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With a new government policy on open source announced, The H sounded out open source vendors for their reactions. Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems was the first person The H called. He was pleased to see the updated policy, "It's a great thing to see it published, as the 2004 policy didn't help very much". The new policy had "a lot of good things in it" such as the costing in of exit, or as Phipps calls them, sundown costs and the preference towards open source because of, as the policy puts it, "its inherent flexibility". Phipps explained "Open source has inherent benefits in that it gives a CIO control of the complete life-cycle. The four freedoms put the CIO in control".

The Falcon Programming Language is a typeless language born for rapid development, prototyping, and ready-made integration. We may also describe Falcon as a “scripting” language with features that enable the programmer to create even complex multi-threaded applications. It mixes several different programming paradigms into an unique blend of constructs, overcoming the limitations and partialities of other languages. The objective of this brief article is to be very practical with code examples as well as step by step simple instructions. Read the full tutorial at Free Software Magazine.

As Microsoft pumps up Windows 7 for a potential Fall 2009 release, the operating system has received generally favorable buzz. But now, some folks are starting to wonder if Windows 7 will somehow save IT sales. The VAR Guy thinks not.

What is Lean Software Development? Fortunately, that's an OK question to ask if you are reading this book. It's not written for developers who are well versed in "lean" or "agile" development. That's good for the rest of us. For instance, in my "day job" we are slowly moving towards a more Agile development model. I suppose if some folks around here weren't all that sure what "agile" meant, reading up on it would be helpful. That's the sort of role this book hopes to fill relative to "lean", with the understanding that the "pro-lean subculture" is well associated with Agile development.

Dell is taking the netbook market by the horns, it would seem. First it refuses to accept that the Psion netbook trademark is a valid one, and now it bucks the market trend for not being able to sell Linux powered netbooks.

Today (February 24th) Quake Live -- a new game from id Software, that plays entirely in a web browser -- was released as an "Open Beta." Great! Right? The bad news, not yet available for GNU/Linux.

Since releasing the Phoronix Test Suite to the public a year ago, one of the most popular feature requests has been for a graphical user interface. The Phoronix Test Suite is not exactly difficult to use from a command line, but this feature has been in development for Phoronix Test Suite 2.0. However, with this morning's release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.8.0 Alpha 2, a preview of this GUI has been introduced. Those testing Linux, OpenSolaris, BSD, and Mac OS X systems now have a simple yet intuitive interface for facilitating their system benchmarks.

The UK Government's new “Open Source, Open Standards and Re–Use: Government Action Plan” sounds impressive. But what's the reality? Here's a detailed analysis of what's good and what's not so good.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Monday, February 23, 2009, with your host, Marcel Gagné. This is episode 52. On today's newscast . . . we ask why government isn't saving big with FOSS, what constitutes good personal marketing, who's buddying up to Microsoft, why are things so tough over at OpenSUSE, and who put the ram in the ramma lamma ding dong?

The logic bomb episode at Fannie Mae is an illustration of the destruction that's possible when enterprises fail to properly monitor user privileges. IT managers must be aware of who has what privileges and determine the appropriate level of access for all users.

We are certain that many of you want to try Linux to see what it is like, but have no idea where to start or how to get into it. This article is the first installment in a four-part guide that will gradually introduce you to the Linux environment and how to adjust to it if you are a new user. One of the hardest things to do while starting out is finding a distro that is right for you. Many users try several before settling on one of two that they really like. Once they find a distro that feels right, they are often reluctant to switch unless the distro becomes unsuitable for their needs for whatever reason.

Microsoft filed suit against TomTom today, alleging that the in-car navigation company's devices violate eight of its patents -- including three that relate to TomTom's implementation of the Linux kernel. It's believed to be the first time Microsoft has filed a patent suit over Linux, after claiming for years that elements of the open-source operating system violate its patents. However, Microsoft says open-source software is not the intended focal point of the action. Five of the alleged patent violations relate to proprietary software.

[Maybe we will finally get to see some of those 200 or so patents Microsoft keeps (not) talking about. - Scott]

Project Oekonux researches the economical, political and social forms of Free Software and similar forms of production we collectively call peer production. In Project Oekonux, different people with different reasons and different approaches get together to build something new. A lot of participants want to know, whether and if so, how, the peer production can serve as a basis for a new society.

Linux certainly has established itself as a prominent server OS these days, pushing Unix into the background. But the open source OS shares the stage with commercial software giant Microsoft, which remains a dominant player with Windows Server. Gartner research published this month found the server OS market shaping up as a battle between Windows Server and Linux. Gartner in other research also has found both OSes on a growth track in terms of revenue. "There still seems to be plenty of robust interest in deploying on Windows, but Linux is still very key," says Gartner analyst George Weiss.

This morning, Mountain View-based startup Appcelerator is taking the wraps off its second Preview Release for Titanium, an open-source developer platform meant to compete with Adobe AIR and the likes for building rich internet, mobile and desktop applications. Titanium PR2 comes with a number of new features that are worth taking a look at, like an extensible Module API and built-in support for Linux and a wide range of programming languages like Python, Ruby and JavaScript in addition to C++. More technical details are outlined on the company blog Appcelerant.

Mark Shuttleworth, the founder and leader of Ubuntu, recently announced the next version of Ubuntu - Karmic Koala (v 9.10) will improve the Ubuntu experience on netbooks.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said on Tuesday that he still wanted to form an alliance with Yahoo to combat the dominance of Google in search advertising. But in his annual forecast to financial analysts of Microsoft’s plans for the year, he ruled out any revival of last year’s aborted deal to purchase Yahoo.

No high concept today. Just straight up information... maybe with an attitude - we hadn't finished writing the post before we wrote this lead.

Google wants to join Mozilla in the European Commission case against Microsoft regarding its bundling of Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system. Earlier this month Mozilla's Mitchell Baker said that "Microsoft's business practices have fundamentally diminished (in fact, came very close to eliminating) competition, choice and innovation in how people access the Internet." In a post on Google's Public Policy Blog, the Vice President of product management, Sundar Pichai, details why they requested to join the proceedings as an interested third party.

[Look who's joining the party? - Scott]

It's not like we haven't almost begged Time Warner and others to give us a hand here. We've presented plans to help local residents budget themselves into full subscription plans...all we asked for is a reduced rate to start with. They didn't have the courtesy to write us a PUAR letter. That's fine...we'll find a way to go around them.