several Open Source OS providers. Android has been making its way into netbooks, and Moblin, LiMo and Ubuntu are also alternatives for OSes on netbooks and mobile handhelds. Now, Novell has also joined the fray, but rather than porting openSuSE, they have teamed up with Intel to get OEMs to use Moblin for their mobile devices. From the article: 'With the other tools and benefits that Moblin offers OEMs and developers, it's really a rather smart approach that could potentially yield a better netbook experience (for developers and consumers), maximize development resources, and produce quality software in minimal time. I don't think Novell is eschewing SUSE, but in its current form, it's not as suited for netbooks as it is systems like the HP ProBooks. Paired with Moblin's netbook-centric bent and coming from a desktop/server market (rather than a true mobile device background), bringing a SUSE/Moblin system to netbooks has as much potential (if not more) for success as an Android adaptation does.'"

Comment Re:Er, no (Score 1) 286

You're thinking about this the wrong way. What you would be programming for is a general purpose language, with extensions (C/C++), then a compiler would generate the necessary binary code specific to the hardware. The compiler would handle the chip specific portions, leaving you to contend with creation of the graphics routines to render your scene (handling parallelism, vectorization, optimizations, etc.), in any way you see fit (rasterization, ray tracing, etc.) There is no reason why this would be any more difficult to support than the current DirectX/OpenGL APIs.

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