I stumbled on an interesting and fairly unbiased article entitled "Microsoft takes on the free world" today.

This article deals with Microsoft's patent infringement threats against GNU/Linux and interviews Brad Smith, Microsoft's senior vice president, and Eben Moglen, the Executive director of the Software Freedom Law Center, in order to get views from both sides.

Of course, no article can be complete without mentioning the fact that although Microsoft has decided that GNU/Linux and FOSS software violates 235 patents, they completely refuse to disclose what they actually are.

I just finished reading an interview by LinuxWorld in which they interviewed Jeremy Allison.
It was an interesting read, but the bottom of page two caught my eye.

LinuxWorld: One of the persistent rumors that’s going around is that certain large IT customers have already been paying Microsoft for patent licensing to cover their use of Linux, Samba and other free software projects.

LinuxDevices has posted a interview with Jim Zemlin, the Linux Foundation's executive director.

The interview talks about the merging of the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and Free Standard Group (FSG) and what they plan to do in the near future. It is definitely worth a read in my opinion.

The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and the Free Standards Group have announced today that they are combining their resources to form the Linux Foundation, a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux.

The consortium will allow them to unify and dedicate more of their resources and services for promoting, protecting and standardizing Linux in order to successfully compete against proprietary platforms.

For those of you who are interested in the OpenMoko, you should be pleased to know that Sean Moss-Pultz has posted the release schedule today on its community mailing list. If you haven't heard about the OpenMoko yet, it is an open source, Linux-based FIC Neo1973 Smartphone.

The schedule is as follows:

• 2007-02-11 Phase 0: Developer Preview