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What do traditional farmers have in common with those taking part in the free software movement? Nothing apparently – while some deal with the millenary agricultural activity, others deal with what our imagination regards as futuristic. However, these characters seem to have similar enemies. They all have monopoly as their main opponent. Hackers from the free software movement fight for the code they develop and use to be free. Farmers, on the other hand, try to protect the species they have long been growing from becoming monopolized by multinational enterprises, which are interested in obtaining a patent on the seeds. In the last case, the code to be protected is a genetic one. Both farmers and programmers are, in reality, fighting for the same cause: free knowledge.

The discussion of open source vs. top-down security is not a new one. In fact it was a major issue at the time of the American Revolution. Washington advocated having a small army and citizens bearing arms, rather than the practice that had stifled freedom in Europe — only the government can have arms and, if a citizen uses a weapon to defend against an attacker rather than waiting for the police to arrive, that citizen is jailed.

To get an accurate picture of how costs associated with patch management figure into the TCO equation, Microsoft recently commissioned Wipro Technologies Ltd to study the cost of updating Microsoft and open source software in a real-world environment for desktops, servers and database servers. This is very important as for proprietary and open source software alike, administering security updates are a reality in the enterprise and a significant factor in total cost of ownership thus to get an accurate picture Wipro surveyed 90 companies in the US and Western Europe with 2,500 to 113,000 employees where both the Windows and open source operating systems were simultaneously being run.

Microsoft Office faces stiffer competition from the open-source world following major releases of Office competitors for the Mac OS X, Unix and Linux platforms this week. Open-source developers hope to give the software giant a run for its money in the enterprise by delivering productivity suites that cost less, work with Office formats as well as open-standards formats, and include commercial support options. The software appearing on the scene this week meets some or all of these conditions.

The Linux community, as opposed to proprietary vendors, provides innate security enhancements and affords a substantial number of resources from developers in the community to ensure that even seemingly insignificant security flaws are properly addressed.

Akiva Corporation, a provider of enterprise-wide open collaboration solutions, has announced the first commercial release of Silk. This software, which has been available in beta release since late 2004, is a comprehensive open source collaboration solution built to enterprise J2EE software standards. This open source software can lower the total cost of ownership when compared with other major proprietary collaboration frameworks.

Today Jimmy Wales, chairman of the Wikimedia Foundation, announced the beginning of a cooperation between Wikimedia and the KDE project at LinuxTag in Karlsruhe, Germany. As the first applications, like the media player amaroK, start to integrate Wikipedia content the idea is to create a webservice API to access the information from Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia or Wiktionary. There are also plans for a KDE API.

Businesses and organizations investigating free enterprise software platforms might want to keep an eye on Alfresco, an emerging open source software company.

The upcoming MySQL 5.0 aims to expand the open source database's image as a niche application for Web and embedded database applications, according to MySQL AB's new worldwide director of product management, Robin Schumacher. In this SearchEnterpriseLinux.com interview, Schumacher explains why he thinks MySQL is ready for the world of "heavy-duty, enterprise-wise applications."

This week, India's IT Ministry released Hindi language tools including an Indianized OpenOffice.org called BharateeyaOO. To the rousing applause of the audience, the Ministry asserted that this freely available office suite is the equivalent of Microsoft Office.

Aussie Open Source advocate analyst, author, and hack Nigel McFarlane has died, according to The Age. Nigel McFarlane was an open source software analyst and technologist with a broad background in science, technology and software engineering.

The Free Software Foundation Inc has moved to dismiss a lawsuit filed against it by a US individual that accused it of price fixing via the GNU General Public License.

The Foresight Linux 0.8.1 distribution showcases some of the latest and greatest software from GNOME. Some of the more innovative things are included, like Beagle, F-spot, Howl, and the latest HAL -- all of this plus some clean default themes and artwork. After using Foresight for an week I decided to use it as my primary distro.

In effort to pump up dwindling Unix revenue, SCO unveils new version of OpenServer, along with new open-source-friendly position.

Wits University's school of computer science is using Ubuntu Linux as basis for regular Linux training courses.

The Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) released the latest version of the Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) Requirements Definition--version 3.1 on June 2, 2005. CGL 3.1 is the successor to CGL 2.0 and 1.1, the earliest versions of CGL which have been broadly adopted by the industry. In this article, Ibrahim Haddad of the OSDL provides an overview of the state of Carrier Grade Linux.

Web-based, Continuously Updated Repository Provides Commercial Source Enabling Developers to Customize Linux for Devices Using Freescale Processors

The removal of the deprecated devfs from the mainline kernel took another step forward today with a patch from Greg KH that removes devfs from the build process. He adds, "if this goes well, and there are no complaints for a few weeks, I'll resend my big 'devfs-die-die-die' series of patches that rip the whole thing out of the kernel tree."

How much do you listen to music? If you love having music playing in your environment, AND you have a somewhat large living or work space, AND you get tired of having to return to a particular room in your space to control your music, AND you otherwise were going to have to start drilling holes in walls and floors to run cable, then the Sonos Digital Music System is for you. It's the current state of the art for wirelessly controlling music in a large home or business where you need just the right music in the right room at the right time. And best of all, it's powered by GNU/Linux!

In this interview with Mark Rais, I get him to answer the top questions beginners have including moving from Windows to Linux, finding files in Linux, using the File Manager, uncompressing using gzip and tar, understanding permissions and knowing where applications are located! I'll be the first to admit, I tried to suck his mind dry on this one regarding Linux new users.