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Autodesk Inc. is planning early next year to release to the open source community, the full code of their MapServer Enterprise product, which is part of Autodesk’s new Web mapping platform .

We are delighted to announce the creation of the MapServer Foundation (mapserverfoundation.org). The foundation is a nonprofit organization whose goal is to provide a supportive framework for open, collaborative development of geospatial software. Several groups and individuals are collaborating to help launch and sponsor the new foundation. Financial support from Autodesk will allow us to get the foundation up and running. In this letter, we present some ideas of how we think the foundation can help the community, but these ideas need broader discussion and debate within the community.

Read the full letter

I think it’s great to see Autodesk releasing a product of this calaber to the open source community. The original version of this product has been around since the 1997 and sees about 10,000 downloads a month.

Stay tuned for more news…

According to one standards attorney, Microsoft’s open standard Office XML format announcement may not be all it’s cracked up to be. The problem was, Microsoft had not revealed a license for its proposed standard for the new XML format specifications for Office 12, Ecma International took a wait and see posture. Microsoft is expected to reveal this license some time this week.

Alan Yates, the general manager of Microsoft’s Information Worker Strategy, has said, though, that “the new license that will accompany the Open XML format with the standards organization will go well beyond traditional standards licensing and will be very positive for the vast majority of developers, even open-source developers.”

We will be watching this closely.

By Paul F. Roberts

Keylogging programs are the epitome of online stealth, and they’re also a mushrooming problem on the Internet, where identity and intellectual property thefts are fueling an explosion of key-capture tools.

ADVERTISEMENT Reports of new keylogging programs soared higher this year, as part of a wave of multifunction malware with integrated keylogging features, according to VeriSign Inc.’s security information company iDefense Inc. The programs often evade detection by anti-virus tools and can be difficult to detect once installed, experts warn. However, at least one anti-spyware company believes that reports about the danger posed by keyloggers are overstated.

More than 6,000 keylogging programs will be released by the end of this year, according to projections by iDefense. That’s an increase of 2,000 percent over the last five years, company officials said.

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By Jeffrey Burt

Chip makers are aggressively moving forward with plans to add more cores to their processors as a way of improving performance without having to bump up the frequency.

Sun Microsystems Inc., of Santa Clara, Calif., next month will roll out the first of its servers based on its new UltraSPARC T1—formerly code-named Niagara—which holds as many as eight cores. In addition, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. this month unveiled road map details for its Opteron server processors as it tries to maintain what officials say is a technological advantage over rival Intel Corp.

The road map includes releasing a quad-core version based on AMD’s current Opteron chip design in 2007, with the cores connected together via an upgraded version of AMD’s HyperTransport interconnect technology, and supporting a new Level 3 cache. Soon after that, another four-core chip based on a new architecture will be released, officials said.

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