Microsoft doesn’t make a habit of filing lawsuits over patent violations. In fact, Redmond has only done so twice in the past, and both cases were settled.

Linux is a joke. Well, that may be a bit harsh, but Ubuntu certainly seems to be all the excuse founder Mark Shuttleworth needs to make one bad pun after another. After Bill Gates’ performances with Jerry Seinfeld, one wonders if becoming a billionaire tech mogul alters brain chemistry. At any rate, Paul Rubens reports on the future of Karmic Koala and Canonical. (Hint: not as successes in show biz.)

“Oracle’s Linux initiative has so far failed to make a serious dent in Red Hat’s business or even in its stock price.

I’m taking PCWorld’s new LinuxLink Blog under my wing. Being a mentor comes with great responsibility.

Have a confusing and entertaining Saturday

Zack Urlocker of MySQL fame was at the Stanford Accel Symposium earlier this week and, along with some other open-source heavyweights, participated on a panel that attempted to cull some lessons learned in building open-source businesses. If you didn’t get to attend the event, don’t panic. Urlocker has written up a few key principles.

MySQL Global User Variables UDF is a shared
library that adds simple user functions to MySQL
in order to keep persistent shared variables in
memory. These variables and their values are
available to all clients. Any data can be stored
into these persistent variables, including BLOBs.
Since updates are atomic and much faster than
MEMORY tables, this is an easy and efficient way
to handle counters and sequences.

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License: MIT/X Consortium License

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Changes:
GLOBAL_STORE() is now an alias for GLOBAL_SET(). The SQL template now loads all available functions. The documentation was updated.

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TV-Browser is a TV guide (EPG) that is easily
extensible using plugins. It is designed to look
like a paper-based European TV guide. Included are
over 500 mostly European channels (Germany, UK, Sweden, and Norway). It is possible to add channels yourself using tools offered on the homepage or via the plugin interface. For US viewers, a SchedulesDirect plugin is included.

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
This version resolves a bug in the data processing that led to an overload of the TV-Browser server at about 8 p.m. Additonally, this update provides several minor bugfixes.

Nuttx is a real-time embedded operating system
(RTOS). It has a small footprint that is usable in
micro-controller environments. It is fully
scalable from tiny (8-bit) to moderate embedded
(32-bit) systems. It also aims to be fully
compliant to standards, to be fully real time, and
to be totally open.

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License: BSD License (revised)

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Changes:
This release adds integrated support for the ZiLOG eZ80Acclaim! processor and code for the the Renesas M16C/s0 processor (which has not yet been tested).

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bareFTP is a file transfer client supporting the
FTP, FTP over SSL/TLS (FTPS), and SSH File
Transfer Protocol (SFTP).

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
This release includes a bookmark system, with a bookmark organizer and an easy-to-access bookmark menu. bareFTP now also supports certain VMS style directory listings and more UNIX style directory listings.