writes "Linux Tech Daily has an editorial slamming a recent Forbes.com attack piece on Richard Stallman and GPLv3. Loved or hated, do you agree with the author that the piece is FUD and completely unprofessional? Love him or hate him, is this unfair treatment of rms? Does he leave himself open to these kinds of attacks with his behavior?" The problem with the editorial of course is that many of the points made in the original Forbes piece are completely valid and true. So basically you get to choose between the linux zealot, and a writer who is obviously fairly hostile towards Stallman's ideas.

frdmfghtr writes "The October 30 issue of Forbes Magazine has an article speculating that Richard Stallman's efforts to rewrite the GPL could threaten to 'tear it apart.' The article describes how the GPLv3 is expected to be incompatible with the GPLv2, causing trouble for Linux vendors such as Novell and Red Hat. The article wraps it up: 'And a big loser, eventually, could be Stallman himself. If he relents now, he likely would be branded a sellout by his hard-core followers, who might abandon him. If he stands his ground, customers and tech firms may suffer for a few years but ultimately could find a way to work around him. Either way, Stallman risks becoming irrelevant, a strange footnote in the history of computing: a radical hacker who went on a kamikaze mission against his own program and went down in flames, albeit after causing great turmoil for the people around him.'"

Slashback tonight brings some clarifications and updates to previous Slashdot stories, including: The facts about Debian Iceweasel; A closer look at Folding@home's GPU client; David Brin's lament; Online gambling ban may violate international law; Human species may do whatnow?; and Another RIAA lawsuit dropped. Read on for details.

kmaclean writes, "VoxForge collects free GPL Transcribed Speech Audio that can be used in the creation of Acoustic Models for use with Open Source Speech Recognition Engines. We are essentially creating a user-submitted repository of the 'source' speech audio for the creation of Acoustic Models to be used by Speech Recognition Engines. The Speech Audio files will then be 'compiled' into Acoustic Models for use with Open Source Speech Recognition engines such as Sphinx, HTK, CAVS and Julius." Read on for why we need free GPL speech audio.

Ravi writes "It is a fact that GNU/Linux has grown from a hackers operating system to be a viable alternative to any commercial proprietary operating system. And the plethora of books on Linux that are being published underlines the popularity of this OS. There are hundreds of flavors of Linux distributions — some of them more popular than the others. Ubuntu Linux is one such distribution which has caught the fancy of many Linux enthusiasts and which enjoys the number one position in the popularity rating chart." Read the rest of Ravi's review.

eldavojohn writes "There's bits and pieces of information floating around that revolve around Iwata Asks interviews on Nintendo's website. What I found interesting was the tidbit about the updatable operating system: 'Wii is the first system from Nintendo that we can continue to be involved in (via operating system updates) after the customer buys it. This means that Wii will greatly expand and diversify the ways in which people will enjoy games in the future.' The Wii is reported to operate on top of a proprietary form of the Linux kernel, although there are already efforts to make a GNU/Linux for the console. So, the answer to the age old question is that it already runs Linux."

Slashback tonight brings some clarifications and updates to previous Slashdot stories, including: What Dell knew and when they knew it, GNU/Linux may gain from the Vista WGA crackdown, China's fusion test was a hoax, and the Vista startup chime will be optional. Read on for details.

An anonymous reader asks: "Our startup honestly wanted to use OSS products. We do not want to spend time for any OSS bug fixing so our main requirement was -official support for all OSS products-. We thought were prepared to pay the price for OSS products, but then we got a price sticker shock. Now behold: QT is $3300 per seat. We have dropped the development and rewrote everything to C# (MSVS 2005 is ~$700). Embedded Linux from a reputable RT vendor is $25,000 per 5 seats per year. We needed only 3 seats. We had to buy 5 nevertheless. The support was bad. We will go for VxWorks or WinCE in our next product. Red Hat Linux WS is $299. An OEM version of Windows XP Pro is ~$140. A Cygwin commercial license will cost tens of thousands of dollars and is only available for large shops. We need 5 seats. Windows Unix services are free. After all, we have decided that the survival of our business is more important for us then 'do-good' ideas. Except for that embedded Linux (slated for WinCE or VxWorks substitution), we are not OSS shop anymore." Why are commercial ports of OSS software so expensive, and what would need to happen before they could be competitive in the future?

lisah writes "Linus Torvalds has a lot of reasons for not wanting to participate in drafting the third version of the GNU General Public License (GPL): He doesn't like meetings, says committees don't make sense, has philosophical differences with the Free Software Foundation, and seems to be generally distrustful of the whole drafting process. Though Torvalds prefers the GPLv2, he says if others prefer the GPLv3, they ought to support it because 'it's not like it kills and eats small children for breakfast, and must never be allowed.'" Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.

Philip Bailey writes "The GPL Violations Project, based in Germany, have won (subject to appeal) a court case against D-Link, who had allegedly distributed parts of the Linux kernel in a product in a way which contravened the GPL. D-Link had claimed that the GPL was not 'legally binding' but have now agreed to cease and desist, and refrain from distributing the infringing product, a network attached storage device. Expenses, including legal expenses, were received by the plaintiffs; they did not request any damages, consistent with their policy. They have previously won a number of out of court settlements against other companies. Slashdot has previously mentioned the GPL Violations Project."

Da Massive writes, "Debian GNU/Linux is experimenting with a new project called Dunc-Tank, which is aimed at securing funding to pay two key release managers — Steve Langasek and Andi Barth — in an effort to ensure the forthcoming Debian 4.0, known as etch, is released on time in December." Dunc-Tank is not affiliated with the Debian Project directly, and in fact was controversial on the debian-private list.

xorgb writes "CryptoDox is an online encyclopedia on Cryptography and Information Security. The data is being made available under the GNU Free Documentation License. The site is powered by MediaWiki and in the few months that it has been online it has got some good articles on the basics of cryptography. It is currently looking out for contributors to enhance its database of articles. Check it out!"

michuk writes "PolishLinux.org has published a review of FVWM-Crystal 3.0.4: "FVWM-Crystal is an eye-candy, functional and ultra-fast desktop environment for GNU/Linux and UNIX, based on FVWM. Crystal can be used even on very old machines, thus it is a noticeable alternative to popular desktop choices like XFCE or Fluxbox.""

lisah writes "Linux.com is reporting that Alexander Maryanovsky, the developer of Jin (a Java-based chess client), has filed a lawsuit alleging that International Chess University has violated several aspects of the GNU General Public License (GPL). Maryanovsky claims that the online chess training website and its CEO, Alexander Rabinovitch, are in violation of both his copyright and the GPL by distributing software that is based on Jin. According to the report, though Rabinovitch is dismissing most of the claims leveled against him, he has apparently left his native Israel for Canada and declines to give his exact whereabouts." Newsforge and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.

DeathElk writes, "The Sydney Morning Herald recently featured an article espousing the virtues of desktop Linux. From the article: 'Linux is shedding its hard-core techie image in a bid to woo ordinary human beings seeking an easy-to-use operating system that can be downloaded for free.' Is this a step forward for widespread GNU/Linux desktop adoption? Too bad the article doesn't mention the large range of live CD/DVD distributions available for try-before-you-fly, or the range of Windows applications tested and working under Wine." Also, the article is slightly unclear on the concept of open source, defining it as an arrangement "where the source code can be modified upon the request of users or other developers."

An anonymous reader writes "Debian's cdrecord maintainers announced that they have had enough of Jörg Schilling and kicked his program suite cdrtools out of Debian, introducing a free fork of his no longer free cdrtools." I've put the message below, along with some other links.

An anonymous reader writes "This is the transcript of the talk with Richard Stallman, the father of GNU in the background of the 4th International GPLv3 Conference being held at Bangalore where RMS is a prominent delegate. He answers questions related to GPLv3, DRM and a couple of other queries."

lisah writes "Misconceptions about the widely used GNU General Public License (GPL) continue to plague the free software user community and, according to the ITManagersJournal, 'the confusion is frequently based on misreadings, rumors, secondhand accounts, and what is convenient to believe.' In order to clarify some of the more common misunderstandings about the GPL, Bruce Byfield consulted with three experts: attorney Richard Fontana, one of the main drafters of the third version of the license; Harald Welte of the GPL-Violations project; and David Turner who is assisting with revisions of the license. Together, they help clarify the distributor's role in providing source code to customers, whether GPL is viral or unenforceable, and why some misunderstandings are really rooted in varied interpretations of the law." ITMJ and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.

An anonymous reader writes "It's 15 years already! On August 25th, 1991 Linus Torvalds submitted the famous message to comp.os.minix: 'Hello everybody out there using minix — I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things)' Happy Birthday Linux!"

Ivan Tarasov writes "Ever wanted to hack the JDK sources to get rid of some nasty bug which bothered you for so long, but was embarrassed by the complexity of the JDK build process? Now you have a good tutorial on how to do it on Debian GNU/Linux: last night I posted a blog entry on how to build the JDK 6 (sources of which are available at the Peabody site). This entry describes in detail which packages you need installed, how do you tweak the sources to make them buildable and how to proceed with the build. The build process for other Linux distributions must be very similar, so don't turn away if you don't use Debian. There is also a nice blog entry by Cay Horstmann "Honey, I built the JDK! (on Ubuntu)"."