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Open source has become big business, suggests an article in the Investors Business Daily, but it has done so by becoming more like the proprietary-software world it purports to leave behind. The article cites recent research from IDC indicating that CIOs allocated up to 24 percent of their budgets to open-source software in 2008, up from 10 percent in 2007--a finding that jibes with recent data from Forrester. This open-source growth is propelling Red Hat to grow "at two to three times the rate of the broader software industry over a multiyear horizon," according to research from Piper Jaffray.

Anyone who knows me well, knows that I am huge fan of Linux and open source. This is perhaps why I get so frustrated with the US health care industry and its general lack of interoperability. I could use many standards as an example, however, for this discussion I’m using the ASTM Continuity of Care Record (CCR) as an example. Now I’m not picking on the CCR. The format is XML (good), and while there is always room for improvement, I think the general structure is reasonable and workable. I’d also point out that David Kibbe and Steven Waldren, two keep champions for the CCR, have always been nice and helpful any time I’ve asked a question on the list serve. I’m using the CCR as example just because the barrier to access is so low ($100). Much of the following is summarized from an inquiry I made to the CCR list serve about a year ago.

It already is. It already has been. It will continue for the forseeable future.

"I found this on Reddit and I was amazed nobody is talking about it over here. Well the site http://www.hmrgroup.co.uk/ is been using this logo which is strictly forbidden by the Ubuntu trademark policy..."

As expected, Adobe patched a zero-day vulnerability in its popular Adobe Reader software Tuesday, marking the second time in three months that it delivered an update on the same day Microsoft issued its monthly fixes. But while Microsoft's PowerPoint patch received lots of attention, the Adobe update should be at the top of people's to-do list, a security expert said today. "Adobe's is more important than Microsoft's," said Wolfgang Kandek, chief technology officer at Qualys. "Even though Microsoft's had more visibility, if you have to choose between the two, you should patch Adobe. [Reader] is pretty much everywhere, attackers are increasing exploiting it and [PDF] is a widely-used corporate format."

Written by award-winning author Keir Thomas, Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference is a totally unique and concise guide for everyday Ubuntu use. It's the world's most popular Ubuntu book, with over half a million readers (and rising!)....The PDF Edition (eBook) is entirely free of charge and is identical to the Print Edition.

Columbia, MO - Students studying journalism at Missouri University are being told they must buy an iPhone or iPod from this fall. According to the University's website, "Effective Fall 2009, students majoring in Journalism at Missouri are required to have either an iPod Touch (the minimum requirement) or iPhone to allow for the delivery of freshman-orientation information as well as course material. Students will electronically download such material to either of those devices from iTunes University, a no-cost component of the iTunes Store.

Dear Asus, I write to you as a customer of your Eee PC line of computers. I'd never really considered buying any of your hardware up until you released your Eee PC line of products. When I discovered that the Eee 701 was pre-loaded with (Xandros) Linux and came pre-configured with all the usual applications that I am familiar with on my Linux Desktop I was delighted.

I'm puzzled. Desktop Linux, for the first time ever, has at least 1% of the desktop market. Linux probably has considerably more than that. So, why is Lenovo's Worldwide Competitive Analyst Matt Kohut claiming that Linux has no future on netbooks? Could it be because, as Kohut said, "there were a lot of returns because people didn't know what to do with it." Really? That's odd. Most of the time, you have to ask for Linux by name. Of the big name computer companies only Dell makes it easy to choose Linux and even at Dell, you really should head straight to Dell's Ubuntu Linux site or you can spend a lot of time looking for it.

oFono.org is a place to bring developers together around designing an infrastructure for building mobile telephony (GSM/UMTS) applications. oFono is licensed under GPLv2, and it includes a high-level D-Bus API for use by telephony applications of any license. oFono also includes a low-level plug-in API for integrating with open source as well as third party telephony stacks, cellular modems and storage back-ends. oFono Architecture - Ofono.org

The GoblinX Project is proud to announce the first released of the next G:Standard. The G:Standard 3.0.beta01 (2.9.90) is Released.

Your editor has long been a user of the Tomboy note-taking tool. Tomboy makes it easy to gather thoughts, organize them, and pull them up on demand; it is, beyond doubt, a useful productivity tool. But all is not perfect with Tomboy. Some people have complained about its faults for a while; Hubert Figuiere, instead, chose to do something about it in the form of the Gnote utility. So now, of course, people are complaining about Gnote instead.

Besides Intel, VIA, and ATI/AMD cooperating with X.Org and Linux developers by providing source code and documentation to help with the enablement of their hardware under Linux, another major company has come to the open-source table. No, sadly it is not NVIDIA...

Why does the EU Parliament stick with Office and other Microsoft software ? An Italian EU deputy, Marco Cappato, had the guts to ask. The reply was they were basing on a study made in 2005. He asked to them to make it public, but his request was refused. Nobody believed he could get the EU to make it public. An well known Italian IT website even called that ‘a miracle‘. I’m going no further, I’ll just translate Cappato’s post and attach here the document for the world to see. Up to you to judge how good it is. (not that is that the document is still super-secret, but it has been disclosed very recently and I guess you won’t have many other chances to read it otherwise)

[In the actual study, Gartner claims there are no mature Linux deployments in Europe(!) -- Sander]

Linux users should soon be able to use USB-connected monitors that incorporate DisplayLink's chips. DisplayLink has released Linux versions of its USB monitor source code under LGPL, and has partnered with Novell and the Linux Driver Project to develop drivers for desktops and mobile devices.

Pictures and a link to a site with a few pages - hidden away - with pictures of those old time computers. The ones as big as a house :)

The next kernel version is to provide all that's necessary to convert, for example, a RAID 5 into a RAID 6 and vice versa. There are changes to the block layer designed to speed up the system, and new and improved drivers will offer better SAS support.

When I want to set up a new GNU/Linux computer ... I find it more convenient to create a virtual machine on which I do all of the setting up and then convert the virtual computer to a real one.

In the first piece in this series we looked at the role schedulers play in I/O optimization. But how do you actually select and tune a scheduler to increase I/O performance in practice? Paul Rubens shows us why and how.

Are you having difficulty finding ways to 'go green'? Here are some simple tips to get you started.