"Brussels, 12 May 2009 -- The European Commission is pushing for software patents via a centralised trusted patent court that would be created with the United Patent Litigation System (UPLS), an international treaty that would remove national courts. This court system would be shielded against any review by the European Court of Justice (ECJ).

I noticed readers of DistroWatch.com complaining about the small amount of attention that the new Mandriva 2009.1 release has gotten so far. This has a lot to do with the fact that the release date was so close to the always over-hyped Ubuntu 9.04 release.

For the past couple of weeks I have been having some fun testing out the latest version of Ubuntu the increasingly popular Linux. The advantage it has over many other OS's out there is it's lightweight footprint.

Like many of you, I live in an Ubuntu world. Sure, I also have a Debian box that I run as a file server on my home network, but most of my desktops/notebooks are fully dedicated Ubuntu machines.

On April 27 I wrote a blog entry titled Ubuntu 9.04: Wow. This was nothing more than a knee-jerk reactionary piece. However, once you get beyond the shiny, glossy exterior you might find a few less-than stellar issues can raise a flag or two.

Motherboard manufacturers usually bundle proprietary software with their products that allow monitoring of hardware sensors, flashing of the motherboard BIOS, and overclocking all from within the Windows operating system. With the exception of LM_Sensors providing some sensors support, this is a grey area for Linux.

A couple of months ago I did some experiments on the interoperability of ODF spreadsheets, the theory and practice. In that earlier post I looked at the then current ODF implementations,

When SugarCRM announced co-founder John Roberts’ (pictured) exit last week, some folks viewed the news in a vacuum — wondering what’s right (and wrong) with the open source CRM provider. But The VAR Guy is looking at the bigger open source picture and he sees some reasons for concern.