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The is a clear pattern to open source's continuing rise. The first free software that was deployed was at the bottom of the enterprise software stack: GNU/Linux, Apache, Sendmail, BIND. Later, databases and middleware layers were added in the form of popular programs like MySQL and Jboss. More recently, there have been an increasing number of applications serving the top of the software stack, addressing sectors like enterprise content management, customer relationship management, business intelligence and, most recently, data warehousing.

Have you ever wanted to ssh to your Linux box that sits behind NAT? Now you can with reverse SSH tunneling. This document will show you step by step how to set up reverse SSH tunneling. The reverse SSH tunneling should work fine with Unix like systems.

55,000 Sugar/GNU/Linux XO machines are being shipped every month to kids all over the world. This is a generation getting ready to break the bonds of digital dependencies and building a commons for themselves on free and open source software and open content and standards. In the meantime, Microsoft announced a pilot study to run Windows XP on these very machines.

Dirac is a video codec data compression technique first developed by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) that is under Mozilla Public License Version 1.1.

You may not know this, but Albert Einstein wore an editor's hat at Encyclopedia Britannica, as did George Bernard Shaw and more than 80 Nobel laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners. But it's that other encyclopedia, the online one, where vandals and anonymous editors allegedly run rampant, that's been getting all the attention lately.

The Hanlin eReader V3 from Tianjin Jinke Electronics out of China claims to provide a month of use between battery charges. By then 10,000 pages of reading should have been possible – provided you have the requisite time and patience.

Thin clients reduce hardware costs, offer added security by stripping away storage options, and ease management tasks by storing all configurations on a centralized server. Citrix provides a good solution and is a dominant player in this arena with Citrix Presentation server, but that comes at a price -- about $1,000 for five concurrent connections and about $200 to $300 for each additional concurrent client connection. However, taking the thin client route does not have to be that expensive: openThinClient is an open source thin client server that is absolutely free.

Nokia has revealed that the next version of its Maemo Internet-tablet operating system will support 3G cellular connectivity. Maemo is the platform used in the Finnish manufacturer's Internet-tablet series, the latest iteration of which was the the N810. On Wednesday, Nokia's open source chief Dr Ari Jaaksi told the audience at an Open Source In Mobile (OSIM) event in Berlin that Maemo 5 would include support for high-speed packet access (HSPA), a standard sometimes described as 'super-3G'.

With 1.4 billion people connected, the Internet is the greatest collaborative network that mankind has experienced. One of the consequences of the growth of this network is a shift in the way knowledge is being created and distributed. As we move to an interconnected world, the balance of power is shifting from old, proprietary models of knowledge creation to the open source model that emphasizes collaboration and sharing. From management gurus to consulting firms to leading business schools, everyone is taking note of this new phenomenon that goes by various names like ‘Collaborative Innovation,’ ‘Open Innovation,’ or ‘Distributed Co-creation.’

Linux Firefox users can say a eulogy for EULA (End User License Agreement). After much pressure, Mozilla is removing the EULA from the Firefox welcome screen on Linux distributions, according to a recent Mozilla blog by Harvey Anderson, VP and general counsel of Mozilla.

OpenOffice.org is in an unenviable place. Office suites -- word processors, spreadsheets, presentations and the ilk -- are utilitarian, complex bundles of software. They are a necessity of modern life, used daily by individuals and businesses all over the world. It isn't that people take them for granted. People don't consider them much at all. It has been a long time since I've had any feelings whatsoever about an office suite. There have been developments in office software that have been innovative, such as online document creation. And though useful, I still can't honestly say that I've been enthusiastic about (or, since Clippy was retired, repulsed by) any office application.

Not that anything approaching brain-surgery-level thinking was in any way involved here, but I figured out why and how it's easy to get paragraphs to automatically indent when writing in the Geany text editor. First of all, it's not called automatic tabbing or paragraph inentation. The correct term for what I'm enjoying so much is "auto-indentation," and it can be turned on and off under the Document menu in Geany.

As a Linux evangelist, I find myself in an interesting quandary. There are many new netbooks being sold with Linux pre-installed, but often the way Linux is installed is not what I’m used to seeing. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I understand the reasoning for custom interfaces, but it has some disadvantages. Love it or hate it, as a Linux community we have to be able to handle these things gracefully, or we lose all the potential impact we gain with pre-installed Linux.

Here's a little something to finish the week off and tie up some loose ends. You may have noticed in our Perl script to maximize guaranteed matches in any give number pool that we did all of our work using permutations, which we then went through the trouble of sorting and removing duplicates. Probably a few people out there were thinking: "Why permutations if 1,2,3 and 3,1,2 are going to be considered equal? Isn't that just a bunch of extra work?" The answers to those questions are "why not" and "yes" ;)

Because a large portion of end user machines attached to the Internet are Windows machines, Web developers have no choice but to develop Web applications that, while they don't necessarily rely on Microsoft technology, do have to work properly with Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. That usually means developers require a Windows installation at their disposal. Those of us who run Linux on our home machines have a harder time testing sites for Internet Explorer compatibility, or accessing sites that require proprietary IE features. IEs4Linux is a script that can help you set up three older versions of IE on any system running Wine. Unfortunately, the program is not as polished as it should be.

CompuLab introduced a tiny fanless PC using 4-6 Watts of power. The Linux-ready "Fit-PC Slim" measures 4.3 x 3.9 x 1.2 inches (110 x 100 x 30mm), but includes a 500MHz AMD Geode LX800, Ethernet, VGA output, WiFi, and a 2.5-inch hard drive option, says CompuLab. The Fit-PC Slim apparently includes much the same ingredients as CompuLab's earlier Fit-PC, introduced last year.

[The only problem -- where can we buy this? It's not at all clear -- steve]

Google quietly introduced an audio search tool called GAudi this week in Google Labs. For now, Google is using to the tool for experimentation purposes to index political content in YouTube videos, but chances are they are exploring this for more than good citizenship points and will expand it at some point in the future.

Funambol, the open source mobile device synchronization and push email provider, released version 7.0 of its server and client software in August. We took a look at what it offers, then took it for a test drive on mobile devices and the Linux desktop. At the heart of Funambol's synchronization abilities is a SyncML server running on top of Apache Tomcat. The company provides source code to a community edition of this server, and sells a carrier edition to commercial clients that adds on functions like remote device configuration and management.

Juliet Kemp shows how you don't need a dedicated computing cluster to perform big processing jobs- you can turn your LAN into a part-time cluster with Condor, which intelligently uses idle CPU cycles for powerful parallel processing.

Q: What do you get when you put 10,000+ IT people in a racetrack with free beer? A: The most fun you can have at 100mph.