Do you have the next two days to yourself? Aside from scarfing down some turkey & fixin’s what are you going to work on? I have a feeling that some of us have some mad hacking in mind.

I’ll start: While the U.S. is taking the holiday I’m still hacking up O’Reilly Developer News, and Java.net News. So, my project for the next two days is to add to my sources of interesting tech news sites outside of the US since US sites are barren wastelands today and, I suspect, will be tomorrow. Frankly, I have very few aside from The Register and BBC News’ tech section so please email me your favorites. Oh, I also happen to have a fresh copy of Spidering Hacks here that I hope to bend the spine of today.

Care to share your hacking plans?

Aside from hacking up a turkey and a brewski I plan to…..

Related link: http://news.osdir.com/article376.html

SuSE has taken the governor off SuSE Linux. You can now download SuSE 9, in its entirety, from their FTP servers. They seem a bit jammed this morning, no doubt from disgruntled users of Redhat (non-enterprise edition), but the big news is that it is available at all.

SuSE, for the last few years at least, has only had an evaluation CD available for download. This always kept me from using SuSE. But, how the tide has turned this morning! Now they’re giving it away, and apparently they can’t do so fast enough.

This is super news for home Linux users. As soon as the FTP servers calm down a bit I plan on installing it on my home machines. Once on my linux desktop tower and once on the other half of my iBook partition for it comes in PPC flavor too!

I for one welcome out new Novell/SuSE overlords!

Post your reviews here as you get a chance to check out SuSE Linux!

Related link: http://www.osdir.com/Poll-27.phtml

The “Open Source Goes to COMDEX” contest was so interesting, and revealing, that I’ll be hosting regular polls about open source projects on OSDir.com henceforth. The first is: What is your favorite CMS?

On OSDir.com we try to capture people’s thoughts about open source projects as they actually use them, but one thing that, I now see, has been missing is the head to head comparisons. When you have to choose one, which do you recommend?

A great thing about open source is the choice it provides, but sometimes it can get to be a bit much and confuses people who want to try a certain tool. They get caught up in which to try first. I think a Poll can handily answer some of those nagging questions. I promise not to run a vi vs. emacs poll. 8^)

Unlike the Open Source Goes to COMDEX contest you can also write in your own vote (in the comments section).

Related link: http://news.osdir.com/article347.html

“Microsoft Corp. is preparing a major PR assault over Windows’ perceived security failings in which it will criticize Linux for taking too long to fix bugs, we have learned.

In a sign that the inroads made by the Open Source community are starting to rattle the software giant, Microsoft has hired several analysts to review how fast holes are patched in the open source software and is expected to announce that Windows compares favorably.”

I’m half way through a third or fourth read of Orwell’s 1984 and reading that Microsoft is planning to dirty the idea of proactively uncovering problems as a security problem reminds me of MiniTruth, the Ministry of Truth, trying to convince Winston Smith that 2+2=5.

Can you resist the fear of the rat eating your face?

Related link: http://news.osdir.com/article338.html

“Roy T. Fielding, Director of the Apache Software Foundation, has announced that the Apache Project (ASF) is proposing new licenses to “reflect changes in the community regarding patents and contributing.”

“The goals of this license revision have been to reduce the number of frequently asked questions, to allow the license to be reusable without modification by any project (including non-ASF projects), to allow the license to be included by reference instead of listed in every file, to clarify the license on submission of contributions, to require a patent license on contributions that necessarily infringe the contributor’s own patents, and to move comments regarding specific Apache trademarks and attribution notices to a location outside the license terms (the NOTICE file).”

Ladies and Gentleman, we are very pleased to announce the winners, as you voted, for the projects that will be attending Comdex at the “Open Source Pavilion”:

In order of most votes:
Plone 1690
KDE 1334
OpenOffice 1302

Zope 1069
Gimp 705
Gnome 551
Eclipse 501
mplayer 458
Evolution 429
Subversion 410
SpamAssassin 364
GNUCash 292
Audacity 256
Gaim 229
SquirrelMail 184
tightVNC 165
XMMS 137
phpMyAdmin 125
Zoe 121 (current versions no longer open source - Steve, Jan ‘05
MoinMoin 89
NoCatAuth 60

The top six projects have been contacted and have confirmed their attendance for the Pavilion.

If you are in the neighborhood of Vegas during the week of the 17 - 20th we encourage you to stop in to say hello and bring potential converts. On hand will also be Rael Dornfest and Rob Flickenger, authors of Google Hacks & Mac OS X Hacks, and Linux Server Hacks & Wireless Hacks respectively.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to participate in voting, I know the winners certainly appreciate it.