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Debian GNU/Linux was started in 1993 by Ian Murdock and was meant to be a small Linux distribution developed and maintained by hackers. Instead, now in 2004 it's a big distribution with a well-organised community of developers and users.

Purchasing open source software provided by commercial companies is a good thing and installing it on more systems to reduce licensing costs is unethical, according to St George Bank’s chief manager of open systems Michael Page.

Microsoft Corp. says it is looking to turn over more of its programs to open-source software developers, playing a greater role in a process that the Redmond company has criticized strongly at times in the past.

Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) -- an open source software framework being developed by the Open Source Development Labs to support high-availability, fast-to-market solutions for major telecommunications and other companies -- is taking considerable time to penetrate the slow-moving carrier market, but it is also gaining ground in vertical segments such as financial services, according to analysts attending this week's SuperComm telecom conference in Chicago.

JDesktop Network Components (JDNC) has been released by Sun as an open source project, so that the technology is available to the community early enough to allow it to directly shape the vision, the feature set, and even the code. "There is still a lot of work to do," says Sun's Amy Fowler, "the JDNC feature set is far from complete and there remain rough edges, especially in the API, which has not had extensive usage outside of unit testing and markup-driven use-cases. But, that is exactly why we need your involvement."

Microsoft's server division expects to release a beta version of Windows Server 2003 tailor-made for the high performance computing (HPC) market by year's end, Microsoft said, but failed to clarify whether either Intel or AMD's top-end 64-bit processors would be supported. It spearheads an attack on a market where Unix and Linux are firmly entrenched.

Business rules software vendor Ilog has introduced a new business rules studio for the Eclipse open source integrated development environment (IDE). Based on its business rules management product Ilog JRules, Business Rule Studio Developer Edition is available as a free download. It is built on the Eclipse IDE for easier management, optimisation and visualisation of the rules that govern business processes in Java-based software.

A group of Iraqi computer enthusiasts are advocating the use of the operating system Linux to rebuild their country.

Oracle and Red Hat hope to make Singapore the regional 'port of call' for all things Linux. The two firms today announced they will invest $11.6m in a new Linux applications centre on the island-state to ramp up Linux certification among independent software vendors (ISVs) in the ASEAN region.

In my review of Sun Java Desktop System release 2 I criticized Sun Microsystems for imposing such restrictive licensing terms on their customers. A discussion on Groklaw followed, and Sun contacted me to discuss the license and how it might modify it in the future. I had several suggestions, and overall they were happy to have the feedback and eager to make their future license agreements more user friendly. But proprietary thinking dies hard. Will Sun really reduce the restrictions in its licenses?

A group of Iraqi computer enthusiasts are promoting the use of the operating system Linux to rebuild their country. Ashraf Hasson is one of the founders of the Iraqi Linux User Group and he is also leading Linux seminars at a couple of Iraq's larger universities.

THE NSW Government has made official its push into open source, launching a $1.5 million deployment of what may be the state's largest-ever rollout of open source software on the desktop.

Red Hat, a leading provider of open source solutions, has the signed systems integrator MAX-SI as a Red Hat business partner. MAX-SI will be formalising its Linux capability into a fully serviced Red Hat Practice which reflects the growth potential for Red Hat in the Queensland IT market.

Sun Microsystems President Jonathan Schwartz sounds off on why open source figures into his company’s new strategy. Remember, Bill Joy is the author of the quote: ‘innovation happens elsewhere.’ We're taking that to heart—and given what we see going on in the landscape, we know there's opportunity in that shift.

The stage is set for some fireworks on the last day of the JavaOne show next week, where Sun Microsystems has assembled a panel to debate the thorny issue of whether it should release its Java technology under an open source license.

The first Slackware release of 2004, Slackware Linux 10.0 continues the more than ten-year Slackware tradition of simplicity, stability, and security.

Using funding provided by the National Science Foundation and as a result of an open bidding process, the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) has purchased a large-scale, Linux-based computing system. The new Linux system will allow the National Center for Atmospheric Research's major community climate and weather codes to be built, tested, and evaluated in a full-scale Linux environment for the first time. The 1.1 TeraFLOP system, manufactured by IBM Corporation, will add significant computing capacity and capability to NCAR's computing arsenal.

Belgian electronic payment specialist Banksys is shipping new payment terminals powered by open source operating systems. The C-ZAM/XENT terminals run Linux and eCos operating systems, and could result in one of the largest deployments yet of embedded Linux in Belgium.

I've been using Fedora Core 1 (FC1) for a few months now and have been quite happy with it. It is a good distribution with a minimal number of bugs (if any) that have caused me problems. Of course, it took some tweaking to get it just right, but I can accept that for the price.