One of the greatest tragedies of intellectual property law is how it generates intellectual confusion among successful businesspeople. Many are under the impression, even when it is not true, that they owe their wealth to copyrights, trademarks, and patents and not necessarily to their business savvy.

For this reason, they defend intellectual property as if it were the very lifeblood of their business operations. They fail to give primary credit where it is due: to their own ingenuity, willingness to take a risk, and their market-based activities generally. This is often an empirically incorrect judgment on their part, and it carries with it the tragedy of crediting the state for the accomplishments that are actually due to their own entrepreneurial activities.

Crispin Cowan, the Linux security expert behind StackGard, the Immunix Linux distro and AppArmor, has joined the Windows security team.

Since early this decade, Microsoft has been promoting their software framework, the .NET platform and its associated libraries. Now up to incarnation v3.5, Windows developers worldwide have rejoiced at the framework source code finally being made available. Yet, does this reflect any trend towards open source by the Redmond giant? How generous is the license and what does it mean?

Brightside is a small utility for extending the functionality of Metacity, the default window manager for the GNOME desktop. Now at version 1.4.0, it currently offers two mutually exclusive functions: corner actions that are activated when the mouse cursor moves to one of the desktop's corners, and scrolling with the mouse between desktops.

In spite of their public opposition to Microsoft’s attempt to get the ISO standardization nod for its Office Open XML (OOXML) document format, IBM and Google quietly are supporting OOXML.

Over the past weekend, I spent most of my time playing around with OpenSUSE and Ubuntu in an attempt to reintroduce myself into the wide world of Linux.

Open-source software, which by its traditional definition is developed collaboratively by informal groups and available free to anyone, has been a major factor driving the growth of the internet, and especially the proliferation of blogs and small websites.