LegRoom.net Kick back and relax

More on the SCO drama:

The SCO Group ... today announced the availability of the SCO Intellectual Property License for Linux®. The run-time license permits the use of SCO's intellectual property, in binary form only, as contained in Linux distributions. By purchasing a SCO Intellectual Property License, customers avoid infringement of SCO's intellectual property rights in Linux 2.4 and Linux 2.5 kernels. Because the SCO license authorizes run-time use only, customers also comply with the General Public License, under which Linux is distributed.

The price? Introductory $699 per CPU through October 15. How gracious!



Press release

For the latest news on this continuing drama, check out these two press releases:

Red Hat Takes Aim at Infringement Claims

Statement Regarding Red Hat Lawsuit

The first is a press release by Red Hat in which they state that they have sued SCO to prove that their products (and Linux/OSS in general) do not infringe upon any of SCO's copyright claims. They also announced that they have setup a community fund to defend against these accusations, called the Open Source Now Fund.

The second is a press release by SCO in response to Red Hat's suite, which basically claims that they were specifically not trying to spread FUD, and instead just wanted to educate end-users.

Now hmm..., who should I believe....

A study on ease-of-use between Windows XP and Linux (with KDE 3.1.2) returned some interesting results:

The study findings suggest that it's almost as easy to perform most major office tasks using Linux as it is using Windows, which has a long history in the consumer market.



Linux users, for example, needed 44.5 minutes to perform a set of tasks, compared with 41.2 minutes required by the XP users. Furthermore, 80% of the Linux users believed that they needed only one week to become as competent with the new system as with their existing one, compared with 85% of the XP users.

This sounds about right to me. KDE has come a long way, but it's still easier to to do some stuff in Windows (GUI file management, desktop settings, etc.) than in Linux.



Full article

Sorry for the severe lack of updates over the last couple of months. Been busy with some work for LOULUG. Here's a fresh batch of news, though, beginning with...

The Opie (Open Palmtop Integrated Environment) Project has announced version 1.0. Opie originated as a fork of of Trolltech's Qtopia, but based on these screenshots, seems to already have surpassed it.

Opie is designed to run on all Linux PDA's, and already includes packages for Zaurus, iPAQ, and SimPad.

More information can be found on Opie's home page.