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Red Hat announced outstanding financial results for its third fiscal quarter, which ended Nov. 30. How outstanding? The Linux company's revenue for the quarter jumped to $135.4 million. That is an increase of 28 percent from the equivalent 2006 quarter and 6 percent from the second quarter of this year. Drilling down, Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions represented the bulk of Red Hat's income. The company's total RHEL income was $115.7 million. That brings RHEL's income up 30 percent year-over-year and 6 percent sequentially.

On Dec. 20, the Samba Group and the Software Freedom Law Center announced a deal with Microsoft that places all of Microsoft's network protocols needed for programs to work with Windows Server into the hands of the newly formed Protocol Freedom Information Foundation. The PFIF is a U.S.-based nonprofit corporation. It will make Microsoft's server network protocol documentation available to open-source developers such as The Samba Group, which creates programs for Windows Server interoperability, and private companies. This information is provided under an NDA (nondisclosure agreement) and developers must agree to the NDA before gaining access to the documentation.

In 2007, much of the open-source action happened outside the corridors of the usual corporate suspects. For years, the center of open-source software, at least from a commercial perspective, was with companies such as Red Hat, Novell, MySQL, and a number of smaller players. Those companies continued grinding away at their collaborative programming projects and support-centric businesses, but more unusual for the year were the new arrivals.

As promised, the second part of this series presents still more commercially available music and sound software for Linux. Come see (and hear) what your money will buy...

If you use Linux on your desktop, and you also happen to have a BlackBerry handheld device, you're probably aware that Research in Motion, the company that develops the BlackBerry platform, offers nothing in the way of support for its devices on Linux -- but the intrepid geeks in the free software world do. Thanks to to the efforts of the Barry and OpenSync projects, I just finished syncing my BlackBerry 8800 with my Evolution contacts on my Ubuntu 7.10 desktop.

The news that the operations chief from a major US airline, Jim Whitehurst from Delta, is taking over at Red Hat from Matthew Szulik is a further sign of the growing legitimization of open source and Linux in the eyes of corporate, mainstream America. It underscores how the “suits to sandals” ratio in the open source and Linux movement sliding further towards the suits. Whitehurst’s blue-chip background at the $16-billion-a-year Delta and the fact he’s an executive lured from outside of the IT industry rather than one who simply swapped one tech industry management job for another underscores the belief in open source as a business.

There are literally dozens of window managers that you can use with your favorite desktop environment to get a beautiful and appealing desktop. If you want to fine-tune your window manager, here are two programs that can help you control everything from application window size to pinning an application to all workspaces to fixing a position for your application windows to resizing desktops. One, wmctrl, works with any window managers that adheres to the Extended Window Manager Hints (EWMH), while Devil's Pie is a window-matching utility, which means it can configure application windows based on defined rules.

After reporting strong quarterly earnings, Red Hat discloses it is replacing CEO Matthew Szulik. In a move that caught even Red Hat senior staffers by surprise, the Linux company announced on Dec. 20 that long-time president and CEO Matthew Szulik is resigning. He will be replaced by James M. Whitehurst, a former Delta chief operating officer, as of the first of next year.

An international venture called the Universal Library Project has made more than one million books freely available in digitized format. The joint project of researchers from China, India, Egypt, and the US has the eventual aim of digitizing all published works of man, freeing the availability of information from geographic and socioeconomic boundaries, providing a basis for technological advancement, and preserving published works against time and tide.

Our resident Master's student Gian Spicuzza chimes in this month with a great feature HowTo on Kernel Hardening! There are a number of ways to lock down a system, and RBAC (role based access control) is one of them. Read on to learn more about what makes RBAC so useful, and to read one of the best overviews on Low/Medium/High Security... The combination of the Linux kernel and GNU packages has always been regarded as a secure operating system, but can it be more secure?

DV and MiniDV camcorder tapes can be used for more than just storing audio and video recordings. If you have a camcorder and a FireWire connection to your computer, you can also use them to store files. Using DV tapes for data storage has its advantages. A 60-minute tape, in Short Play mode, can realistically store about 10GB of information at a speed transfer of around 3MB/second, while in Long Play mode it should be able to store about 15GB. Besides that, moving files to a DV tape is a good way to hide sensitive data, because few people would look there for that kind of information.

Sharing printers across subnets is not something that has been reduced to clicking a couple of checkboxes yet, and a lot of folks don't even know it can be done. With Linux it is fairly easy, but it takes some digging to learn how to do this. So Carla Schroder has dug, and today shares the spoils of her digging.

Syslets are a proposed mechanism which would allow any system call to be invoked in an asynchronous manner; this technique promises a more comprehensive and simpler asynchronous I/O mechanism and much more - once all of the pesky little details can be worked out. A while back, Zach Brown let it be known that he had taken over the ongoing development of the syslets patch set; things have been relatively quiet since then. But Zach has just returned with a new syslets patch which shows where this idea is going.

Developing secure applications has always been a difficult task. Software that manages critical functions once serviced only users on internal networks; today, applications run on Web servers accessible to users anywhere in the world. Not only have the scope and magnitude of Web applications increased, but so has the complexity of securing them. The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) comes to the rescue of Web application architects with tools, frameworks, and guidelines to improve security in applications.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: A Sonnet-based spellcheck runner, and icons on the desktop in Plasma. Continued work revamping KBugBuster, more work towards KDevelop 4. GetHotNewStuff support for downloading maps in Marble. Image and audio dockers in Parley. The start of Glimpse, a new scanning application based on libksane. The beginnings of a generic resource display framework for NEPOMUK. Various work in KHTML. Music Service configuration work, and the integration of last.fm code in Amarok 2.0.

Adobe Acrobat is expensive, but that doesn’t mean you have to live a life without portable documents. What many people don’t realize is that PDF is a Federal Information Processing Standard, which means the specifications behind the format are widely published. Numerous developers take advantage of this fact and create programs that offer effective alternatives to Acrobat. Check out our list of these programs and take advantage of these tools that are full of some of the best PDF features and functions.

Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 2 is now available for testing. The second beta of the next major Firefox version offers around 900 bug fixes over Beta 1, including several feature enhancements and fixes to improve speed, stability, security and memory usage.

Dell has caught up to the Ubuntu release machine, adding the latest version of the operating system as a standard option with Linux-friendly laptop and desktop.

In the recent accusations that the GNOME Foundation has been supporting Microsoft's OOXML format at the expense of ODF, KDE has been presented as a counter-example. Based on a KDE News article, Richard Stallman suggested that "major KDE developers" had announced "their rejection of OOXML" and urged GNOME to do the same. More recently, a widely linked story on ITWire used the same article to declare that KDE has taken a "principled stand" against OOXML. However, if you go the source, the story is more nuanced than these claims suggest.

QDisk bolsters the quorum of small count clusters. This article outlines when and how to use QDisk. Note: QDisk was added to RHCS and GFS starting with the updates in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.4 and 5.0.