Moving up the Stack – Forget about Linux on the desktop. The next stage of open-source adoption will occur in enterprise software. An article by Erick Schonfeld, some months ago on Business 2.0. Fab observation:

Rather than being used to improve products, an astounding three-quarters of new license revenue in the enterprise software industry is instead plowed right back into sales and marketing.

That means, as Augustin likes to point out, that the business model of a traditional enterprise software company is effectively to charge customers a ton of money to convince those same customers that they need the software in the first place.

The FFII and NoSoftwarePatents.com have picked up an award for outstanding contribution to software development for their work in blocking European patent legislation, at the CNET Networks UK Technology Awards.

Florian Mueller of NoSoftwarePatents.com and Rufus Pollock of the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) received their awards in front of an audience of IT professionals from across the industry at the Hilton Hotel in London.

See the full original article at: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/developer/0,39020387,39222696,00.htm

Another CfP:

“The USC, Simi/Conejo, and UCLA Linux User Groups are proud to announce the 4th annual Southern California Linux Expo scheduled for February 11-12, 2006 at the Westin Hotel near the Los Angeles International Airport. Building on the tremendous success of last three years’ SCALE, we will continue to promote Linux and the Open Source Software community.”

See http://www.socallinuxexpo.com/ for details.

A company in Belgium has a patent-pending system (“SMS2mail”) whereby you can text a word to a free short code and get back more information by email to the address of your choice. So where’s the invention, exactly? ;-)
For further details see this article: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=25732

Given the current fuss around Linus and the Linux trademark, I should perhaps clarify that I think intellectual property (IP) is important. Basic copyright and trademarks make sense. Patents also, they give an inventor some time to market their creation.
It just goes horribly wrong with software patents. See my recent post for an idea about where the line can be drawn effectively.

What a great -important and necessary- initiative!
From the site:

OpenUsability.org brings Open Source Developers and Usability Experts together
The idea behind is simple: There are many Usability Experts who want to contribute to software projects.
And there are many developers who want to make their software more usable, and as a consequence, more successful.