We warned about this a couple of weeks back, the context being Yankee Group FUD, but it’s worth repeating and presenting this alongside some more material and background, as well as new supportive stories.

Civil liberties put at further risk by MS: "Microsoft has developed a small plug-in device that investigators can use to quickly extract forensic data from computers that may have been used in crimes."

"Software developer Hans Reiser was found guilty today of first degree murder in the death of his wife in late 2006, a conviction that carries up to 25 years in prison and a possible death sentence for the Reiser4 file system."

The KDE development community announced yesterday the first KDE 4.1 alpha release. Although the alpha has a lot of bugs and rough edges, it gives users a very promising first look at the KDE 4.1 feature set. Ars Technica tested KDE 4.1 by installing it from Stephan Binner's openSUSE LiveCD, which is available for download from his web site.

reStructuredText is a lightweight markup language intended to be highly readable in the source format. With it, you can produce beautiful HTML, PDF, XML, and even S5 documents from plain text files.

Yes, yes, I realize Ubuntu is not a company at all but a free Linux distribution, GPL'd and open source by definition. But still, the Ubuntu distro is sponsored by a traditional for profit company, Canonical Ltd, and it is very fair to say that the distro would not exist without the company.

If you want to be notified when and how a Web site has changed, you can turn to either netstiff or urlwatch to keep and eye on things for you. Both of these tools monitor Web sites for changes and allow you to see a diff-like output of exactly what has changed. You can also use netstiff to monitor FTP sites for changes.

Ah, how the mighty have fallen. In what must have been gross oversight, Red Hat is pitching proprietary software on its website under the banner of "No vendor lock-in." The way Red Hat and IBM make it appear, simply running one's software on an open platform like Linux magically removes the proprietary lock-in of the application.