Finally, the United States Congress and the United States Supreme Court take action to reign in a patent system gone haywire.

Can the Linux desktop succeed? Perhaps, but first it must hurdle a number of lofty legal obstacles.

For more than four years, Microsoft has claimed that Linux infringes its patents. True or false? Here’s a clue: Have you ever seen the Boogeyman?

The defeat of the Computer-Implemented Inventions directive — the so-called “software patent” directive — by the European Parliament seems positive. But it doesn’t address the larger issues — and that could yet spell trouble for software makers.

The phrase "open source license" refers to a large number of agreements that license the copyrights inherent in software widely, fairly, and with the fewest restrictions possible. This article -- the first of two -- describes the tenets of copyright and explains the intents of an open source license. The second article in this series explores individual licenses, such as the GNU Public License and the Apache License.

Who knows what the future will hold? Well, heaven knows we don't or we'd have already won the lottery a few times and retired to a private island somewhere. However, we can look at the past to make a few reasonable predictions-- such as the companies in the free and open source software community that are going to have a major impact on the market in 2008.

We pick the companies that are defining the future of Information Technology and will have the most impact on the Open Enterprises of 2007. It's the inaugural edition of our 20 Companies to Watch list and we guarantee that every company here will challenge how you think about Linux and Open Source before the year is out.

As the Mozilla folks start making plans to plan for the Mozilla 2 codebase, Matt Gertner over at the AllPeers blog has a radical suggestion: Dump the Gecko rendering engine and embrace WebKit.

XML may be the best way to store your data, but how do you make it presentable? Enter XSL.

Validating XML documents using schemas will reduce your stress level. We explain what validation is and take a look at four different ways of doing it.

In last month's article, we looked at writing a basic Linux SCSI driver -- one that basically sucked. Actually, this driver was worse than planned because it contained a bug which anyone running on an SMP box would have found pretty quickly.

I'm 36 years old, and it seems that makes me an elder in the computer business these days. The employees at my own company, VA Research, are on the average at least five years younger than me. I first noticed the age difference when employees whose first computer was a 486 started showing up. They'd nod politely and smile with a humoring look as I described how to load a program from punched cards on a General Automation 1830 by entering the jump op-code for the card reader subroutine using toggle switches. I tend to tell people around the office I'm "in my late twenties" lest they think it's time to put me out to pasture.