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IT organizations that feel safe from open-source licensing violations might be wise to check their code anyway, because open-source components are rapidly seeping into applications by way of offshore and in-house developers taking shortcuts, as well as a growing population of open-source-savvy grads entering the workforce. "With all of these new aspects, open source is something companies are going to have to get their heads around," says Anthony Armenta, vice president of engineering at Wyse Technology Inc., a maker of thin clients.

The next version of VMware's flagship virtualization management software, VirtualCenter Server, will work with Linux and the iPhone, the company's chief technology officer has announced. The VMware VirtualCenter Server update will run on Linux and will be supplied as a virtual appliance, which is a ready-to-run virtual machine that has been preconfigured with all the necessary software, Stephen Herrod said in a keynote speech at the VMworld conference in Las Vegas Wednesday.

The is a clear pattern to open source's continuing rise. The first free software that was deployed was at the bottom of the enterprise software stack: GNU/Linux, Apache, Sendmail, BIND. Later, databases and middleware layers were added in the form of popular programs like MySQL and Jboss. More recently, there have been an increasing number of applications serving the top of the software stack, addressing sectors like enterprise content management, customer relationship management, business intelligence and, most recently, data warehousing.

55,000 Sugar/GNU/Linux XO machines are being shipped every month to kids all over the world. This is a generation getting ready to break the bonds of digital dependencies and building a commons for themselves on free and open source software and open content and standards. In the meantime, Microsoft announced a pilot study to run Windows XP on these very machines.

You may not know this, but Albert Einstein wore an editor's hat at Encyclopedia Britannica, as did George Bernard Shaw and more than 80 Nobel laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners. But it's that other encyclopedia, the online one, where vandals and anonymous editors allegedly run rampant, that's been getting all the attention lately.

Thin clients reduce hardware costs, offer added security by stripping away storage options, and ease management tasks by storing all configurations on a centralized server. Citrix provides a good solution and is a dominant player in this arena with Citrix Presentation server, but that comes at a price -- about $1,000 for five concurrent connections and about $200 to $300 for each additional concurrent client connection. However, taking the thin client route does not have to be that expensive: openThinClient is an open source thin client server that is absolutely free.

Nokia has revealed that the next version of its Maemo Internet-tablet operating system will support 3G cellular connectivity. Maemo is the platform used in the Finnish manufacturer's Internet-tablet series, the latest iteration of which was the the N810. On Wednesday, Nokia's open source chief Dr Ari Jaaksi told the audience at an Open Source In Mobile (OSIM) event in Berlin that Maemo 5 would include support for high-speed packet access (HSPA), a standard sometimes described as 'super-3G'.

With 1.4 billion people connected, the Internet is the greatest collaborative network that mankind has experienced. One of the consequences of the growth of this network is a shift in the way knowledge is being created and distributed. As we move to an interconnected world, the balance of power is shifting from old, proprietary models of knowledge creation to the open source model that emphasizes collaboration and sharing. From management gurus to consulting firms to leading business schools, everyone is taking note of this new phenomenon that goes by various names like ‘Collaborative Innovation,’ ‘Open Innovation,’ or ‘Distributed Co-creation.’

Linux Firefox users can say a eulogy for EULA (End User License Agreement). After much pressure, Mozilla is removing the EULA from the Firefox welcome screen on Linux distributions, according to a recent Mozilla blog by Harvey Anderson, VP and general counsel of Mozilla.

As a Linux evangelist, I find myself in an interesting quandary. There are many new netbooks being sold with Linux pre-installed, but often the way Linux is installed is not what I’m used to seeing. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I understand the reasoning for custom interfaces, but it has some disadvantages. Love it or hate it, as a Linux community we have to be able to handle these things gracefully, or we lose all the potential impact we gain with pre-installed Linux.

Because a large portion of end user machines attached to the Internet are Windows machines, Web developers have no choice but to develop Web applications that, while they don't necessarily rely on Microsoft technology, do have to work properly with Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. That usually means developers require a Windows installation at their disposal. Those of us who run Linux on our home machines have a harder time testing sites for Internet Explorer compatibility, or accessing sites that require proprietary IE features. IEs4Linux is a script that can help you set up three older versions of IE on any system running Wine. Unfortunately, the program is not as polished as it should be.

Funambol, the open source mobile device synchronization and push email provider, released version 7.0 of its server and client software in August. We took a look at what it offers, then took it for a test drive on mobile devices and the Linux desktop. At the heart of Funambol's synchronization abilities is a SyncML server running on top of Apache Tomcat. The company provides source code to a community edition of this server, and sells a carrier edition to commercial clients that adds on functions like remote device configuration and management.

Juliet Kemp shows how you don't need a dedicated computing cluster to perform big processing jobs- you can turn your LAN into a part-time cluster with Condor, which intelligently uses idle CPU cycles for powerful parallel processing.

Richard Stallman, the founder of the GNU Project, speaks at great lengths about preserving the ideological purity of free software, and in his vision of the future, computer software development is modeled after mathematics and science research, where all research and development is open.

Ahead of celebrating global Software Freedom Day on Saturday, several of the country's open source user interest groups have been busy jointly hosting a number of related events this week. The string of events kicked off with a student focus yesterday--the first of two such events was held at the NTU (Nanyang Technological University) campus, with another slated for Friday at the NUS (National University of Singapore).

The "Trasnoche de Traducción Aymará" started at 6 pm, Bolivia time (+/- EST), of Friday, September 12. Much fun was had as the evening went on by about a dozen volunteers, mostly from the Linux community who were quite interested in the Sugar interface and the XOs but, alas, mostly were not Aymara savvy. However, our 3 "Aymaristas" got agreement on 58 strings, so we have just about 2.500 to go. The first string translated was "Name:", as when a kid names the XO. That will be "Suti:" for us...

If you develop applications using FOSS tools, Workbench is an ideal distro for you. In addition to packing a gamut of development tools, the distro also bundles everyday apps and eye candy, so you can use it on your desktop as well. Workbench is based on Xubuntu, the Xfce-powered Ubuntu flavor, but unlike Xubuntu it doesn't fit on a standard 700MB CD. With all its development tools and productivity apps, Workbench weighs in at 1.4GB. You can download the distro from either a low-speed direct download server or BitTorrent.

Again inspired by Phil Howard's [1.], whose penchant for seeing simple text files as the solution, I have found, indeed, it would have provided the quicker, less error prone approach for updating the News page on the defunct OpenSourceToday site. Moreover, not only would have it been, it is simpler; it also had the additional advantage of the ability to discard older, rotted stories before they become an obvious embarrassment. That is what I will show here, the more direct method to update these pages relying more heavily upon text files, while reducing the risk due to excessive processing.

After years of development, Google's first Android-powered phone is finally here -- well, almost. T-Mobile is expected to unveil the HTC Dream at a closed media event Sept. 23, with the device rumored to hit store shelves by mid-October. The question, then, is whether the Dream -- and the Android concept on the whole -- can actually deliver.

For an entertaining example of how Linux can power home appliances, check out the Tangent Quattro Internet radio. This device combines Internet and broadcast radio with a media server client on an embedded Linux platform to give you a variety of audio playback options. The Quattro has a solid feel. A single speaker at the top of the unit produces rich sound. The front panel has volume and tuning knobs and a dozen buttons for station presets and other functions. At the center of the front panel is a two-line LCD display that shows the station you're listening to, menu choices, and status messages.