We’ve just begun a new project at Mozilla to create a tool that can help defend against invalid software patents...The problem is that when patents are asserted or enforced, it’s difficult, expensive, and time consuming to find the references (documents or other software/systems) that contain the elements of the asserted patent claims, also known as prior art.

"It's hard not to be enthusiastic about fisl, or to expand the acronym, the 9th Fórum International Software Livre, held each year in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

One of the perqs of being a journalist is that I often hear about software and events before most people. A case in point is Writer's Tools, an extension for OpenOffice.org Writer being developed by my fellow journalist Dimitri Popov, whose articles about macros have taught me most of what I know on the subject.

Well, I am trying to be a mystic here but it seems like there is something really changing for the good right now. First I read about Red Hat dropping the desktop and then see The BBC talking about Ubuntu in a very positive way.

Last week we shared the sad reality about Unreal Tournament 3 that it's been 5 months and there's still no Linux client. There's not even any sign that the game client will still be made available for Linux once their "legal" problems are resolved.

Good systems administrators know that implementing a robust backup procedure is one of their most important duties. Unfortunately, it's also one of the most complex and least fun. When the phone rings and there's a panic-stricken user on the other end who has just lost a crucial document, you need to be confident that you can promptly recover his missing files.

If you want to make Gnome menus Faster in Ubuntu follow this procedure

The Open Source Census rolls forward, but I'm not sure how far it has gone as yet. In the summary, it shows just 789 machines scanned (as of the time that I read it). That's not a bad start, but it is just a start. As such, it's hard to read much into the data.