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There are several fully functional and stable Open Source operating systems including Linux, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, NetBSD, OpenBSD and so on. Each of these operating systems is competent and production ready, each has it strengths and weaknesses, each has its unique technologies and goals. So the question is why has Linux won the popularity context. Using a tool like Google Trends it is clear that searches and news stories for Linux are more than 20 times higher than that of FreeBSD or OpenSolaris. The question is why? The answer can be summed up in two words: license and hero. In this case the license is the GPL and the hero is Linus Torvalds.

While Google's new Chrome web browser has been met with a lot of praise and positive responses (well, mostly, at least), there has been one nagging issue that arose quite quickly after people got their hands on Chrome: the End User License Agreement accompanying the browser. It more or less granted Google the rights to everything seen or transmitted through the browser. Google now changed the EULA, saying it was a big case of woopsiedoopsie.

Move over, Digium. You’re not the only poster child for Asterisk and open source PBXes. Rival Fonality has scored another $12 million in financing from Intel Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson — and some of the money could be earmarked for acquisitions. Impressive, but what does it mean for VARs and solutions providers? Here are the details.

Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer lost nearly a full percentage point in market share during August, the browser's biggest drop in three months, a Web metrics firm said today. IE's rivals -- Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox, Apple Inc.'s Safari and Opera Software ASA's Opera -- all extended their shares at IE's expense last month. But all those browsers, Microsoft's included, now face competition from Google Inc., which yesterday launched a new browser, dubbed Chrome, that immediately grabbed 1% of the market, Net Applications Inc. said today.

My copy of Oxford defines open as: unconcealed circumstances or condition. Way back in the day when the GNU operating system was getting going, they coined the mantra: Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer. Last month, I talked about transparency and how important it was in software and systems. Just as important are standards, and, more important following those standards. Today, in Computerworld, a different issue has been raised. The value of standards.

Novell is losing money in the desktop Linux market, but those desktop deals are driving big wins in the server arena. A case in point: Novell's desktop Linux relationship with Lenovo -- the big PC maker -- will extend to servers this September, The VAR Guy has confirmed. Here's the scoop.

This may be the first time I've run a series of posts where the topic was different every step of the way. That's a good thing, because I get just as bored as anyone else reading about the same thing over and over ;) So, following in the footsteps of our posts on Number Pools And Guaranteed Combinations Within Fixed Lists and Perl List Permutations, we'll move straight ahead to the next logical step, which is almost an entirely different subject altogether.

Adopting an open source library automation system allowed a small group of libraries on Maryland's eastern shore to save money and create a more intuitive, user-friendly catalog system for both librarians and patrons. Library automation systems allow librarians to keep track of which materials patrons have checked out and when those materials are due back in. They also allow patrons to access the library's catalog system online to search for books and put them on hold, as well as renew books they've already checked out.

This past winter, Red Hat announced the release of a product called MRG–a computing platform that features high-speed messaging and allows high-throughput computing, realtime transactions, and workload management. Not sure what all that means? We weren’t either. So we contacted Brian Che, the project manager for MRG, to see if we couldn’t get a few questions answered. He obliged, and so we bring you the MRG QandA. Still have questions of your own you want answered? Comment and let us know…

Learn how to extend your Python command-line tools by writing plug-ins. Plug-ins offer a convenient way to extend the functionality of existing code.

Captcha images are commonplace on Web site applications and forms. With its latest framework, Zend is introducing a new Captcha Form Element that can provide multiple types of Captcha mechanisms. Among them is Captcha integration for something called FIGlets, group of large characters built out of ASCII characters that outline a letter or word. "We've finally found a use for them other than just drawing pictures," Sinclair explained. "You can use them for Captcha now and it's hard for machines to figure out the characters."

If you do your Debian package management from the command line, you are probably aware of utilities that search the cache of available programs, such as apt-cache, apt-file, and dpkg. Possibly, too, you have cursed the limited search information available in graphical interfaces like Synaptic, which does not extend much beyond searching for the description, name, versions, and dependencies. Now, the GNOME Debian Package Finder (gpfind) is in the process of bring much of the command-line search capacity to the desktop -- although, at version 0.1.6, it is still too rough to replace its command-line equivalents for most users.

Google Inc.'s new Chrome browser grabbed 1% of the browser market in its first day out in public, Web metrics providers said today. Both U.S.-based tracking company Net Applications Inc. and Irish vendor StatCounter put Chrome's total market share at around 1%, less than 24 hours after the browser's launch, passing rivals such as Opera and Netscape in the process. "This is a phenomenal performance," said CEO Aodhan Cullen, in a post to StatCounter's blog today. StatCounter, which provides free visitor statistics tools to Web developers, monitors traffic on the sites run by its 1.5 million members.

Participate in a survey to determine whether political party and open source adoption are related.

As Networking 101 begins moving on up the stack toward the layers involved with routing, we must pause for a moment. Some attention needs to be paid to the most misunderstood protocol: ICMP. Managers and administrators alike should understand what ICMP is really used for if they plan on making firewall policy decisions, and administrators can use ICMP knowledge to fully understand routing issues.

Firefox developer Mozilla has claimed its decision to reinvent the command line to make mashups easier has received an overwhelming response from developers. Mozilla Labs last week released an experimental plug-in called Ubiquity, which lets users call up a command line entry box and type in commands to carry out additional functions beyond those defined in the Firefox graphical user interface (GUI). Mozilla project leader Aza Raskin said developers have already contributed thousands of new commands to Ubiquity. "In under a week, we have a roughly comparable number of Ubiquity commands as there are Firefox extensions," Raskin said.

I move from computer to computer constantly -- desktops, laptops, testing machines -- and rather than worry about synchronizing the assorted hard disks content, I prefer to keep one central copy of my documents that I can access anywhere. I do that using wdfs, the WebDAV file system for FUSE. Keeping one set of files means never worrying about synchronization and merging. Changes never get unknowingly overwritten, and I have a single, simple backup strategy. WebDAV is the Distributed Authoring and Versioning extension to HTTP. On Apache systems it is usually implemented with mod_dav, and many Web hosting companies provide it as an option, giving you a simple "flip a switch" path to run your own WebDAV server.

Phoronix Media has announced the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.2 (codenamed "Malvik"), an update to its leading and award-winning benchmarking software, during the 2008 X Developers' Summit. This update incorporates support for new operating systems and features to better aid ISVs, IHVs, ODMs, and OEMs in profiling their hardware and software for optimal performance and compatibility. In total there are more than 250 official changes with many new test profiles and suites since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 in June of 2008.

Google took a direct shot at the bow of Microsoft and Apple yesterday and the battle for world domination continues unabated. Whether the market will bear yet another browser is an open question, but it seems that for Google, this is more than a browser war, it's a fight for the soul of the desktop (and the hand-held for that matter).

After last week's update to the KDE 3.5 series, today's KDE release updates the stable KDE 4.1 branch to KDE 4.1.1. It bears the codename "Cebidae" referring to an in-joke often made during Akademy 2008. With only a good month of development time -- and Akademy in between -- the changelog is still impressively long. Pretty much all applications have received the developers' attention, resulting in a long list of bugfixes and improvements.