Free Software Update!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59197-2002Nov2.html 
 
By Ariana Eunjung Cha 
Washington Post Staff Writer 
Sunday, November 3, 2002; Page A01  
 
MERIDA, Spain -- Luis Millan Vazquez de Miguel, a college professor 
turned politician, is succeeding where multibillion-dollar, 
multinational corporations have failed. He is managing to unseat 
Microsoft Corp. as the dominant player in the software industry, at 
least in his little part of the world. 
 
Vazquez de Miguel is the minister of education, science and technology 
in a western region of Spain called Extremadura, a mostly rural expanse 
of olive trees and tiny towns with 1.1 million inhabitants. In April, 
the government launched an unorthodox campaign to convert all the area's 
computer systems, in government offices, businesses and homes, from the 
Windows operating system to Linux, a free alternative 
 
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http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/27896.html 
MS settlement rotten with loopholes 
By Thomas C Greene in Washington 
Posted: 02/11/2002 at 10:01 GMT 
 
As we learned Friday, Judge CKK has conditionally accepted most of the 
MS/DoJ antitrust settlement, effectively shutting down the unsettling 
states unless they can find solid grounds for an appeal. "The court is 
satisfied that the parties have reached a settlement which comports with 
the public interest," she wrote.  
 
There will be no breakup, no forced disclosures of source code, no 
bare-bones Windows.  
 
There are, to be sure, a number of provisions which ought to be useful 
in cultivating a slightly more diverse software marketplace, only most 
of them are so rotten with loopholes that MS' competitors are basically 
where they were at the outset of this four-year fiasco; that is, pretty 
well forced to rely on Redmond's renowned openness, good will and honest 
competitive spirit. 
 
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http://www.gstreamer.net/apps/vw/ 
From a Slashdot post 
Zeeshan Ali Khattak has made a videowall using Red Hat Linux, GStreamer 
and commodity hardware. The solution was made based on the need to 
create a flexible and cheap solution for use in Pakistani Schools and 
Universities using commodity hardware. To find out how this was done and 
some more details, and of course some cool pictures, check out the Video 
Whale project homepage." 
 
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http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/27853.html 
Brussels to spend ?250k on Linux migration study 
By John Leyden 
Posted: 30/10/2002 at 17:12 GMT 
 
The European Commission has awarded UK-based consultancy netproject a 
?250,000 contract to study the issues of migrating government computers 
in member states to a Linux / Open Source environment.  
 
netproject has been hired by the Commission to draw up guidelines on a 
move to open source technologies and to help define EU IT strategy on 
desktop computing. The German state of Mecklenburg-Pomerania  
is to be used as a test bed in defining this strategy, which goes beyond 
the investigation of a switch between Windows and Linux PCs.  
 
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http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2002/1028/web-open-11-01-02.asp 
Open source courses through DOD  
 
BY Dan Caterinicchia  
Nov. 1, 2002 
What would happen if open source software were banned in the Defense 
Department? 
A recent study conducted by Mitre Corp. for DOD posed that hypothetical 
question and found this answer: The department's cybersecurity 
capabilities would be crippled and other areas would be severely 
impacted. 
Mitre Corp. was asked to develop a listing of open-source software 
applications at DOD and to collect representative examples of how those 
applications are being used. Over a two-week period, an e-mailed survey 
identified 115 applications and 251 examples of use, and Mitre's report 
acknowledged that actual use could be "tens of thousands of times larger 
than the number of examples identified." 
To help analyze the data, the hypothetical question was posed: What 
would happen if open-source software were banned at DOD? 
 
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http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2002-10-30-linux-cars_x.htm 
10/30/2002 - Updated 09:53 AM ET  
 
Linux finding its own niche in the automotive industry 
 
DETROIT (AP) - To lower costs and stay competitive, automakers are 
turning to inexpensive Linux-based computers for crash simulations, 
structural analysis and other tasks once handled by expensive 
high-performance systems.  
 
The auto industry's move away from computers based on custom hardware 
and the proprietary Unix operating system mirrors trends in other 
industries, including oil exploration and retail.  
 
"This is a game-changer for any industry that has a high-performance 
computing workload," said Steve Solazzo, general manager for Linux 
operations at IBM.  
 
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Thanks, 
 
Sunil 
 
===== 
Sunil Abraham [MAHITI] 
314/1, 7th Cross, Domlur 
Bangalore - 560 071 Karnataka, INDIA 
Ph/Fax: +91 80 5352003. Pager: 9624 279519 
[email protected] http://www.mahiti.org