'With the advent of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Induce act, the technical community can no longer be uninvolved,' says Jeff 'Hemos' Bates, vice president of editorial operations and executive editor of Slashdot.org. 'Part of the reasons that the DMCA was passed is that people were not involved,' Bates added. The solution: Slashdot.org now has a political site, http://po litics.slashdot.org, taglined 'Politics for Nerds. Your Vote Matters.'

It remains to be seen whether or not Delaware Chancery Court Judge Leo Strine this week will side with Oracle and declare void PeopleSoft's poison-pill strategy designed to stave off the hostile takeover bid. Before then it may become moot; if Oracle ups its current $21 tender offer for example, and promises a quick transaction, perhaps PeopleSoft will dismantle the defensive measures itself.

'Software is more complex than a cotton gin or whatever else you might typically invent in a bricks and mortar world,' argues Groklaw.net Editor Pamela Jones. 'Software and patents don't belong together,' Jones maintains.

In a partial victory, the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT), which brought the US Patent and Trademark Office evidence of prior art in respect of one of the four patents that Microsoft holds on the Windows file system, succeeded in convincing the USPTO that Microsoft merely made 'obvious' extensions to pre-existing ideas. Microsoft now has to defend itself against PUBPAT's alleged prior art and the patent re-examiner's findings.

Brad Silverberg, who used to be a senior VP at Microsoft, has teamed up with fellow Microsoft expat Cornelius Willis to try and build a billion-dollar business out of challenging Oracle and Microsoft by helping the enterprise build open source applications on their platforms, something the enterprise has trouble justifying today.

Sun's Calvin Austin is one of the busiest people in the Java world these days, but in this exclusive interview with JDJ's Yakov Fain he talks about Java 5 - J2SE 5.0, formerly known as 'Tiger' - which was officially released yesterday. Find out more about Java 5, including what it is that Austin considers to be the coolest new feature of Java 5.

Old soldiers never die, they say - and it looks like they don't just fade away either. Byron Sebastian, Cornelius Willis, and Will Pugh have all departed the San Jose, CA-based proprietary enterprise software powerhouse BEA Systems for pastures new. And they're betting that the most fertile territory business-wise these days is to be found in the Promised Land known as 'dependable open source.'

Can something be considered to be 'open source' if some organization stays in control of the standards that the software implements? In other words, is 'Open Source/Closed Standards' a good idea? Yes, says LinuxWorld editor-in-chief Kevin Bedell, 'I believe this should be fine. It's to everyone's benefit to allow open source implementations of standard APIs while preventing fragmentation of those APIs, he contends. 'For example, if Sun were to want to release Java under an open source license, this may be the type of license it would choose,' Bedell adds.

'We are not bizarro numbskull anti-Sun conspiracy theorists,' writes Red Hat's Michael Tiemann, in response to a remark last week by Sun's president and COO Jonathan Schwartz. 'If you won't open source Java,' Tiemann continues, 'why should customers believe what you are telling them?' Schwartz hasn't yet responded, but the Linux community has, and it's not necessarily pleased with Tiemann and Red Hat. Or with Schwartz and Sun for that matter.

Ex-Computer Associates CEO Sanjay Kumar could be sentenced to 100 years in the slammer if he's found guilty of everything he was charged with on Wednesday, according to the Justice Department. 'Not exactly a Martha Stewart reprise,' says Maureen O'Gara.

Spooked at the thought of an Oracle-PeopleSoft combination to the point of considering playing white knight, IBM has now allied directly with PeopleSoft, getting it to promise to standardize its applications on IBM's WebSphere middleware.

'I get confused by a lot of Sun's technology advertising and marketing,' writes Roger Strukhoff. But there are numerous reasons, he argues, not to give up on Sun - the company that famously grew 'from start-up mode to $1 billion in annual sales without spending one cent on advertising its products.'

Is Sybase targeting MS SQL or PostgreSQL or both? That's what developers and DBAs have been asking themselves after last week's big announcement by Sybase that it has released a free (as in beer) version of the Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) database - which Sybase claims is the first free Linux enterprise-class database for production use.

The open source community has spawned another SCO-like eruption. This time the parties involved are Brian Connolly, formerly head of the Technology practice at Ogilvy, and the entire community around the Mambo operating system. Connolly claims the Mambo OS contains misappropriated code belonging to his company, Furthermore Inc. The Mambo community disagrees - vociferously - as anyone monitoring the discussion here at LinuxWorld has seen over the past few days.

Meet Furthermore - a case of higher-order integration made possible by a fortunate meeting of the open source technical world and a business manager with a vision. It's a group blog. It's a content organization and meta-content organization engine.

Maureen O'Gara believes that SCO intends to charge IBM with fraud. What SCO and its legal A team of Boies and Silver want aired are IBM's e-mails, which they think tell a killer story about AIX, Dynix, and Project Monterey. According to O'Gara SCO wants the world to start seeing the case the way SCO sees it and are going to file a motion asking the court to unseal most of the documents that are currently under seal. What it wants aired

The SCO Group has asked the Utah district court overseeing its $5 billion suit against IBM to postpone any decision on any IBM dispositive motions - like the one the court is supposed to hear on Wednesday seeking a partial summary judgment in IBM's favor - until after the court-ordered fact-finding period ends on February 11. SCO maintains, as it has before, that IBM flatly refuses to turn over the discovery that the court ordered it to produce and that IBM's attempt to accelerate certain decisions is just IBM's way of overturning the court's scheduling order, blocking critical discovery and forcing adjudication 'without adequate opportunity for SCO to develop its proof.'

For over a decade, Tim Bray, one of the prime movers of XML, managed the Oxford English Dictionary project at the University of Waterloo. That was from 1988 to 1999. During the end of his time there he launched one of the first public Web search engines (in 1995), coinvented XML 1.0, and coedited 'Namespaces in XML' (1996-1999).

'Headlines like this...really drive me nuts,' writes Sun's president and COO Jonathan Schwartz in his most recent blog. He is referring to the Forbes Magazine headline on September 1: 'Sun Micro Still A Potential Threat To Linux.' Not so, Schwartz thunders, using his deliberately provocative lower case 'l': 'Sun is not a threat to GNU/linux. Innovation is not a threat to GNU/linux. dTrace is not a threat to linux. Nor is Solaris 10, nor Janus.' What is a threat, then? The answer, according to Schwartz anyway, is: Red Hat.

SCO's still got $43 million in the bank, but its latest quarterly results revealed that the hated SCOsource licensing scheme brought in just $667,000. This is up from $11,000 in Q2, but nothing like the $7.3 million it contributed in 3Q03 when Microsoft and Sun were paying SCO dues.

There are some people who are passionate about the differences between 'free software' and 'open source.' I'm beginning to wonder if the difference matters. The term 'free software' came into use at about the same time that Richard Stallman quit his job at MIT, launched the GNU Project, and began writing the software that would eventually become the core of the free software community: emacs, the GNU 'C' compile (gcc), the 'C' libraries, and a few others.

The question 'How will Sun ever make money off giving so much source-code to open source' - as it did in 2000 with OpenOffice.org, has most recently with Project Looking Glass and is about to again with Solaris - is the wrong one, argues Sun's Simon Phipps. 'It's a good question,' he says, but at its heart - he argues - 'lies a misunderstanding about the nature of open source software, and once that's cleared up everything falls into place much more easily.'

'We obviously recognize that you could question the independence of a report funded by Microsoft,' said the IT boss for the London Borough of Newnham who controversially just signed a 10-year partnership agreement with Microsoft. Was the report (in favor of MS solutions over Linux) influential, he was asked: 'It would be insane to claim otherwise,' came the reply.

Recent 'Linux Quote of the Week' may have been vintage Torvalds, but isn't the best thing Linus has ever said about SCO - says Kevin Mack, whose has his own Top Ten. We bring it to you here. One LinuxWorld reader comments: 'Linus has a gift of saying what we all are thinking in a way that we wish we'd have thought of.'

'UserLinux is enterprise Linux without the big price tag,' said longtime open source advocate Bruce Perens recently. The new distro launches September 1 and is intended, as Perens and his supporters express it, to 'repair the economic paradigm of enterprise Linux.'

Not pleased by an award given to the blogging technology RSS by the Linux Journal, Dee-Ann LeBlanc writes an open letter to the editors of the journal that somewhat puzzlingly declared RSS winner of the 'Best Game' category.

So here we are three weeks shy of the third anniversary of that fateful day when HP said it was going to buy Compaq, and Cleo, the muse of history, who gets spiteful when people ignore her, is sitting there saying, 'I told you so.' HP's enterprise storage and server unit, ostensibly the real reason HP bought Compaq, is a dud - the company's chronically worst performer - and whatever the temptation to blame weak spending - it's more an HP-specific problem than anything else.

Wired has found that the Mac platform is still OS number 2 (to Microsoft Windows) on the desktop, but that certain analysts are predicting it could drop to number 3 position in 2005, with Linux taking over the number 2 spot.

What is open source? It is a way of developing, distributing, and licensing software. In the late 1970's and early 1980's, the roots of open source as we know it today were established.

BEA has witnessed the departure of two key executives in the past two weeks. Scott Dietzen has resigned as chief technology officer, closely following the recent departure of Adam Bosworth, BEA's former chief architect and senior vice president, to join Google.

Stand by for a week here at LinuxWorld in which Sun and Novell are mentioned in the same breath in all sorts of ways. Both have big bets in place on Linux; both spend a great deal of time and energy engaging open source; plus there's the little matter of the speculation that Sun might even acquire Novell. Unless IBM does so first. There's never a dull moment in the Linux world.

A LinuxWorld reader writes: 'I need an operating system that's easy enough for my parents to use but secure enough so that I can firewall it and all the other stuff that one needs to do in order to be on the Internet these days. It also needs to be flexible enough that I can give them only the options they need and hide the guts from them and low administration so that I don't have to touch it any time soon.' Can LinuxWorld's readership help?

By the end of the year, Red Hat and SuSE will have a new commercial Linux rival to worry about, one that Red Hat nurtured in its own bosom in its core OS and tools development teams.

SCO's two latest filings with the Utah district court hearing its $5 billion suit against IBM claim that SCO's Unix Executable and Linking Format (ELF) codes are in Linux illegally.

Well, Linux has spawned a rare management company, which is odd, you see, because one would have thought that by now there would be a slew of them, but there aren't, are there?

Should Java be open sourced? What would the verb 'open-source' actually mean if it were? What would be lost, if anything, in terms of safeguarding the compatability of Java, if Sun moved toward more of an open-source model? What innovation and energy might be lost to Java if it doesn't? These questions were asked and - in part - answered this morning, from multiple perspectives, at 'The Big Question' keynote debate at JavaOne in San Francisco.

Sun Microsystems today underscored its commitment to open source and desktop technology leadership by contributing Project Looking Glass and Java 3D technology to the open source community. This contribution will unleash a new dimension of developer innovation by making Sun's technology available at Sun's 3D Desktop Technology Open Source Project on java.net.

JDesktop Network Components (JDNC) has been released by Sun as an open source project, so that the technology is available to the community early enough to allow it to directly shape the vision, the feature set, and even the code. 'There is still a lot of work to do,' says Sun's Amy Fowler, 'the JDNC feature set is far from complete and there remain rough edges, especially in the API, which has not had extensive usage outside of unit testing and markup-driven use-cases. But, that is exactly why we need your involvement.'

An interesting new wiki, focused on defining the needs of Linux newbies, has just gone live. 'Our goal is to find out what newbies need to make the switch to GNU/Linux and then to create a useful manual on basic tasks that new users will find simple and clear and easy to follow, using what we learn from our study,' writes GrokDoc's prime mover, Pamela 'PJ' Jones from Groklaw. GrokDoc is at www.grokdoc.net.

Just recently Gartner reported that IBM has overtaken BEA in application server market share. The interesting thing is that Gartner's expression of market share is in a single number, dollars. While dollars are certainly an important factor in declaring a market leader, is this an accurate measure of market lead? If it is, where does that leave open source offerings such as Jonas and JBoss?