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James Maguire, Datamation's managing editor, claims he has no interest in software whose source code is available for editing. "I'm not a software engineer," he says. "If I can't grab it off the shelf, I can't use it." He's half-joking, of course. But he echoes the opinion of many people outside the free and open source software (FOSS) community about what its efforts are about. Ask average computer users what FOSS is about, and, if they've even heard of it, they'll probably say something about the source code being publicly available.

NVIDIA has long supported their CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) technology on Linux for allowing general-purpose code algorithms to be executed on the graphics processor, while AMD and their Stream Computing support has been absent on Linux. AMD has only been supporting their Stream SDK on Windows XP, but this morning we have confirmation that the Software Development Kit will be released for Linux in the coming days. According to AMD's Michael Chu on the AMD Developer Forums, an SDK v1.1 Beta is expected within the next two weeks (this message appeared a week ago) and that testing has been done with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SuSE Enterprise. This SDK will make it possible to use CAL and Brook+ on Linux, permitting of course you're using an R600 GPU.

Linux may be a free platform for many and a reasonably inexpensive alternative to Unix and proprietary platforms for others, but make no mistake. For years, Linux has been big business, and if projections made by the market researchers at IDC turn out to be correct, in a few short years the Linux server ecosystem spending on hardware, software, and services directly relating to the platform will hit $49 billion by 2011. That's more than twice the $21 billion in Linux-related server spending that IDC reckons the companies of the world accounted for in 2007.

[Here are some more 'statistics' for you - Scott]

Software as a service (SaaS) entered the IT landscape in 2000 and has revolutionized the deployment models of many software companies and even entire industries, such as Internet search. It has also becoming an increasingly popular form of consuming applications within enterprises of all shapes, sizes and geographies.

The US smartphone market may continue to be dominated by mobile platforms from Apple, Microsoft, and RIM, but Linux has been creeping into ever more mobile devices in the last few years. Some Motorola RAZR 2 models have donned a Tux, Palm is looking to Linux to drive its next-generation consumer smartphones, and Android's backers hope to spread it to an even wider array of handsets. Linux is also driving many avant garde connected consumer electronics devices such as the Chumby, Nokia N810, Amazon Kindle, Dash Express, and whatever the fertile minds tinkering with Bug Labs' modules are envisioning,. Even the remote control that houses the user interface of Logitech's Squeezebox Duet is a Linux computer.

Eclipse is still open source's best-kept secret. Here Mike Milinkovich, boss of the Eclipse Foundation, explains how Eclipse has evolved from its origins as a Java IDE, what goes to make up the new Equinox run-time project, and why he hopes Microsoft will join Eclipse.

It has been said that the best things in life are free. While this isn't always true, it applies in this case. If you've struggled with GNUplot, JPgraph or other charting applications, FusionCharts Free is a breath of fresh air. Have you dreamed of finding a charting and graphing application that is simple to install, easy to configure, and drop-dead gorgeous? Stop dreaming and download a copy of FusionCharts Free. You'll be producing professional quality charts and graphs in no time.

The Ubuntu Live conference is still a few months away, but The VAR Guy has already booked his trip to the event -- and he expects to track these five trends at the conference.

Linux does many things to bring many people together. Often, the effects of such convergences are powerful. Larry Cafiero, an Editor for the Santa Cruz Sentinel, tells the story of how 2 people with absolutely nothing in common can find common ground for the greater good. A great read and indeed food for thought.

It sounds crazy to say this, but the XP-based version of the Eee PC 900 (the new version with the 8.9" screen) will actually be considerably -cheaper- than the Linux based version. At the official launch today, the company told journalists that "Microsoft has been a longstanding supporter of Asus" to explain the price discrepancy. And -- get this -- only the XP-based machine will be sold at mass-market retailers, while the Linux-based model will be consigned to computer stores.

Today was the first official day of JavaOne. I visited a couple of non-JBoss sessions that sounded really interesting, and they were–so now I share them with you. The first is about an improved web recommendation system, and the second is for improving collaboration with your off-site coworkers.

OpenSolaris, Sun’s open-source take on its Solaris operating system, has finally arrived. Some people, like Jason Perlow at ZDNet think that this is great news and that Sun’s latest operating system will give Linux a real challenge. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. I’m inclined to doubt it simply because OpenSolaris has failed to develop a strong developer community. For more on that see Ted Ts’o, noted Linux developer and CTO of the Linux Foundation, blog posting, What Sun was trying to do with Open Solaris. T’so wasn’t playing OS religious wars, he was pointing out that while “OpenSolaris has been released under an Open Source license,” it doesn’t have “an Open Source development community.”

Experts have defended the Open Document Format standard against suggestions that its schema is broken, but the critic who highlighted the alleged flaws has defended his position. Alex Brown, a major contributor to the progress of the ODF's Microsoft-backed rival, OOXML, within the international standards process, carried out a "smoke test" last week, which he said showed the OpenOffice open-source application suite does not produce documents that conform to the ODF format--and also showed the schema defined in the OpenOffice standard is broken.

VMware Inc. today released a public beta for Fusion 2.0, virtualization software that lets Intel-based Macs run Windows, Linux and other operating systems. Fusion 2.0 also adds support for multiple monitors and makes it easier to switch from rivals' virtual machine programs, said the company. Multimonitor support is a first for Mac virtualization software, VMware claimed in a post to its company blog dedicated to Fusion. Its main competitor, Parallels Inc.'s flagship Parallels Desktop for Mac, lacks the feature.

Have a look at Linux kernel source from a bird's eye view. The Linux kernel is one of the most mysterious open source projects. There is a lot of documentation, however it is still a difficult subject to comprehend. The Interactive Linux kernel map is intended to help people gain an overview of the structure and interactions of the Linux Kernel. This approach is similar to classic operating system diagrams in which application and user space interfaces are at the top, hardware interfaces and drivers are at the bottom and separate functions are shown in vertical bars

Sun today announced the yet-to-launch JavaFX programming language will gather data on end-users activities to help developers monetize software, by selling ads for instance. The company's Project Insight will see "instrumentation" added to PCs, mobiles and Blu-ray devices that run JavaFX, which feed data back through a special data stream to a hosted service. Codenamed Project Hydrazine, the service is run by Sun for the benefit of third parties.

Yesterday, I wrote in a comment that indeed Sun's performance in 2003 in signing the agreement with SCO, highlighted in the trial testimony, was making it look really bad. The motive in doing it seemed to me to be not just to open source Solaris but to also hobble Linux and promote a competitive product instead, and in the ugliest way possible. And then, when they had to power to stand up to SCO and protect Linux end users, they failed to do so.

Ext4 is the latest in a long line of Linux file systems, and it's likely to be as important and popular as its predecessors. As a Linux system administrator, you should be aware of the advantages, disadvantages, and basic steps for migrating to ext4. This article explains when to adopt ext4, how to adapt traditional file system maintenance tool usage to ext4, and how to get the most out of the file system.

Thomas Beale, Chair of the openEHR Foundation Architecture Review Board (ARB) has posted a message describing some goals for the coming year. These include a vision, roadmap and strategies for the architecture and clinical modeling.

Google is spearheading a volunteer workforce it hopes will become the centralized authority for responding to security issues in open source software. oCERT, short for the open source computer emergency response team, will aim to remediate security vulnerabilities and exploits in a wide range of open source programs by coordinating communication among publishers. According to Google's security blog, the group "will strive to contact software authors with all security reports and aid in debugging and patching, especially in cases where the author, or the reporter, doesn't have a background in security."