Reported at BBC News: “Bosses who phone staff at home or vet employees’ e-mails could face legal action, UK executive representatives have warned.

Ringing staff at home to discuss work matters could, under UK human rights legislation, be construed as an invasion of privacy, the Institute of Management has said.
“

Reported at News.com: “Compaq Computer has signed a deal with Covalent Technology to jointly develop and market Covalent’s Apache Web server software, the companies plan to announce Monday.” That will be just one of a flood of announcements expected at Linux World Expo, taking place next week in San Francisco at the Moscone Center.

From the New Zealand Herald: “New Zealand’s addiction to expensive packaged code means it is missing one of the most important developments in the knowledge economy, the rise of open source software.

That’s the view of Chris Hegan, general manager of Auckland Linux specialist Asterisk.

“This country is missing the Linux boat,” Mr Hegan said.”

LinuxSecurity.com has posted its latest Advisory Watch: This week, advisories were released for fetchmail, groff, ucd-snmp, ipfw, sdb, gdm, telnetd, procfd, openssl prng, dump, sendmail, and tcp wrappers. The vendors include Caldera, Conectiva, FreeBSD, Mandrake, NetBSD, Progeny, and SuSE.

From Tech Republic: “Once implemented, a Mono user could develop an application in C# (or any
other CLS-compliant development language available on Mono), test it on Linux (or any other
operating system on which the GNOME class libraries are available), and then deploy it on either
Linux or on Microsoft platforms. And this is what has current open source advocates so
concerned. In a world where Microsoft invests billions of dollars to optimize the .NET Framework
for their .NET Operating System, many in the open source camp think that Mono will turn into an
easy path for GPL developers to deploy their applications on Microsoft platforms at the expense
of Java and Linux.”

GNU Midnight Commander 4.5.55 has been released.

Development of the GNOME frontend will continue on the stable branch only:
“Branch_MC_4_5_x”. All GNOME support will be removed from the head branch
in the next few days.

Hello everybody!

GNU Midnight Commander 4.5.55 has been released.

Development of the GNOME frontend will continue on the stable branch only:
"Branch_MC_4_5_x".  All GNOME support will be removed from the head branch
in the next few days.

NEWS:

- Mostly bugfixes and portability fixes.  Making things work as they
  were meant to work.

- Text edition improvements.
        - Ctrl-O supported in the viewer and editor.
        - Better terminal support.  Should not need "Learn Keys" on rxvt
          and xterm in most cases.

- GNOME edition improvements.
        - Find dialog rewritten.
        - Editor and viewer ask whether to save modified file when
          closed from window manager.

- Editor.
        - New syntax rules - S-Lang, PO files, Octave.
        - Alt-B goes to matching bracket.

- Portability improvements.
        - Should compile out-of-box on Cygwin and QNX Neutrino.
        - Can be compiled by BSD make.
        - Subshell and VFS code are safer and more portable.

- Experimental features (disabled by default).
        - Charset conversion support.
        - Large (64-bit) file support on 32-bit systems.


Homepage:

http://www.gnome.org/projects/mc/

The source tarball is currently available here:

http://www.gnome.org/projects/mc/mc-4.5.55.tar.gz

Note that the final location will be

/ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/sources/mc/

Any help with moving the tarball to the final location (or giving me
access to do so) will be appreciated.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin

From Wired News: “No word yet on whether they’ll be wearing shiny little “Happy Birthday” hats with penguins on them or drinking some special Linux brew
cooked up by the local monks, but the night sure won’t be dull.

The first day of the third annual Linux Beer Hike — a weeklong event starting Aug. 25 — will coincide with the 10th birthday of Linus Torvalds’ operating
system.

The 150 or more open-source true believers gathering in Bouillon, Belgium, plan to make the most of the occasion, throwing a birthday party in Linux’s
honor — and doing their best to hook up with birthday celebrations planned in other countries.”

From BULMA: “Could you imagine a world in which penicillin had died the same day as Fleming died ? Could
you imagine a world in which only British people could be saved from the death because
Fleming who was British, has discovered the penicillin in 1928 ? It seems ridiculous isn’t it? How
could anybody want to hide a such discovery only for money? Could you even imagine if he
dies without sharing his discovery. Could we wait ten more years until somebody else
rediscovered it?

Well it seems all right when we are speaking about medecine but why dont’t we think the same way
when we are speaking about programing?” This article is also available in Spanish and French.

Reported at Linux Planet: “Red Hat’s decision to employ ext3 as the default filesystem in its upcoming release has sparked considerable interest among
technically savvy Linux users. But it is not the only, nor in many ways the best, of the journaling filesystems available to users
of modern Linux kernels. Yet it has attributes that make it an attractive first step for a large distribution, chief among them
backward compatability.”

From a column at osOpinion: “I’m a strong believer in the Free Software Movement. All software ought to
be free software and distributed under the terms of the General Public
License (GPL). There are solid ethical and engineering reasons to take that
stance. I’m also a strong believer that growth-oriented, profitable, socially
responsible businesses can be based on free software and do so without any
need for proprietary or even open-source (non-GPL) components. The
simplest argument in favor of this view is to recognize that proprietary
software licenses are largely an accounting convenience rather than a
necessary condition of how software-based businesses operate.”