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Efforts to increase the adoption of open-source software are being derailed by the efforts of a "loud minority" within the community who have made personal attacks on individuals who have expressed doubts about the software, according to one of the open-source movement's main advocates.

Consolidation in the business intelligence market has pushed Business Objects into the arms of SAP and Cognos into IBM's fold,but there are other options. Pentaho is gaining traction with its open source alternative, a BI suite that includes reporting and analysis tools, data mining, and dashboards. Service subscriptions tripled last quarter.

There's been a lot of discussion about which open source application works best as a replacement for Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Outlook: Evolution, Ximian, Thunderbird, and so on. Let's add another contender to that list, shall we? Meet Spicebird, currently in beta 0.4 form.

One big hole for open source lies in security. It’s not a real hole. It’s a meta-hole. But we still view it as a hole, so it’s a hole. That hole opened up again in Australia this week, where a “loud minority” got personal when Australian Taxation Office chief information officer Bill Gibson expressed concerns about open source security.

Apple updated its Safari Web browser for Mac and Windows on Tuesday and offered the new version for download from its Web site. The company also began pushing the browser to Windows users -- whether it was previously installed or not -- via the Apple Software Update, a practice Mozilla CEO John Lilly said is just "wrong."

WHAT a refreshing change, a Linux distribution with a well-chosen, meaningful name. But just having a good name isn't enough, is it? Nor is saying you're going to do something, then not following through. Here's a precis of what the Foresight Linux team have to say about their operating system on their website (http://www.foresightlinux.org/)

"Allocations of larger pages are not reliable in Linux. If larger pages have to be allocated then one faces various choices of allowing graceful fallback or using vmalloc with a performance penalty due to the use of a page table," began Christoph Lameter, describing the third version of his virtual compound page support patchset. He continued,"a virtual compound allocation means that there will be first of all an attempt to satisfy the request with physically contiguous memory. If that is not possible then a virtually contiguous memory will be created."

Floating point whiz ClearSpeed continues to try and make coding for its specialized hardware easier. The company this week touted the release of Version 3.0 of its mainline code. As you might expect, the package includes a variety of additions to simplify the process of moving code off a general purpose x86 chip and onto ClearSpeed’s CX600 accelerators.

Our friends over at OpenUsability have just started a call for students of usability, user-interface design, and interaction design or related subjects for the Season of Usability. Season of Usability is a project that offers mentoring students that want to work on usability aspects of various projects, including KDE. Students are offered a stipend worth $US1000. KDE is involved in the Season of Usability with three possible stipends, two for students who want to work on the KDE 4 Human Interface Guidelines, another project aims for improving the toolbox and palette interaction KOffice.

COMMENTARY -- I used KDE as my primary desktop from 1996 through 2006, when I installed the GNOME version of Ubuntu and found that I liked it better than the KDE desktop I'd faced every morning for so many years. Last January, I got a new Dell Latitude D630 laptop and decided to install Kubuntu on it, but within a few weeks, I went back to GNOME. Does this mean GNOME is now a better desktop than KDE, or just that I have become so accustomed to GNOME that it's hard for me to give it up?

For the first time in ages, the sale of new PCs with Windows as a percentage of the PC market is declining sharply. The new winner is the Mac, but, while no one does a good job of tracking the still-new, pre-installed Linux desktop market, it's also clear that Linux is finally making impressive inroads into Windows' once unchallenged market share.

GoblinX, an installable live CD based on the solid foundation of Slackware Linux, released Standard edition version 2.6 last month. It comes with lots of handy applications and five desktop managers: KDE, Fluxbox, Xfce, Enlightenment, and WindowMaker. I was impressed with the amount of software included as well as the stability and performance of GoblinX 2.6.

Almost exactly one year ago, I made the followingsuggestion in the wake of Dell's long-awaited decision to offer ready-configured GNU/Linux systems alongside the usual panoply of Windows systems:we must vote with our wallets. Assuming the Dell GNU/Linux systems are not hopelessly flawed in some way, we must all try to buy as many of them as we can (within reason, of course).What follows is a short report on my own experiences of putting my money where my mouth is.

The KDE Plasma team is inviting everyone to participate in a contest to create Plasma themes from which a select few will be chosen to be included as a part of the upcoming KDE 4.1 release. This is a great opportunity to contribute to a very visible component of the KDE project, the Plasma desktop.

The Eclipse Foundation's announcement of a runtime project got a lot of coverage, as the one-time tools-centric initiative moved deeper into runtime deployment and management. OSGi on mobile was one area that generated particular interest at EclipseCon. And not just any mobile: we're talking Google's Linux-based Android.

The Ubuntu team released Ubuntu 8.04 LTS beta. Codenamed “Hardy Heron”, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Desktop Edition features incremental improvements to familiar applications, with an emphasis on stability for this second Ubuntu long-term support release, and is easier than ever to try out with the new Wubi installer, the team said in a release.

Would you like to add an animated scrollbar, such as gOS's iBar or the one on Mac OS X, to your Linux desktop? If you're looking for some eye candy but don't want a program that gobbles your RAM or CPU, then wbar is just the thing for you. This fast, small launch bar features cool effects and a modern look.

Will the Google-sponsored Android platform be the right alternative for today's proprietary mobile environments? The answer is an emphatic "no," according to open source developer David Schlesinger.

The Eclipse Foundation looks destined to remain a mistress to Microsoft and Sun Microsystems - while the platform is married to IBM. The fifth annual EclipseCon this week saw a blockbuster project announcement and an almost shocking partnership.

The steps for setting up any mail-merge document in OpenOffice are easy; the one potentially gnarly bit is creating your contacts database in the first place. Your contacts list must be in Base, which is a bit of a pain. But the good news is Base can import data from most other databases, spreadsheets, text-delimited files, and email address books.