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According to a letter seen by heise online, the German Federal Office of Justice last week launched summary proceedings against The SCO Group GmbH for “breaching regulations pertaining to the publication of its accounts.” The proceedings were suspended after the imposed fine was paid. No information on the size of the fine is available. According to the agency’s website, the fine can range from 2,500 euros to a maximum of 25,000 euros.

Recently, I was showing a Motorola Milestone phone to a non-technical friend. When I mentioned that the phone was running Android, he said to me “Oh, thats the Google Linux for phones isn’t it… does it run OpenOffice?”. I had to disappoint him at that point, but it lead to a question I had to ask: When the user interface is different and the API for developers is different, is an operating system still Linux, or is it something else?

The N900 is Nokia’s first device built around the Linux-based Maemo 5 operating system. Is it a mainstream smartphone, a must-have for Linux developers, or both?

The Ubuntu server is the most innovative distribution for servers. It enables administrators to gain access to cutting edge technology and implement that with new ideas. If you are looking for the latest and greatest, this is the server option for you.

Regardless of how severe limitations Apple imposes on the iPad, we can expect it to be reasonably successful. I don’t think it will duplicate the success of the iPhone but due to Apple’s strong marketing and its own technical merits, it will sell in significant numbers. How will this affect Linux and the upcoming tablets based on it? When I say Linux, I mean Google’s Android and Chrome operating systems as well because they are all based on Linux.

Beyond expressing a preference, does anything else need to be done to make sure that governments that say they are going “open source” really do so?” Quotas — dictating specific percentages of open source usage — seem an obvious answer, but in countries that have tried them, open source has not necessarily flourished. One country where quotas on open source use have been instituted is Hungary. While some in the open source community have held Hungary up as an example to Europe and the rest of the world, there are others in the open source community there who question if the intent behind the quotas has actually been achieved.

Nina Paley’s “Sita Sings the Blues” is becoming a huge critical success, and may even succeed financially, which is unusual for any independent film, but virtually unprecedented for free culture films (“Sita” was released under the CC By-SA). There’s only one sad thing about this for free software fans, and that’s that “Sita” was made using proprietary software, and the “source code” is in a proprietary format: Adobe Flash’s “FLA” format, to be precise. Paley has posted these files on the Internet Archive, but she doesn’t know how to translate them into any free software friendly format (and neither do I). Can you help? Read the full story at Free Software Magazine.

Linux Journal Insider is your monthly peek at what to expect from the new issue of Linux Journal, before it even hits the newsstands. Shawn Powers and Kyle Rankin give you the inside scoop on topics, articles, and geekery in general.

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This guide explains how to set up mod_geoip with Apache2 on an Ubuntu 9.10 system. mod_geoip looks up the IP address of the client end user. This allows you to redirect or block users based on their country. You can also use this technology for your OpenX (formerly known as OpenAds or phpAdsNew) ad server to allow geo targeting.

Each day, the drumbeat for Ubuntu Server Edition is getting a little louder. In recent weeks, a growing list of ISVs (independent software vendors) have vowed to support Canonical’s Linux server operating system. The latest example involves Mailspect launching antispam and email archiving solutions for Ubuntu Server. Here’s the scoop.