For quite some time now I have had a vague notion to write about so-called “software piracy”. That vague notion has sharpened into a resolve to write about Proprietary Closed Source Software (PCSS), “software piracy”, GNU/Linux, Free Open Source Software (FOSS) and your business.

LINUX NEWS - FULL STORY

Hewlett-Packard is making an effort to support non-commercial Linux distributions on its servers and other vendors' business hardware. But you wouldn't know it from the black hole of fanfare regarding its new collaborative portal, communitylinux.org. Word of the launch came as a brief reference at a LinuxCon talk by Bdale Garbee, the venerable open source and Linux chieftain at HP. Garbee said the website was announced this week, but that's news to us + everyone + dog.

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Intel has expanded the scope of Linux-based Moblin by porting the OS from netbooks to mobile devices and desktops, where it could compete with Microsoft's Windows OS. The company introduced a beta version of Moblin 2.1 at the Intel Developer Forum being held in San Francisco. The new version of the OS now builds in capabilities like native touchscreen input and gesture support, new user interface features, and support for more hardware drivers. It also includes incremental upgrades that expand the usability of the OS.

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International Business Machines Corp., the world’s largest computer-service provider, is introducing its first software for netbooks, tapping in to the growing market for the scaled-down laptops. The software, called the IBM Smart Work Client, will run on so-called open-sourced Linux programs instead of Microsoft Corp.’s Windows, the company said today in a statement. Armonk, New York-based IBM said it will start selling the software in Africa and then expand to other emerging markets.

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The Linux kernel is getting too big too fast, and that's negatively affecting Linux performance. While this might sound like a message fromMicrosoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s marketing team, it's actually a frank admission that Linus Torvalds made Monday in a roundtable discussion at the LinuxCon event in Portland, Ore. Asked whether features are being added to the Linux kernel too quickly, and whether this is affecting Linux performance, Torvalds acknowledged that this is indeed a problem. The Linux kernel has also grown to the point where it's no longer streamlined and efficient, Torvalds added.

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A new Linux netbook based on Moblin will be introduced this week, and it may represent a new way that the Linux community is approaching the mass market. Leaders at the first Linuxcon Conference in Portland, Oregon, hinted at an announcement to come this week at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco that they say will reassert Linux's initial momentum in the netbook market. "You're going to see this week interesting new netbooks coming out that are killer. They have the cool factor and they're priced right," said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation.

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Linux's heart is open source. But developers can pick and choose how much, if any, proprietary software they want to include in their distribution. Recently, the Free Software Foundation announced its two latest additions to its listing of open-source purist distributions. This news lead me to thinking about both these distributions and the best of the distributions that go the other way and contain a great deal of proprietary programs.

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The Linux Foundation (LF), the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Citrix Systems has become its newest member. Citrix is a leading provider of virtualization; cloud computing, and software as a service (SaaS) offerings for companies worldwide, including 99 percent of Fortune 500 enterprises. Citrix leads the open source Xen® hypervisor project which is based on Linux. “The Linux Foundation provides a neutral forum for collaborative work on requirements for Linux and complementary projects such as the Xen Project, Xen Client hypervisor Initiative (XCI) and Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) initiative,” said Ian Pratt, founder and chair of Xen.org and vice president of Advanced Products at Citrix Systems. “Citrix has joined the Linux Foundation both in its role as leader of the Xen Project and because it ships commercial products based on Xen.”

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