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Microsoft’s general counsel Brad Smith took the hot seat at the Open Source Development Conference here March 25, facing an hour of questioning from panelists and attendees. But before the grilling started, Smith gave a 30-minute address about the parallels between open-source and proprietary software business models.

So how is Oracle doing with its Oracle Unbreakable Linux? Pretty well. According to Monica Kumar, senior director Linux and open source product marketing at Oracle, there are now 2,000 customers for Oracle's Linux. Those customers will now be getting a bonus from Oracle: free clustering software.

Upgrade Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) Beta

I am pleased and excited to announce the release of PCLinuxOS Gnome 2008. Totally new and redesigned! Increased speed, great looks and out-of-the-box usability have been our main concern with this release! Screenshots at The Coding Studio

After having a mostly positive experience updating to the pre-release version of Kubuntu Gutsy 7.10, I thought I'd take the plunge with Hardy. This in no way constitutes a full, formal review, but is rather my impressions of the software so far.

I've recently been converting a bunch of old spoken-word cassette tapes to digital format. The Audacity audio editor (also available for Windows and Mac users) is the ideal tool. It's built-in effects -- which include normalising and noise removal -- make it even more useful, and it can save files in a variety of formats including WAV, AIFF, FLAC, OGG and MP3. But there's one trick it can't handle...

Two years ago we introduced five design patters, and now here are five more PHP design patterns to help accelerate your application development. PHP V5's object-oriented features give you the ability to implement design patterns to improve your code's design, so that it becomes more readable, more maintainable, and more robust to absorb changes.

Experience has shown a weakening U.S. economy would be good for open source, as a shortage of cash is usually a major catalyst for innovation, particularly around open-source applications, Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu Linux, said at the annual Open Source Business Conference here March 25.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organisation behind Wikipedia and other projects, has attracted substantial funding from the Alfred P Sloan Foundation.

We go through this every six months: Ubuntu brings out a new release, and by the time release day comes around, it's murder to get enough bandwidth to grab the damn thing and make a new disc out of it. And no, I don't have any recent Ubuntu installs that I can upgrade, so I need the full ISO. Hence, I'm downloading a Ubuntu 8.04 beta right now.

Jonathan, you are leading the development of a Free Software, high-quality, multi-language VM runtime with an extensive class library, called OpenJDK. Miguel, you are leading the development of a Free Software, high-quality, multi-language VM runtime with an extensive class library, called Mono. How about a merge? We'll call the new project "OpenVM", for convenience in this letter. Let's jump right in to the advantages for the projects:

News that IBM is among the new investors in EnterpriseDB has already been remarked upon by our own Matt Asay. I know it gives employees a warm feeling to know that the VC money is flowing and Big Blue believes in them. But what should this mean to the EnterpriseDB community? Does IBM’s backing for an open source company give you the same feeling, or something queasier?

The main focus of this article is to get you setup with a solid Linux server and a streaming media application called Ampache. If you follow my guide verbatim, you will have exactly that. Let's get started!

Trusted Computer Solutions, Inc. (TCS), a leader in building security applications that run on the Linux operating system, today announced that it has become a member of the Oracle PartnerNetwork and now offers organizations that have invested in Oracle® Enterprise Linux versions 4 or 5 with Security Blanket 1.2, an automated system lock down and security management tool. Security Blanket enables systems administrators to automatically configure and enhance the security level of their Linux operating platform by simplifying the current arduous methods for “hardening” systems that must be undertaken on a regular basis to meet security compliancy requirements.

While Matt Asay and Paula Rooney chose the meat in Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst’s remarks at OSBC, others chose to play the political game of gotcha. So, is open source anti-American?

The Web Console Group announced the immediate availability of an open source application, Web Console 0.2 beta. The application is written on Perl using AJAX technology does not require any database and can be deployed in about 10 minutes. Web Console is a web-based application that allows remote users to execute UNIX/Windows shell commands on a server, upload/download files to/from server, edit text files directly on a server and much more. The application is represented as a web page that accepts user input such as a command, executes that command n a remote web server, and shows command output in a browser.

Over the past 14 months I’ve reviewed two previous releases of Vector Linux: Vector Linux 5.8 Standard and Vector Linux 5.8 SOHO. Anyone who has run those versions of Vector Linux would find the new version quite familiar. In reality the changes between 5.8 and 5.9, which was released in December, are like day and night.

Red Hat hasn't done a good enough job of promoting its position as the leading Linux vendor, and also needs to do a better job of getting its customers involved with the community, Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat CEO and president, told attendees at the opening keynote at the Open Source Business Conference here March 25. "Our customers expect a lot more from us than we are currently delivering," Whitehurst said. "While we deliver the value of the community model to enterprises, we do a lousy job of getting those enterprises involved with the community."

Developing a business model around free and open source software (FOSS) can be a delicate balancing game. Many companies in this space opt for models in which revenue comes from sources such as services, rather than the software itself. However, the recently announced LinMin is taking a different approach with a new appliance and imaging appliance: Although it runs and works on FOSS, LinMin's software is proprietary. The company's reasons for this practice raise several core issues about the relationship between FOSS and proprietary software on one hand and business priorities on the other.

Vyatta today introduced the Vyatta 514, a networking appliance that combines Vyatta’s open-source routing and security software with a small form factor hardware platform. With integrated routing, firewall, and VPN features, the Vyatta 514 is ideally suited to connect small businesses and branch offices to the Internet or private networks. The Vyatta 514 provides all the security, performance, and functionality of proprietary networking solutions at a fraction of the cost.