Intel announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Wind River Systems, one of the top providers of embedded Linux distributions and tools. Intel plans to acquire Wind River for $11.50 per share in cash, or about $884 million, making it a wholly owned subsidiary.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed suit against Apple to defend the First Amendment rights of a noncommercial online forum. The suit comes in response to pressure from Apple lawyers that forced "BluWiki" to remove discussions of how to make third-party media management software work with the iPhone and iPod.
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Open Invention Network (OIN) announced that three of the eight patents cited in Microsoft's lawsuit against TomTom have been posted for prior art review by the Linux community. The evidence is being compiled to convince the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that the patents are invalid.
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Red Hat and Georgia Tech have published a study that measures open source activity around the world. The Open Source Index (OSI) is accompanied by an interactive map (pictured) that shows the relative rankings for 75 countries based on their open source software (OSS) activity.
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Database giant Oracle has agreed to purchase Sun Microsystems in a deal worth $7.4 billion, according to a story in eWEEK. Oracle wants Sun more for its hardware than its software, and may choose to jettison Sun's open source offerings, including MySQL, says eWEEK.
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Sun has added support for the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) to the latest version of its "open source" desktop virtualization software. Other enhancements to VirtualBox 2.2 (left) include greater hypervisor optimization and 3D graphics acceleration for Linux and Solaris applications, says an eWEEK story.
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The Linux Foundation (LF) announced that it will help companies excise the Microsoft FAT filesystem from their systems to avoid the fate of TomTom, which recently settled with Microsoft over alleged patent infringements over FAT. Meanwhile, other open-source leaders are suggesting a standardized FAT substitute may be in the offing.
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If by suing TomTom, Microsoft wins the right to charge for ubiquitous FAT filesystem features like long filenames and flash wear-leveling, it could spell real trouble for Linux device makers. Not to mention SAMBA distributors. OTOH, decades of non-enforcement are going make tough sailing for Redmond legal on this one.
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[Updated 1234545906] -- As most any user can tell you, Linux systems think of time in terms of the number of seconds, not counting leap seconds, since the beginning of the UNIX epoch: Jan. 1, 1970. For most readers, that number will reach 1,234,567,890 this Fri. the 13th. Psych!
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Unemployed? Take a lead from the great open source entrepreneurs, and have a slice of open source cake, suggests Sramana Mitra in an interesting Forbes article that goes on to profile Apache and CollabNet Founder Brian Behlendorf, SugarCRM Founder John Roberts, and SpringSource Founder Rod Johnson.
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