Yahoo, in an effort to gain some ground on Google in the search market, has released a beta product designed to allow you to search for related sites without leaving the page you are in. It’s an interesting idea, but search is supposed to be getting more specific and accurate, not less. I’m not sure this is a step forward, but who knows, it might have some uses I’ve not thought of yet. Read more at Eweek.

The German National Railway made a second major move towards open source Linux software when it successfully moved 55,000 of it’s Lotus Notes users onto the Linux operating system. The Railway expects “continuous cost savings, greater flexibility and integration benefits” as they move the rest of their systems over. They already replaced 150 of their servers with Linux systems as of November of 2004.

Most people think the Munich deal is the biggest Open Source deal in place world wide, but the Munich deal is relatively small compared to German Railways (Munich is only 14,000 desktops as it stands now.) Both roll-outs are very significant however and show how Germany is one of the worlds leading countries in adopting Open Source and Linux. It is also unlikely that Germany will back the software patent directive any more (yay!), now that big chunks of their infrastructure is based on Linux they will not allow big companies to use spurious software patents to cause them problems. The simple maths here, is that Microsoft can make all the threats it likes about pulling out funding from these countries, but nothing they can offer would match the amount these governments will save in the long term by not being reliant on Microsoft. So the writing is on the wall. Governments are full of bean counters, and the numbers are not in Microsoft’s favour. IBM is behind both of these big roll-outs, and is to be congratulated for both. You can read more about this at Techworld, but you may need to register to see it.

about Linux security. This guy writes for something called Focus … yet he cannot focus for a whole article, he rambles. I guess the point is solid: you need a central way to report a security flaw. If we do anything with such a flaw, use our contact form.

The European Union has shown that it is capable of listening to it’s members today when it shelved the current software patent directive after Poland and Denmark made clear their displeasure about it.
So now the directive will start from scratch, and this time it is unlikely they will be able to sneak it though without full discussion and disclosure. I’ll bet there are some big software companies that are not happy campers this morning. The story can be found at Groklaw.

Sun recently got some exposure by claiming to give away 1600 patents for use by Open Source programmers. It took a couple of weeks, but the catch has finailly been revealed. It isn’t all Open Source programmers that get to use the patents. Only programmers that sign up to use Suns new CCDL license are protected. Any GPL licenced programmers are out in the cold. As Dan Ravicher of PubPat.org said:

“My advice is that developers should ask themselves if they really want to work on software distributed by a company that has expressly retained the right to sue them for patent infringement if they don’t give their improvements back to the company.”

This isn’t about helping Open Source, this is about Sun losing Solaris market share to Linux and deciding to try and steal some of the OSS programmers by promising them the world. This is hardly a fair move from a company that sells and uses much Open Source GPL code as part of their enterprise desktop and indeed their server product also includes some GPL code. The response by the OSS community has so far not been good. Read more at Groklaw.

A new exploit is available that takes advantage of flaws in Internet Explorer and Realplayer. Basically the exploit can be used to load local files into the browser using Realplayer .rm files. Read more at TheInquirer.

A lot has been happening in the last few days. For one thing HP has created what they think will replace the transistor and revolutionize the entire chip industry. Microsoft appear to have taken a leaf out of Mozilla’s XUL platform (the basis for Firefox, Thunderbird with their extensions, NVU and Sunbird), and is touting the benefits of developing for the MS Office “platform”. Be wary though, as the anti-virus and anti-spyware companies are just finding out now, and many other companies found out earlier, if you come up with anything innovative, you will eventually find yourself competing with Microsoft themselves. In other Microsoft news, MSN search is out, using their own kit for once, and they are marketing it for all it is worth. They are also suddenly co-operating with governments on the issue of security, meaning that they will now share with governments information about exploits and patches that they have previously kept to themselves. Don’t get all warm as fuzzy about it though, it looks like they are only doing it because governments around the world have been doing some hard looking at Linux and Open Source, and Microsoft is looking increasingly bad in comparison. This is an apparent effort to try and stem that tide. Good luck to them, even with this they still look bad, so I doubt it will alter anything.

There is a new Open Source organization called “The Software Freedom Law Center” who’s task is to help Open Source programmers defend their rights, and they are getting support and money from many sources in the OSS world. Their task will be to stop corporations from using potentially invalid patents and copyright cases from putting OSS developers out of business just because they have deeper pockets then their targets. Read more here.
In other news, it has been reported that every spyware infected machine on the Internet earns the crackers about $3 dollars, and that it is an industry worth over a billion dollars. Since the vast majority of that spyware uses Internet Explorer to get onto peoples machines, the guys doing this must really hate Firefox which blocks pretty much all of it.