Oracle today announced Dell and HP will certify and resell Oracle Solaris, Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM on their respective x86 platforms. Customers will have full access to Oracle's Premier Support for Oracle Solaris, Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM running on Dell and HP servers. This will enable fast and accurate issue resolution and reduced risk in a company's operating environment.

I was really pleased to read the announcement that Lockheed Martin’s social networking platform, EurekaStreams, was released as an open source project today. Lockheed is a very conservative company, and while they’re happy to use open source internally and on projects for their customers, this is their first experiment with actually running a project themselves. I think it’s a big deal, not just for Lockheed Martin, but for large corporations who are considering a more open, more innovative approach to software development.

Do you remember the Frankencamera? The API used for the Frankencamera has been released for the Nokia n900 Phone, making the phones camera programmable.

Amazon announced a third generation of its Linux-based Kindle e-reader, featuring a lighter and smaller body, a screen claimed to have 50 percent better contrast, and a battery life of up to one month. Still available with 3G, the device is also offered in a Wi-Fi-only version that includes a WebKit-based browser, the company says.

A happy customer might tell someone. An unhappy customer tells everyone. Converting to Linux before taking a dose of reality might make you a very unhappy customer. Let's be perfectly honest. Linux isn't for everyone-yet. However, Ubuntu, Mandriva, and a few other distributions come close but for now, Linux is a little more difficult to use than Windows.

[For the edification of our readers, another KH article that leaves a bad taste in my mouth..- Scott]

Tabbed browsing has arguably had a significant impact on the way that people use the Web, but the feature hasn't really scaled to accommodate the increasing complexity of the average surfing session. The existing tab management and overflow handling mechanisms that are present in modern browsers are dated and suffer from some fundamental limitations that significantly detract from user productivity.

As part of his Python Development Masterclass, Kunal Deo drew up some golden rules when working with Python. Have you got any Python gems to share?

The recent history of the Amarok music player is like a scaled-down version of KDE's recent past. Like KDE 4, the Amarok 2 series was greeted with a user revolt that has only gradually quieted. And just like KDE 4 inspired Trinity KDE for those who preferred KDE 3, so Amarok 2 inspired Clementine, a fork of Amarok 1.4. The supporters of both Trinity KDE and Clementine make similar claims for their preferences: in both cases, the retro-apps are described as faster, easier to use, and outfitted with a better feature set than the most recent versions. But is that so?

A lot of people was looking forward to use Gnome 3.0 stable release this year on many distributions also known as Gnome shell ”technology part of Gnome 3.0“.

After my six weeks of constant use of two iPhone 4s, I still believe it is, overall, the best device in its class, for reasons including its ultra high-resolution screen; easy, integrated video calling; slick software; strong battery life; a remarkably thin body; and a world-beating selection of 225,000 third-party apps.

As for reception, I am sticking with my initial conclusions. I have found that in areas with average or strong AT&T coverage and capacity, the iPhone performs better than its predecessor and about as well as other AT&T smartphones I've recently tested. - Walt Mossberg, WSJ

SimplyMEPIS is a simply wonderful distribution. It was the first to offer a complete out of the box experience all tied up in a pretty package. It would be fair to say that it was probably the inspiration for many of the easy-to-use distributions available today.

I’ve been using the latest version (10.04) of Ubuntu Linux since April and there’s a lot to like about it. I announced earlier this year that I was giving desktop Linux another look, and I went with Ubuntu because it is the Linux distribution most focused on a desktop OS. I have lots of observations about the Ubuntu experience and how it compares to Mac and Windows, but I’m going to save most of that feedback for another article.

Even though my goto operating system for servers is Red Hat Enterprise Linux, lately I have been working with Canonical’s Ubuntu Server 10.04 and I will admit that it has so far been a great experience. Just like what is expected of a server operating system, it is not intended for the general user base and focused more toward an experience Linux user; especially when by default there exists no GUI. That is one of the best parts in my personal opinions. Another great thing about the OS relates to its simplified installation process and how everything is automatically installed and to an extent configured should you choose to configure the server as a LAMP, DNS, etc. A couple of years ago, I had reviewed an older 8.10 release here and here and wasn’t impressed. Now, I can see things have changed for the better. Unfortunately I will not be discussing this. But before I get any deeper into this article, I wish to share my experiences with 10.04.

A wide swath of the net's top websites, including MTV, ESPN, MySpace, Hulu, ABC, NBC and Scribd, were sued in federal court Friday on the grounds they violated federal computer intrusion law by secretly using storage in Adobe's Flash player to re-create cookies deleted by users.

At issue is technology from Quantcast, also targeted in the lawsuit. Quantcast created Flash cookies that track users across the web, and used them to re-create traditional browser cookies that users deleted from their computers. - Ryan Singel, Wired

There has also been substantial grassroots participation in the legal discussions surrounding F/OSS, notably through the Groklaw project (http://groklaw.net/). Groklaw is a website (originally a weblog) founded by a paralegal, Pamela Jones, to provide information on the SCO lawsuits. By her own account, Jones began publishing information about the SCO case as she grew angry at SCO's legal tactics. Her reasons for becoming involved are illustrative of the ways that the pragmatic commitments of the F/OSS development community translate into action, often despite the fact that members of the F/OSS community do not think of themselves as "political." Certainly Jones does not. In an interview, she stated: I reasoned like this originally: I am not a lawyer. I am not a programmer. I have no influence. I have few friends in high places. I am not a political person. I belong to no organizations. What can * I* do? ... I wanted to do something. I love GNU/Linux software. It taught me how much fun computers can be. I love seeing into the process. I love the ideals behind free software, specifically, caring about other people and not just yourself, and cooperation, and being able to look at the code and even change it and share it freely... All right, I said to myself, what can I do well? The answer was, I can research and I can write (Jordan, July 31, 2003). Groklaw has grown to include every significant filing in all of the SCO cases-hundreds of documents-most with detailed commentary by Jones or other contributors to the site. Groklaw went beyond this role when, speaking for the "open source community," contributors posted a very sophisticated response to McBride's Letter (Orion, Sept. 20. 2004). Groklaw has also remained a key site for collaborative research on important historical aspects of the case. Recently, a contributor posted the original Unix settlement agreement between Unix Systems Laboratories and the University of California, a document which provides important details about the chain of ownership of Unix. The settlement was confidential and has long inspired speculation, yet it was a tenacious independent Groklaw supporter who thought to use California's version of a FOIA request to obtain the content. The agreement grants the public rights to redistribute much of the Unix source code, and could be a significant development in favor of IBM (Jones, Nov. 28, 2004; McMillan, Dec. 2, 2004). In effect, Groklaw has become an informal research center for the F/OSS community's efforts to dispel legal uncertainty surrounding Linux, the GPL, and to a lesser extent, F/OSS in general. Such a public resource, explaining litigation in real time to all interested or affected parties, is unusual if not unprecedented. Groklaw operates on the same volunteer basis as F/OSS development, and with the same informal authority structure built on the credibility and effort of the founder. Like other F/OSS projects, it maintains its centrality in the face of possible 'forks' in the epistemic community. Groklaw is not the only F/OSS community discussion of the SCO case, though it is by far the most extensive. LWN.net, a Linux new site, began to track the SCO case and offer documentation, but it eventually deferred to Groklaw ("A Look at," Feb. 1, 2005). Rob Landley, Eric Raymond, and others published an exhaustive critique of SCO's Second Amended Complaint on the OSI website (Landley, Feb. 1, 2005). Bruce Perens, Eric Raymond and Greg Leahy have all analyzed SCO's public presentation of some of the code implicated in its suit, and have published their analyses online[33]. Grassroots engagement has also coalesced around the technical defense of the Linux and other F/OSS projects from SCO-like claims. Developers have mobilized extensively around the search for (and elimination of) potentially infringing code. In the SCO case, this effort has been hampered by the fact that not all of the code at issue has been publicly identified. Nonetheless, the process itself represents a great asset for F/OSS projects-although the openness of the code encourages infringement claims, it also means that they can be addressed in an efficient and timely manner. - Reuters, Yahoo!

Since GNOME 3.0 has been delayed until March, 2011, it seems there's enough time to rethink the way GNOME Shell looks, especially since a lot of people don't like it (especially from the usability point of view). Some new GNOME Shell mockups were uploaded to GIT recently, showing a lot of similarities with Ubuntu / UNE:

Richard Stallman answers the top 25 questions from reddit readers.

A fascinating interview ...

Ms. Sherrod also said she intended to sue Andrew Breitbart, the blogger, who runs BigGovernment.com and who posted the edited video of her making what appeared to be antiwhite remarks in a speech that was really about racial conciliation.

"He hasn't apologized, and I don't want it at this point," she said of Mr. Breitbart, adding that she intended to sue him. "He will definitely hear from me."

It is unclear who actually uploaded the misleading video to YouTube.

[PJ: That will almost certainly come out in discovery.] - Marc Lacey, NYTimes

Oracle today announced Dell and HP will certify and resell Oracle Solaris, Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM on their respective x86 platforms. Customers will have full access to Oracle's Premier Support for Oracle Solaris, Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM running on Dell and HP servers. This will enable fast and accurate issue resolution and reduced risk in a company's operating environment. - Oracle, Dell, HP press release

I was really pleased to read the announcement that Lockheed Martin's social networking platform, EurekaStreams, was released as an open source project today. Lockheed is a very conservative company, and while they're happy to use open source internally and on projects for their customers, this is their first experiment with actually running a project themselves. I think it's a big deal, not just for Lockheed Martin, but for large corporations who are considering a more open, more innovative approach to software development. And yet, Dana Blankenhorn hates it.

[PJ: Here's the project on github. And here's the page for developers to get started on the code. I think it's great Lockheed did this.]- One People