The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has just memorialized the Affero GPLv3, a version of the GPL that was created to cover software that runs over a network such as the Internet, which these days would mean, oh, SaaS stuff and Google Apps, Web Services, game servers, web and e-mail servers, that kinda stuff. It's based on the GPLv3 but adds a codicil that lets users who interact with AGPLv3-licensed software over a network get the source code to that program. It's meant to force more software modifications to be shared by removing the protection of the server. The Affero license started outside the Free Software Foundation - the operation behind the GPL - but it concert with it because the GPL hadn't anticipated protecting works accessed over the Internet. The FSF now maintains the Affero license and published two drafts of AGPLv3 this summer seeking feedback.

I was reminiscing about the good 'ol days tinkering with computers: Commodore 64s, GWBASIC, Turbo Pascal 5.0, DOOM and the Autoexect.bat config.sys hacking required to get it running on underprivileged 486s, Amiga 500s, broken Linux 1.0 kernel compiles, EGA video cards and more Sierra games than I can remember. Getting stuff running was hard. Understanding how stuff worked was heaps of fun. Connectivity to other likeminded communities was basically non-existent, so a great book on the topic of interest was like striking gold in Ballarat.

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has filed two more lawsuits in defense of the GPL, charging router maker Xterasys Corporation and High-Gain Antennas LLC with denying downstream recipients of GPL-protected code with access to the source code. One can only hope that one of these defendants doesn't collapse and sees the complaint through to the end so the GPL can be tested in the courts but one suspects that the SFLC, the GPL's legal enforcer, is careful of its targets. High-Gain claims it's not using Busybox code and makes the source code available to those who ask for it but SFLC won't listen. The very first case of copyright infringement based on the GPL brought in a US court was settled out of court on October 30 for an undisclosed amount of money shortly after the SFLC brought suit against Monsoon Multimedia on behalf of the programmers who wrote BusyBox, a lightweight set of standard open source Unix utilities licensed under the old GPL version 2 and commonly used in embedded systems. Busybox is again the complainant in these new suits. The actions, filed Monday in US district court, demand injunctions and damages to the tune of the alleged violators' profits off the widgetry.

This book contains 14 chapters and an appendix. Its subtitle is 'the ultimate ASP.NET beginner's guide.' As its two titles imply, this book covers the basics on a lot of ASP.NET topics. The chapter titles convey this: ASP.Net basics, VB and C# programming basics, constructing ASP.NET Web pages, database design and development, etc.

Reminding people of how its backing was the making of Linux, IBM, to no one's surprise, has thrown its support behind cloud computing, that delicious nexus of every chi-chi buzzword technology currently in vogue: Web 2.0, rich Internet applications, software-as-a-service, SOA, grid computing, Web Services, virtualization and utility computing. IBM calls its initiative Blue Cloud - like it could have another name - and claims it's a 'game-changing model for Internet-scale computing,' providing customer with just the right size computer power while at one and the same time being 'green' as well as 'self-healing and self-managing' based on open standards and Linux. Lordy, if this thing was a cute guy with money, it would be every mother's dream.

Microsoft this week announced that Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 have released to manufacturing (RTM) and are now available for MSDN subscribers to download, and will be available soon to Microsoft's customers through its various other channels. Visual Studio 2008 has new support for Web server communication techniques for AJAX/JSON, the company noted.

Hi, this is Scott Hanselman and this is another episode of Hanselminutes and we are fortunate enough to be sitting down today with Robert Pickering, the author of the Foundations of F# book, and I'm in Portland. Robert, you are where right now? Robert Pickering replies: I'm in Saint-Germain-en-Laye near Paris, France.

Mercado Eletrônico is the leading B2B company in Latin America. Founded in 1994, it provides services for supply chain management, such as e-procurement, catalog, sourcing and collaboration, based on an advanced technology platform supporting more than 30,000 transactions a day and a complex buyer/supplier user community.

Just as I'm finishing this column, Miguel comes on chat (#mono on irc.gnome.) and mentions that the media embargo on project 'Barking Duck' will be lifted at midnight. 'Project Barking Duck' is an inside joke at Mono and not actually a project. But the media embargo was real. At midnight, Microsoft announced the release of Silverlight 1.0.

Oracle owns PeopleSoft and JD Edwards; they own SleepyCat; they own BEA; and of course they have their own enterprise database. This means they have the stack from top to bottom, with the exception of an operating system. They can take the CRM and banking and insurance and end-user apps that they now own, host them on an entire stack, and basically squeeze the middleware vendors out of existence.

Here are my thoughts on this. I was expecting Alfred - who is known to be an arrogant and incompetent CEO - to run away from Larry as fast as he could. But this movie usually ends as follows. First, history repeats itself. By that I mean that Alfred should remember Larry's PeopleSoft hunt, which ended up with the PeopleSoft's CEO's head on a stick. In my humble opinion, in Act 2 of Larry's BEA hunt, we will see Alfred's head on a stick and the BEA shareholders will make the wedding plans, as always happens when Larry plans another marriage for his baby Oracle.

In Visual Studio 2003 and earlier, the build process for Visual Basic and C# projects was hard-coded, and built into Visual Studio itself. The only build scripting tool that Microsoft offered was nmake, and a companion tool called build.exe that provided some support for concurrent builds. Visual Studio users whose build systems were based on makefiles had to maintain project files in parallel. For Visual Studio 2005, we thought it would be great if it was possible to completely customize the build process, and to build Visual Studio projects on machines that didn't even have Visual Studio installed, exactly the same as they built inside Visual Studio. We also wanted to be able to plug in reuseable build loggers and build steps.

C# 3.0 represents a radical new approach to .NET development. The new language features were added primarily to support Language Integrated Query (LINQ), allowing you to query data using the same constructs regardless of where the data is currently stored. However, you'll find that there are many things you can do with these new features outside of queries. There's a learning curve for these new features, but by adopting them you'll find that you can be much more productive than you ever were in earlier versions of C#. In this article, I'll give you a whirlwind tour of C# 3.0 language features, and how you can leverage them in your work.

After Google's Android announcement, at least four big guys should be irritated: Sun Microsystems, Apple, Adobe and Microsoft.Google approaches telephony from the open source side - Linux-based platform, uses Java but does not care about sticking to Java ME - they are planning to use fast OpenGL libraries and are not afraid to be hardware-specific.

It was the usual story: a short deadline and a tight budget. The client's internal staff said 'No way' to build the Web-based application in fewer than six months, with any fewer than three full-time resources. The project needed to be completed in two months. It included custom authentication, collaboration, business rules, and forums. Therefore we chose SharePoint 2007 as the development platform and configured the solution to handle 80% of the functionality. Where SharePoint could not meet the requirements through configuration, we developed custom code to complete the other 20%. Herein we'll detail some best practices and lessons learned from our implementation.

I asked what she did for a living. She said she was a software engineer working with SOA. I did not think about my plane ride much until I arrived in San Francisco to attend the SOA World Conference & Expo this past Monday and Tuesday. The first day of the conference as I walked into the hotel, guess who I saw? My friend who I met on the Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul. What a small world, isn't it? Her company was one of the sponsors of the event.

When .NET first came on the scene, there was fighting over whether it was a platform or not. As I have said here in the past, those debates are over as .NET has proven itself a very useful and valuable platform, expanding into areas that people assumed it wouldn't and even couldn't in the early days.

The three-year-old Dojo Foundation has put out version 1.0 of Dojo, an open source JavaScript toolkit for AJAX development meant for building rich Web 2.0 applications without proprietary plug-ins or single-vendor solutions. The widgetry makes use of Google Gears, Google's solution for making applications work both on- and offline. What Dojo calls Dojo Offline is based on it. The toolkit is all of 25K in size and supports progressive enhancement and animations and is supposed to open the door to a wealth of high-quality widgets and extension modules. Dojo also supports the Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera browsers and the OpenAjax Alliance Hub 1.0 to guarantee interoperability with other toolkits IBM, Sun, BEA and AOL are Dojo backers.

Egenera, which claims it's the archetype Virtualization 2.0 company to VMware's Virtualization 1.0 - and is going put its PAN Manager software on other people's hardware to prove it - has convinced Fujitsu Siemens, which OEMs Egenera's BladeFrame servers, to put PAN on its own industry-standard Primergy servers. It's Egenera's first PAN partnership since the American company said last week that it was setting up a software line of business around PAN and would move the software out through fellow OEMs. Fujitsu Siemens says the widgetry will form part of its FlexFrame Infrastructure, its latest milestone in its Dynamic Data Center strategy of creating business-responsive IT using the latest virtualization and automation technologies.

Watching VMware stock and its market cap spike since it IPO'd must have had Red Hat positively pea green with envyWatching VMware stock and its market cap spike since it IPO'd must have had Red Hat positively pea green with envy - so green in fact that it's gonna try taking VMware on by pushing the Xen virtualization integrated in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Red Hat's new goal is to underpin 50% of the world's servers by 2015. And since virtualization is projected to take over the world by then that's a lot of Xen virtualization - and there's no extra cost in it like there is with VMware since it's bundled with RHEL. (Red Hat's telling people they'll save $20,000-$30,000 a server.) Red Hat claims it's got its first 18,000 virtualized servers - although it's a little fuzzy about whether those 18,000 are actually in production - anyway, it's confident they'll get there eventually after all the testing and evaluating is done.

Microsoft's immediate answer to rival web-based applications, its free Windows Live online programs, the stuff it calls 'software plus services,' emerged from their beta gauntlet Tuesday. The suite includes e-mail, instant messaging, photo sharing, blogging, parental controls for surfing and event planning. Users can read and answer e-mail even if they're offline. It aggregates with AOL and Google Gmail.

The infamous Microsoft-Novell interoperability/patent protection deal that FOSSers love to hate just passed its first birthday and, bragging that it's exceeded their original business targets, the pair has extended the arrangement. They're going to create a cross-platform accessibility model that links the existing Windows and Linux frameworks used to build assistive technology products that enable people with disabilities to interact with computers. At the same time they disclosed the names of 30 new customers, including Costco, Southwest Airlines, the City of Los Angeles and Zabka Polska, one of the largest retail chains in Poland, that will be getting Microsoft certificates for three-year priority support subscriptions for SUSE.

In what amounts to a monumental reversal of policy, Microsoft said Monday in a press release - so it's in writing - and publicly at TechEd in Barcelona that it's changing its licensing terms and will no longer restrict developers 'to building solutions on top of Visual Studio for Windows and other Microsoft platforms only.' In the same press release it said it's committed to putting out its next-generation Visual Studio 2008 development environment and its .NET Framework 3.5 upgrade by the end of the month ahead of its 'official' launch on February 27 along with the delayed Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008.

The demonstrations will illustrate practical interoperability scenarios between some of the Web Services platforms implemented by vendors such as Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, HP, Sun Microsystems, BEA, and WS02. The session will cover interoperability best practices for different SOA architecture styles ranging from SOAP and REST messaging patterns to complex multi-service and multi-vendor interactions using a variety of WS-* protocols like WS-Security, WS-SecureConversation, WS-Addressing, WS-ReliableMessaging, MTOM, etc.

Many articles have already been written about service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Service Component Architecture (SCA), for example, see references [1] and [2]. In this article we'll focus on a freely available, open source implementation of the Service Component Architecture that provides a simple way to implement SOA solutions. This SCA implementation is being developed in the Apache Tuscany Incubator project. The project started in 2006 and is being used by many who are looking for a simple SOA infrastructure. The recent Tuscany SCA version 1.0, which was released in September 2007, supports the Service Component Architecture specifications 1.0.

At a court hearing Tuesday Novell surprised a lot of people and withdrew its claim that SCO damaged it to the tune of $100 million by reneging on a deal supposedly assigning its Unix IP to UnitedLinux, the failed Linux consortium, in 2002. Novell - or rather its allegedly independent Nuremberg-based German subsidiary, SUSE Linux GmbH - originally made the claim under seal to an arbitration panel in Switzerland that was supposed to decide whether SCO had in fact turned the IP in question over to UnitedLinux. UnitedLinux was supposed to produce a common Linux distribution and was composed of SCO, Turbolinux, Connectiva (now part of Mandriva) and SuSE, the Linux distribution that Novell subsequently bought with IBM's money. Each of the companies was supposed to own 25% of a Delaware LLC that held the IP and Novell claims that the LLC then turned the IP rights over to SUSE.

To take advantage of the OpenSocial implementation in Orkut sandbox, you have to create a Google Gadget with the OpenSocial feature, post the gadget on the Internet, and then add the URL of the gadget as an application. As I looked into the Google gadget API to build this, I found something interesting, the Google Gadget framework exposes the function _IG_FetchContent() that can be used to asynchronously fetch the text at any URL.

After much anticipation, today at TechEd Developers in Barcelona, Spain, S. 'Soma' Somasegar, Corporate Vice President in Microsoft's Developer Division, announced Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 will be released by the end of November 2007. Somasegar also unveiled a number of resources for developers enabling them to make the most of out of their Microsoft tools investments.

I'm down here in Sebastopol, California at Foo Camp and I've been lucky enough to sit down with Tim Ferriss, the New York best-selling author of The 4-Hour Workweek. I want to understand how you're able to synthesize what is a 40- or 60- or 80-hour workweek to those four or few hours that really are the most value-added. Are you just outsourcing everything that's tedious?

Most of the restrictions imposed on Microsoft by its 2002 consent decree with the US government - which were supposed to expire on November 12 - have been temporarily extended to no later than January 31, 2008 to accommodate the legal maneuvering of the states now seeking to extend the decree for another five year. The so-called California Group of states and, at the last moment, the New York Group filed motions last week with Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, basically Microsoft's probation officer, seeking the extension. She in turn gave Microsoft until November 6 to reply and gave the Justice Department until November 9 to file an amicus curiae brief siding with Microsoft. The states then have until November 16 to respond.

In a big uh-oh for Microsoft, Yahoo and the other GoogleClick critics, the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission approved Google's $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick Tuesday. The regulator decided the two companies weren't close competitors, which is what Google has been saying all along. That leaves the US or Europe to find fault with the pairing. The European Commission is supposed to be running some unidentified concessions past Google's opposition.

FiveRuns Corporation, a pioneer of monitoring products for Ruby on Rails, described by some as the new Java, has gotten $6.2 million in funding from Austin Ventures. The money is earmarked for acceleration product development, sales and marketing and the company's partnership efforts. Since it kicked off a year ago August, FiveRuns has secured $9.2 million in funding. It claims a customer base of 65 organizations or so that it says are monitoring hundreds of servers, with 'hundreds' in evaluation.

It seems that Microsoft has persuaded the Nigerian government to switch out the 17,000 copies of Mandriva Linux it ordered under a pilot project of Intel Classmate PCs for its schools and substitute Windows instead. Mandriva's still going to get paid but the CEO of the little French company, Francois Bancilhon, is fit to be tied. He's put an open letter to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on his web site basically accusing Microsoft of playing dirty pool. According to the letter, Mandriva's bid for Nigeria's business survived Microsoft's muscling it and playing hardball for it. Mandriva got the order, qualified the software, got the machines shipping and press releases issued with quotes from Nigeria.

Busybox is a lightweight set of standard Unix utilities used in embedded systems and Multimedia was only making the executable version of the firmware that it created using Busybox available, not the source code. Monsoon joined in the SFLC announcement and had its CEO Graham Radstone say, 'The fact that Monsoon Multimedia and Busybox have reached an agreement amicably shows that settlement is far better than costly litigation. We will ensure that we are in compliance with the agreement in the future.'

Leopard introduces a bunch of amazingly powerful new controls, but one of my favorite new controls is the NSCollectionView. This control works a lot like the FlowLayoutPanel if you're familiar with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). It essentially is a layout container responsible for laying out a collection of subviews. You can either manually create the subview collection, or you can set the content array of the NSCollectionView. This is a really powerful option because if you can set the content array, you can also bind it. For this demo, I've bound the content array of the NSCollectionView to an array controller. If you follow along (or if you cheat and just download the code), you'll notice that the NSCollectionView subviews automatically request Core Animation layers. This means that, by default, new items fade in as they are added, but you can change that transition using the animations tab of the inspector.

What I am going to do in this regular column is feed my habit by highlighting some of the books I am reading, and (mostly) enjoying. (I will only rarely write negative reviews; it's a rare book that I 'do not put down gently but throw across the room with great force' after all.) Geeks like to read - and not only programming books. Most of us read incessantly. Whether it's popular science, sci-fi or fantasy, a good thriller or an occasional popular history book or biography, it's a rare geek who isn't in love with books. And I am no exception, although I have to confess I am rather an extreme case since my love of books and eclectic tastes borders on the 'gentle madness' aka bibliomania.

I've actually seen a few reports of people having trouble with the upgrade - their computer hangs at the bootup screen for hours on end. Since I didn't 'upgrade' (like a good boy, I reformatted and started over) I didn't experience the hour-long hangs, however, I did experience some delays during boot. The first time I inserted the Leopard disc and it prompted me to click the button to restart, I waited for about 20 minutes at the 'grey screen' waiting for the Apple logo to appear.

Standards devised by one tech company whose main purpose is to undermine another tech company, usually don't work. In this case it's Google trying to undermine Facebook. And I don't think it's going to work. What would be exciting and uplifting, a real game-changer -- Internet companies giving users full control of their data.

Sybase has announced new Microsoft .NET Framework-based enhancements to PowerBuilder 11 and DataWindow.NET 2.5. New features for PowerBuilder include Windows Vista support, .NET Framework incremental compile capabilities, and database driver enhancements. DataWindow .NET 2.5 has been extended with the ability for developers to use Web services as a data source.

Consistent with its position that the 2002 consent decree imposed on Microsoft did what it was supposed to - and that the European Commission is misguided - the Justice Department says it has no intension of seeking to extend the decree's provisions past their November 12 expiration date. The DOJ has told the court acting as Microsoft's parole officer that the 'standard for such an extension' hasn't been met.