France moves forward with law challenging Apple

France's lower house of parliament passed a law on Tuesday that could challenge Apple's dominance of the online digital music market by making it open its iTunes store to portable music players other than its iPods.

French officials said the law aimed at preventing any single media playing operating system, Apple's iTunes or Microsoft's Windows Media Player, from building a grip on the digital online music retail market.

"These clauses, which we hope will be taken up by other countries, notably at the European level, should prevent the emergence of a monopoly in the supply of online culture," Richard Cazenave and Bernard Carayon, National Assembly deputies from the ruling UMP party, said in a statement on Tuesday.

The new legislation will require that online music retailers such as iTunes provide the software codes that protect copyrighted material -- known as digital rights management (DRM) -- to allow the conversion from one format to another.

Sun releases processor designs as open source

Sun Microsystems Inc. has taken another step to leverage open-source design so that developers can create more servers based on its Sparc chip architecture. The company on Tuesday released the source code for its UltraSparc T1 processor.

The strategy is part of Sun's OpenSparc Initiative, a move to create the world's first multicore, multithreaded ecosystem, the company says.

Sun advanced that effort in February when it released its Hypervisor API (application programming interface) specifications. That move allowed companies to port Linux , BSD and other operating systems to UltraSparc T1 and gave developers the information they needed to create related hardware and software tools.

Mozilla Happenings

Lightning strikes Mozilla

Mozilla ventures into the world of integrated calendaring with the release of Lightning 0.1. Will the addition of calendaring capability give Thunderbird a popularity boost?

Lightning 0.1 is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux as an extension for Thunderbird. Currently limited in its functionality and not yet ready for a production environment, it does offer a handful of calendaring functions, all of which are integrated into Thunderbird.

Installing it is simple. Download the .xpi file and then install it into Thunderbird as you would any other extension. After restarting the e-mail application, you are rewarded with a changed interface. Under the list of e-mail inboxes and folders on the left-hand side of the application is a new mini-calendar along with a three-tab interface for accessing an agenda, a to-do list, and calendars. Clicking on the Calendars tab causes the message list and message preview window to be replaced with a one-week calendar view. The view appears to be limited to one week at a time; clicking on a particular day brings up a appointment entry dialog box.


Firefox 2.0 alpha available

Curious to see what's in store for Firefox 2.0? An alpha of 2.0 with some new features has appeared on Mozilla's FTP servers.

Due out later this year, Firefox 2.0 promises a handful of improvements and new features over what is already a very solid browser. (By way of disclosure, I use Firefox 1.5 exclusively on my PCs and laptops)