The OIN (Open Invention Network) site's front page starts out by saying, "Open source software development has been one of the greatest sources of innovation. It has reduced costs, improved functionality and spurred new industries." After another few sentences it says, "Open Invention Network® is an intellectual property company that was formed to promote the Linux system by using patents to create a collaborative ecosystem." Go a little deeper, on the About page, and you learn that: "Patents owned by Open Invention Network® are available royalty-free to any company, institution or individual that agrees not to assert its patents against the Linux System. This enables companies to make significant corporate and capital expenditure investments in Linux — helping to fuel economic growth." Today's interviewee, Deb Nicholson, is the OIN's Community Outreach Director. We did a video interview with OIN CEO Keith Bergelt back in February. This one adds to what he had to say. And once again, we remind you: "...if you or your company is being victimized by any entity seeking to assert its patent portfolio against Linux, please contact [OIN] so that we can aid you in your battle with these dark forces." Make your first contact through Linux Defenders 911 -- and may the OIN be with you!

alphadogg writes "Start-up Cumulus Networks this week has emerged with a Linux network operating system designed for programmable data centers like the ones Google and Facebook are building. The company's Cumulus Linux OS operating system includes IPv4 and IPv6 routing, plus data center and network orchestration hooks. Much like OpenFlow for independent, software-defined control of network forwarding, Cumulus Linux is intended to run on commodity network hardware and bring Open Source extensibility to high capacity data centers. The head of the company used to work for Cisco and Google." The distribution is based on Debian and ported to several router platforms. They claim to release most of their code Open Source, but there are at least a few proprietary bits for interfacing to the routing hardware itself.

Qedward writes with an excerpt at TechWorld about a new project from Jon "Maddog" Hall, which is about to launch in Brazil: "The vision of Project Cauã is to promote more efficient computing following the thin client/server model, while creating up to two million privately-funded high-tech jobs in Brazil, and another three to four million in the rest of Latin America. Hall explained that Sao Paolo in Brazil is the second largest city in the Western Hemisphere and has about twelve times the population density of New York City. As a result, there are a lot of people living and working in very tall buildings. Project Cauã will aim to put a server system in the basement of all of these tall buildings and thin clients throughout the building, so that residents and businesses can run all of their data and applications remotely."

Brandon Butler writes "Red Hat made its first $1 billion commercializing Linux. Now, it hopes to make even more doing the same for OpenStack. Red Hat executives say OpenStack – the open source cloud computing platform – is just like Linux. The code just needs to be massaged into a commercially-hardened package before enterprises will really use it. But just because Red Hat successfully commercialized Linux does not guarantee its OpenStack effort will go as well. Proponents say businesses will trust Red Hat as an OpenStack distribution company because of its work in the Linux world. But others say building a private cloud takes a lot more than just throwing some code on top of a RHEL OS."

stoilis writes "Groklaw reports that the SCO vs IBM case is officially reopened: 'The thing that makes predictions a bit murky is that there are some other motions, aside from the summary judgment motions, that were also not officially decided before SCO filed for bankruptcy that could, in SCO's perfect world, reopen certain matters. I believe they would have been denied, if the prior judge had had time to rule on them. Now? I don't know.'"

CowboyRobot writes "The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit that manages much of the day-to-day business behind the open source operating system, maintains a small office in San Francisco. Stop by, however, and you probably won't find anyone there. That's because the organization's 30-something employees work virtually. It's like the anti-Yahoo: Just about everyone, including Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds, works from home. 'We really wanted to have that effectiveness and nimbleness of a virtual organization,' said Amanda McPherson, Linux Foundation's VP of marketing and developer programs. 'You have that commitment and ownership of your job more than when you're just sitting there in that cube farm,' McPherson said. 'For us, if you hire the right people who are motivated by that, you just get more commitment. [You get] people who really love their jobs and like to work, but also like that they can go to the gym at 2 in the afternoon when it's not crowded. In an office, [people would say]: "Why isn't he at his desk? It's 2. There must be something wrong."'"

coop0030 writes "Feel like someone is snooping on you? Browse anonymously anywhere you go with the Onion Pi Tor proxy. This is fun weekend project from Adafruit that uses a Raspberry Pi, a USB WiFi adapter and Ethernet cable to create a small, low-power and portable privacy Pi."

An anonymous reader writes "Red Hat will switch the default database in its enterprise distribution, RHEL, from MySQL to MariaDB, when version 7 is released. MySQL's first employee in Australia, Arjen Lentz, said Fedora and OpenSuSE were community driven, whereas RHEL's switch to MariaDB was a corporate decision with far-reaching implications. 'I presume there is not much love lost between Red Hat and Oracle (particularly since the "Oracle Linux" stuff started) but I'm pretty sure this move won't make Oracle any happier,' said Lentz, who now runs his own consultancy, Open Query, from Queensland. 'Thus it's a serious move in political terms.' He said that in practical terms, MariaDB should now get much more of a public footprint with people (people knowing about MariaDB and it being a/the replacement for MySQL), and direct acceptance both by individual users and corporates."

Debian warns on its blog: "The unofficial third party repository Debian Multimedia stopped using the domain debian-multimedia.org some months ago. The domain expired and it is now registered again by someone unknown to Debian. (If we're wrong on this point, please sent us an email so we can take over the domain! This means that the repository is no longer safe to use, and you should remove the related entries from your source.list file.)" Update: 06/14 02:58 GMT by U L : If you're wondering where it went, it moved to deb-multimedia.org, after the DPL (at the time) asked the maintainer to stop using the Debian name.

judgecorp writes "The OpenStack project could be the 'Linux of the cloud', according to Red Hat, which just announced a fully supported distribution of the open source software. The plan seems to be to offer it as a competitor to VMware's vSphere. From the article: 'The open source firm has been a member and supporter of OpenStack for some time, but with this announcement, its OpenStack distribution graduates from a “community release” similar to its Fedora Linux distribution, to a fully supported offering, comparable to its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) OS. The company wants to position OpenStack as a future cloud platform analogous to Linux, and is building it into a whole set of announcements and programs.'"

An anonymous reader writes "The H-Online is reporting that the upcoming RHEL 7 will use GNOME Classic Mode over Gnome Shell as its Default Desktop GUI. Speaking to TechTarget ahead of the 2013 Red Hat Summit, Red Hat engineering director Denise Dumas said this regarding the decision: "I think it's been hard for the Gnome guys, because they really, really love modern mode, because that's where their hearts are." She added that the same team had "done a great job putting together classic mode" and that it was eventually decided to use it in favour of the more radical modern interface to spare customers the effort of relearning their way around the desktop again."

colinneagle writes "The first developer preview of Ubuntu Touch – aka 'Ubuntu for Phones and Tablets' – was unveiled just a few short months ago. And, just a few weeks back, it was announced that the team was shooting for having a fully functional (aka "can use it as your actual phone, on a daily basis") version by the end of May. May is now over, so Bryan Lunduke published some screenshots and analysis of the core features of the Ubuntu OS for smartphones and tablets."

hypnosec writes "Linus Torvalds has released Linux 3.10-rc5, and he is certainly not happy with the changes merged last week. Rc5 is bigger than rc4 and has code scattered across its entire code base because it addresses many outstanding problems. In the release announcement, Torvalds noted, 'I wish I could say that things are calming down, but I'd be lying. rc5 is noticeably bigger than rc4, both in number of commits and in files changed (although rc4 actually had more lines changed, so there's that).' Torvalds has warned that he is going to start cursing again, and said, 'I'm going to call you guys out on, and try to come up with new ways to insult you, your mother, and your deceased pet hamster.'"

Five years ago today, reader J.J. Ramsey asked what's keeping you off Windows (itself a followup to this question about the opposite situation). With five years of development time gone by for Windows as well as all the alternative OSes, where does Windows stand for you today? (Is it the year of Linux on the Desktop yet?)

An anonymous reader writes "In clearing up common misconceptions about Wayland (e.g. it breaking compatibility with the Linux desktop and it not supporting remote desktops like X), Eric Griffith (a Linux developer) and Daniel Stone (a veteran X.Org developer) have written The Wayland Situation in which they clearly explain the facts about the shortcomings of X, the corrections made by Wayland, and the advantages to this alternative to Canonical's in-development Mir."

An anonymous reader writes "Stephen Gallagher, Security Software Engineer at Red Hat, has completed his week-long experiment running GNOME 3 Classic. Stephen writes: 'While I was never as much in love with GNOME 2 as I was with KDE 3, I found it to be a good fit for my workflow. It was clean and largely uncluttered and generally got out of my way. Now that Fedora 19 is in beta and GNOME Classic mode is basically ready, I decided that it was my duty to the open-source community to explore this new variant, give it a complete investigation and document my experiences each day.' I'll leave Stephen's opinion on the new Classic Mode to the Slashdot reader to discover, but I will say that it does touch on the much debated GNOME Shell Activities Overview, and the gnome-2-like Classic mode's Windows List on the taskbar."

coop0030 writes "Thanks to the affordable Raspberry Pi and some clever software, anyone can re-create the classic arcade experience at home. Adafruit brings the genuine 'clicky' arcade controls, you bring the game files and a little crafting skill to build it. Classic game emulation used to require a well-specced PC and specialized adapters for the controls, so it's exciting to see this trickle down to a $40 system. Also, a video of the game system is on YouTube."

New submitter ckugblenu writes "I'm an undergrad computer engineering student in Ghana with some Linux knowledge under my belt. How do I start a Linux users group at my university and what kind of activities should occur? The engineering department is willing to provide meeting space, but that's about it. The other computer groups are into mobile web and not as specialized as I would like. How do I successfully achieve it and build a following, since it will be the first in the university?"

An anonymous reader writes "The Kickstarter campaign for the UDOO board is 7 days out from closing and they currently sit just under $4,000 short of their stretch goal of $500,000. The UDOO is an attempt to produce a single board which would combine the best parts of both Raspberry Pi and Arduino. UDOO will have a 1GHz ARM i.MX6 CPU in either a Dual Core or Quad Core flavor, 1 GB DDR3 RAM, HDMI and LVDS + Touch, and both an RJ45 port and an on board Wifi Module. Along with those specs, it will be compatible with Arduino DUE R3. The UDOO will utilize Micro SD as a boot device and run both Linux and Android. Currently on Kickstarter, the Dual Core starts at a pledge of $109."

New submitter m.alessandrini writes "I've been using Debian for a long time, and I'm not a novice at all; I install system updates almost daily, I avoid risky behaviors on Internet, and like all Linux users I always felt safe. Yesterday my webcam suddenly turned on, and turned off after several minutes. I'm pretty sure it was nothing serious, but I started thinking about malware. At work I use noscript and other tools, but at home I have a more relaxed browser to be used by other family members, too. Here I'm not talking about rootkits or privilege escalation (I trust Debian), I think more of normal user compromise. For example, these days much malware come from malicious scripts in sites, even in advertising banners inside trusted sites, and this is more 'cross-platform' than normal viruses. So, what about non-root user malware? How much could this be real? And how can you diagnose it?"