Skype, the beleaguered VOIP provider-cum-white elephant owned — and if they could line up a buyer, unloaded — by eBay, gave up on a GPL-compliance lawsuit has been fighting in Germany today, signaling another victory for the forces of Free Software everywhere.

Two months ago, the big Gmail news was that spammers had broken Google's extra-heavy-duty CAPTCHA and had begun to run amok offering "private" enhancements and Nigerian fortunes. This month, it's the news that they wasted their time.

About nine months ago, Microsoft was handed its — er — bum by Europe's Court of First Instance, with the court ruled that Microsoft's nearly decade-long fight against the European Commission's antitrust decisions must end, and that the company must pay the $1.43 billion fine that has been accruing since 2004.

Second-place chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices added fuel to its anti-trust fire against Intel this week, filing a pre-trial brief with the court overseeing the company's anti-competition suit that claims...well, something we're pretty sure is salacious.

In one of the biggest judgments in the history of intellectual property law, BitTorrent search engine TorrentSpy was ordered Wednesday to pay $110 million to the Motion Picture Association of America, the fruits of the a default judgment won by the MPAA last year after the site's operators refused to turn over information about users and acted to anonymize posts on the site.

Sun Microsystems, which acquired Open Source database firm MySQL in January, has apparently found the key to unlocking their plans to make some MySQL features commercial-only: torch-wielding users.

The One Laptop Per Child program announced last week that they have named a new President and Chief Operating Officer for the non-profit, ostensibly in a desperate play to stem the hemorrhaging of talent and controversy the project has seen over the past few months.

Google, masters of the internet and the main sponsor of the CoreAVC-for-Linux project, have removed the media codec from their Google Code site after a DMCA complaint from the creators of the original codec.

OpenSolaris, the open-source variant of Sun's popular Solaris operating system, has finally exited development with the release today of OpenSolaris 2008.05.

Details have been trickling in all weekend about Microsoft's decision Saturday to make good on their threats to take their toys and go home — although we'll likely never get all the pieces of the puzzle, enough have emerged to put together a roundup of how things went down.

Linux Journal Breaking News has just learned that Microsoft has backed down from its unsolicited takeover bid for über-search firm Yahoo.

According to legend, the priestess of Apollo at the Delphic Oracle was supposed to have delivered wild, frenzied, sometimes nonsensical prophecies after breathing mystical vapors rising from the ground beneath her three-legged stool.

In a somewhat surprising move, Adobe has decided to remove restrictions from its market-dominating Flash format, making development and closer integration of Flash applications possible for the first time.

Microsoft — which has spent the last three months in a frustrating bout of fisticuffs with Yahoo over its unwelcomed buyout offer — has finally begun to show some signs of life, after having

It's been a while since anything interesting went on in the epic SCO v. Novell litigation — primarily because the matter has been mired in federal court for months due to SCO's Chapter 11 Bankruptcy.

Hans Reiser, the programmer responsible for the ReiserFS file system, has been on trial for the murder of his estranged wife for the past six months. Yesterday, that all ended with a jury finding Reiser guilty of first-degree murder.

By now, everyone knows that Microsoft is doing a hostile-takeover Apache dance with Yahoo, and Yahoo wants no part of it. Saturday was Microsoft's big bad deadline, after which the Empire has promised to launch it's attack. So, where are we?

As of about 8:15 this morning, Ubuntu — the Linux distribution that has taken the desktop world by storm — has released version 8.04 "Hardy Heron" to a flurry of cheers, frantic downloads, and — we suspect — sighs of relief from all involved. Though the GNOME-based Ubuntu has a tendency to steal the spotlight, the party also includes the KDE-based Kubuntu, Xfce-based Xubuntu, and education-focused Edubuntu.

The end of something of any size doesn't usually come from a single event — yes, one iceberg sank the Titanic, and one wrong turn started World War I — but in general, the meltdown of a major entity is usually a chain of events that balloon towards an eventual end. With all the things going wrong for Microsoft, we can only hope that's exactly what's happening.

This morning we continue in our quest to flesh out all the weekend's news in order to see that you are suitably prepared for the week ahead. In that spirit, we bring you the last and latest of the noteworthy news.