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[Editor: This is a great article and one that should smoke. Except for the gentler tone, Greenmeier and McDougall muckracked the analysts at Gartner, Forrester, IDC and the Yankee Group. Finally, you say.

I particularly liked this quote:

Money changes hands, and the vendor that commissions a report often reviews it before general distribution. Microsoft's "Get The Facts" marketing campaign has made liberal use of sponsored research to tout the benefits of Windows over Linux. Such reports aren't always clearly marked as having a vendor's backing. A 47-page white paper by Security Innovation, published in November, mentions that it was funded by Microsoft at the bottom of page 6.

- Tom Adelstein]

You go guys!

More than 30 international and regional speakers will be addressing a wide array of e-government issues at the inaugural Government Technology Middle East Conference & Exhibition (Govtec), being held in Bahrain from February 13 to 15.

Convened under the official patronage of Industry and Commerce Minister Dr Hassan Abdulla Fakhro, and supported by the Central Informatics Organisation, Govtec features international case studies from Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia, Ireland, Scotland, Dubai, Egypt and Bahrain and will debate key issues facing public sector administrators such as open source architecture, IT governance, citizen-centric government, public private partnership and m-government.

Survey: Not since the heady days of the dot-com boom will IT freelancers have had it so good

IT contractors could earn more money this year than since the peak of the dot-com boom, research suggests.

A survey carried out by contract service provider Giant group indicates that contractor unemployment is at a record low as work in the telecoms sector is picking up.

Ladies and gents, welcome to the 2005 Vaporware Awards -- the prize that celebrates the tech products that were promised last year but never delivered.

4. Microsoft's Vista and Internet Explorer 7
The ever-delayed debut of Microsoft's next version of Windows, Vista, is a long-running vaporware joke. It's been put off so many times, it's been called "Hasta la Vista."

A look at how the OOo project balances being similar to MS Office with maintaining its unique, better features.

I'm sitting in the overflow room for the Bill Gates Keynote at Supercomputing '05 (SC05). Odd, his talk is being given in a medium sized room, I am told they have bigger rooms in the convention center. Ah, but why risk empty seats. First, let me say how bazaar this is. Bill Gates at SC, like the CEO of Pepsi addressing the Coke shareholders meeting, no it is worse, it is like Terrel Owens explaining the word humble to the Dali Lama. The term non sequitur comes to mind.

According to maddog, Linux is becoming a more attractive alternative for the desktop and the key driver is the need for Microsoft to keep pumping its new products into the market.

“People will be going through a big change with the (Microsoft) Vista project. There’s a lot of people who are still on Windows 95 and 98 and moving from that to Vista is going to be a big move. It will require new hardware but some of their hardware is still viable in the Linux space so instead of going to Vista they’ll go to Linux.

Can open-source upstarts compete with Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft? It's an uphill battle, but customers are starting to look at the alternatives

The makers of an open-source implementation of push email are hoping to leap-frog the patent-embroiled likes of RIM, Good Technology and Microsoft with this latest version of its product.

Welcome to our issue number 32 of Fedora Weekly News.

An InformationWeek survey of 354 business-technology professionals finds that many already are expanding their use of open-source software into new application areas and even to the desktop. The low cost of Linux continues to be the big adoption driver; the operating system's performance and reliability are increasingly seen as pluses. But issues such as compatibility with the Microsoft world, potential security weaknesses, and the lack of Linux skills among IT workers stand in the way.

Nearly 60% of those surveyed are using Linux and other open-source software on servers, up from 49% just a year ago. More surprising, 35% also use open-source software on desktop PCs, with another 18% pilot-testing such desktop software and another 10% planning to try it this year.

An emergency management centre in Cape Town will soon be using open source VOIP telephony to deal with and respond to disasters in the region. The implementation of the Asterisk-based call-handling system by local VOIP gurus, Connection Telecom, points towards growing open source use in critical applications.

Fon has been around for awhile. Which is to say, three months. The Spain-based brainchild ofMartin Varsavsky, it's a global community of people who share WiFi connections. Also a business. And it's about to get a lot bigger, because Google, Skype and Sequoia Capital have justinvested $21.7 million in it. And if you're a"Linus", a"Bill", or even an"Alien", you get to benefit too. Or that's the idea, anyway.

When we asked the question: What Linux Distribution do you use as a desktop? We received an overwhelming response. In a short time, a question posed to LXer readers generated unparalleled activity on our site and on other sites around the globe. We now have several hundred replies we can use to create a statistical model to project Linux desktop use.

We also will feature comments from the forum posts such as Rajiv's. He makes a compelling case for his favorite distribution. You can find all the posts in our Linux Meta Forum. Thank you.

Welcome to this year's sixth issue of DistroWatch Weekly! With all eyes on the final stages of development of Fedora Core 5 and SUSE Linux 10.1, other distributions are not resting either; we bring you interesting information about the upcoming releases of Novell Linux Desktop 10 and Kubuntu 6.04. Interested in network security and penetration testing? The brand new BackTrack live CD provides an amazing collection of tools just for this purpose; we'll take a quick look at the first beta released over the weekend. Also in this issue: try the new smart-urpmi for Mandriva and read how a vice president of a large financial firm fell in love with Gentoo. Finally, our January donation, the largest DistroWatch.com has ever made, goes to Gambas and Krusader. Happy reading! Join us at irc.freenode.net #distrowatch

The OpenQRM project is being hosted on SourceForge.net and distributed under a modified Mozilla Public License. The software is available for free download. Qlusters will generate revenue by offering support packages, starting at US$750 per server, per year. Add-ons, such as support for VMware, will bump the cost of OpenQRM to about $1,250 per server, per year, says Ofer Shoshan, founder and CEO of Qlusters.

Paris, France (AHN) - In a move that stunned those supportive of open sourcing for computers, officials announced that French police will convert their 70,000 desktops to Mozilla's Firefox browser, abandoning Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

IBM has announced free software and educational resources to help developers in Russia build and deploy innovative applications based on open standards and open source. The company is giving software developers, architects and students in Russia free access to software and hundreds of new tools and technical and educational resources that will enable them to easily build open standards-based applications.

In Linux Land, distributions are often divided into categories based on how they manage software. It's more than just keeping track of what is installed, but what version. The obvious issue is security updates. Software is usually offered in packages. Sometimes they are all self-contained; often there are packages which depend on others. These dependencies usually make sense, but not always.

Server management vendor Centeris is looking for UK channel partners keen to make Linux and Windows work together. Centeris provides a cross-platform suite for managing Linux and Windows servers and hopes to boost business for resellers working with either vendor.