Quickly now, before the suits show up Open Source Insider The Open Source Initiative, a non-profit that advocates for open-source software and coined the term, celebrates its 20th anniversary this month. It's difficult to conceive of where the internet, indeed the world, would be today were it not for open-source software and, perhaps more importantly, the free software movement that preceded it and continues to promote free software today.…

For the first time in a century, the US Supreme Court has weighed in on how much design patents are worth. The answer: not nearly as much as Apple thinks.

The 8-0 opinion (PDF) is a rebuke to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which held that the relevant "article of manufacture" for calculating damages was—in fact, had to be—the entire smartphone. That meant even though Apple's patents covered only certain design elements, it was entitled to $399 million in lost profits damages.

Over at Popehat, there's a fascinating story about the depths to which patent trolls will go to "protect" their business models. The story involves Landmark Technologies, a troll we wrote about earlier this year for its rather aggressive take on patent trolling. Landmark holds patent 6,289,319: 'Automatic Business and Financial Transaction Processing System.' Or, as the EFF puts it more succinctly: paying with a credit card online. eBay recognized that Landmark's trolling was bad news, and filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for a re-exam of three patents.

The members of the Firebird Project team are proud to announce the release of Firebird 2.1, a full release containing many sought-after new features including database monitoring, global temporary tables, database triggers and dozens of new internal functions.

There is plenty of Source Mage GNU/Linux activity. A new test ISO, new Sorcery and more!

New developers, new Stable Grimoire and work progressing on new Source Mage ISO.

Lead Developer Eric Sandall talks about how Source Mage GNU/Linux started back in 2002. He explains his current position with the distribution and discusses his work.

Return values are not just important but as age has taught me - essential. Use return values to your advantage and wrangle them when you can. Breaking things out helps, but making sure you let everyone know that you did break out some code might be just as important.

LXer Feature: 04-Aug-2006

GNU/Linux -- Like No Other Hotrod, Ever

While others appear to be going backwards, Linux just keeps racing ahead.

'Linux supports more devices, "out of the box", than any other operating system ever has.'

"Yes, that's right, we support more things than anyone else. And more than anyone else ever has in the past. Linux has a very long list of things that we have supported before anyone else ever did."
-- Greg Kroah-Hartman, OLS 2006 Keynote

The Firebird Project is pleased to announce builds of Firebird 2.0 Alpha 3 kits are now ready to download and testing.

This version of Firebird 2 is an alpha version, meant for field testing only and not for use in production.

And I installed Gentoo on my machine (on another partition) and get realized about some advantages when using Sorcerer rather than Gentoo: