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Gervase Markham has announced that his second online newspaper column has been published on Times Online, the website of The Times newspaper in the United Kingdom. In the column, entitled Open formats make history - and maintain it, Gerv discusses how the decision of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to use OpenDocument is the start of a move towards people reclaiming control of their data.

The recent release of Novell SUSE Linux 10.0 has elicited strikingly different reactions from a pair of reviewers -- Alan Canton, president of a software consulting company, who is experiencing SUSE for the first time; and eWEEK.com columnist Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, a seasoned SUSE user.

The Mozilla community marketing site Spread Firefox won the Best Marketing Campaign award at the UK Linux & Open Source Awards 2005, which were presented at the London LinuxWorld Conference & Expo earlier this month.

The open-source community is in the midst of a change, with the network increasingly becoming its own platform built on open-source software, said Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media Inc. on Tuesday.

This has been demonstrated by the rise of companies such as Google Inc., eBay Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., which can operate unfettered from open-source licensing concerns because they are not distributing software.

"They deliver their software as a service," O'Reilly said.

FOUR LINUX LUMINARIES came together at a roundtable here to discuss where Open Source was. And where it was going.

The panel consisted of Marten Mickos from MySQL, Marc Fleury of Jboss, Juergen Beck from SuSE Novell, and Eero Teerokopi.

The panel was asked to rebut a statement by Microsoft that Linux was harder to support. Juergen Beck, chief technology officer at SuSE Novell, said that these Microsoft allegations could all be rebutted, and it was just getting the word out.

Two weeks remain until the opening of the Open Source Business Conference, set for Nov. 1-2 at the Boston Marriott in Newton, Mass. OSBC's program will bring together highly placed execs from the best-known names in enterprise IT (Sun, Microsoft, Novell, Sybase, Intel, EMC, SugarCRM, among others), plus some of open source's most influential thought leaders, including the creators and/or maintainers of Linux, PHP, MySQL, PostgreSQL, JBoss, and a variety of newer open source enterprise apps.

The open source software (OSS) initiative has already created a highly productive, globally supported alternative software platform. The choice of free applications for Linux is growing daily. Smart application software vendors are already reaping a financial reward from the sale of their applications. Companies that have not yet embraced OSS, by porting their application to Linux, are likely to go the way of the dinosaur.

Meanwhile, just over half of those surveyed said they planned to increase their spending on Linux, with the lion's share (43 percent) favoring Red Hat and 9...

Microsoft has lost one of its high-profile hires to an open-source consortium.

Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, announced on Monday that Ward Cunningham is leaving Microsoft to join the staff of the open-source tool consortium. Cunningham's new title is Director of Committer Community Development.

On Oct 17, 2005, Red Hat announced the Red Hat Certified Security Specialist (RHCSS), the first security certification from a major Linux certification program. RHCSS candidates have to be RHCEs and pass three endorsement exams, Security: Network Services, Directory Services and Authentication, and SELinux Policy Administration.

Gavin writes: "With MySQL experiencing a possible backlash, it seems the company can confidently flip the middle finger to certain critics with the latest market share numbers from Evans Data Corp (EDC)."

"MySQL is fast approaching majority market share among software developers, with 44 per cent using the open source database to meet their needs. Use of MySQL has surged 25 per cent during the last six months according to EDC."

Hey Gavin, ever hear the one about pride coming before the fall? The more you have, the less you need to show it off. The more confident you are, the less arrogant you need to be. -Ed

any application that needs a flow computer with secure Ethernet or Internet access or any of the many powerful capabilities of the truly open Linux-based IPm

In an effort to attract new corporate customers, MySQL is planning to ship a major upgrade of its namesake open-source database within the next seven to 10 days.

evenue of $500 million; revamp its sales strategy; and focus on a few higher-growth areas such as outsourcing, open source and Linux products, Microsoft

Fortunately, my quest has ended in success with the Bookmarks Synchronizer. This slick little Firefox extension enables bookmark syncing via any good 'ol fashioned FTP/WebDAV server, and for the past couple of days it's been working like a charm. You can set the extension to sync at the startup and/or shutdown of Firefox, which also works really well with one minor catch: quitting Firefox causes this extension to kick into syncing action, which effectively stops Firefox from actually quitting so the sync can finish. Once a small progress window disappears, signalling a successful upload, you can then truly quit Firefox.

When Ebay recently purchased Skype they clearly saw the future of telephony and that is VOIP (voice over internet protocol). However few of us want to sit there with Madonna style headsets and PC microphones just to make phone calls. That's where funky phones like the Linksys CIT200 come in, this latest release from Linksys provides a wireless extension of your Skype service away from the PC using a handset that is very similar to a mobile.

Paul writes: "People should care about these issues, and over time we've seen things like the Electronic Frontier Foundation emerge and other politically oriented groups, but I believe in the past decade we've only scratched the surface of what we have to do to ensure digital democracy, so to speak."

SAN DIEGO – There’s room enough within governments to adopt open-source and proprietary software solutions, several technology experts said yesterday.

“Clearly, it’s changing the landscape of the technology industry for better and worse,” said Alan Yates, general manager of Microsoft’s information worker business strategy, referring to the growing use of open-source software.

Bill Welty, CIO at California’s Air Resources Board, which conducts air pollution research, said his organization has been involved with open source for about 11 years and has found success.

Open source is “cost-effective for us, particularly where we can get really good software for very low cost,” he said.

Welty said 63 percent of applications run on Linux, 88 percent of Web applications run on an Apache server, 61 percent of applications require a database using open-source products and 83 percent of scripting languages are nonproprietary, he said.

Linux software distributor Red Hat Inc. said Tuesday that Bob Young, the company's co-founder and former chief executive, is resigning from the board.

Frustration is what led John Roberts to abandon the world of proprietary software development.

He jumped ship last year as director of product management at US software company E.piphany, recently acquired by another enterprise software company, SSA Global, and with two other E.piphany executives founded a commercial open-source project and a company, SugarCRM, which he now leads.