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IDC on Wednesday painted an optimistic outlook for Linux over the next few years, predicting that overall revenue for desktops, servers, and Linux-compatible packaged software will reach $35 billion by 2008.

Michael Singer writes an interesting article today, "Linux to Grow Steady for Next Four Years," for Jupitermedia's Internetnews.com. He cooly states, "Linux is much more popular in the enterprise than previously thought, according to a new report out today." Given how grossly this understates the truth about GNU/Linux and its prospects, such tempered optimism deserves a cascading laugh track.

The Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving choice and promoting innovation on the Internet, today announced that it has placed a two-page ad in the December 16th edition of the New York Times. The ad, coordinated by Spread Firefox, features the names of the thousands of people worldwide who contributed to the Mozilla Foundation's fundraising campaign to support last month's highly successful launch of the open source Mozilla Firefox 1.0 web browser.

Authentication is easily one of the most critical services provided by your network infrastructure. It is the gatekeeper for every resource on your network. Workstations, applications, printers, and files would all be open to the world without a system of ensuring that only those people who need any given resource can gain access to it. Once you have accepted the fact that you need authentication, you must decide whether to stay with one network operating system in the interest of a completely homogenous network, or accept a "best of breed" system that will better fulfill your needs, even though it will complicate your environment. If you choose the second option, often times you are left with a management nightmare, where you have two, three, or even more authentication engines to maintain across your network operating systems.

PHP Development Team would like to announce the immediate release of PHP 4.3.10 and 5.0.3. These are maintenance releases that in addition to non-critical bug fixes address several very serious security issues.

Did he or didn't he? A cracker identifying himself as "ChineseSpyBoy" has been contacting news organizations -- including NewsForge -- the past day or so claiming to have broken into McAfee Inc. corporate servers and providing screen shots as evidence. McAfee says he did not break into their boxes but that he did compromise a partner's machine.

Once the hallmark of a laid-off dot-commer, the job title "consultant" is now legitimately paired with "Linux." Linux consultants, often called in to supplement the in-house staff of large corporations, are also finding fertile ground in the growing number of small businesses seeking powerful and cost-effective IT solutions that let them compete with bigger firms.

Open Sense Solutions LLC has launched a Linux-friendly multi-user PC unit that will support up to three users simultaneously, using any one of three distinct mice, keyboards, or monitors to access the same desktop software.

Phillip Lougher announced the release of SquashFS 2.1, a compressed read only filesystem. Significant speedups were achieved in this new version by indexing directories and sorting them alphabetically. To highlight this improved performance, Phillip offered some benchmark comparisons between SquashFS 2.0, SquashFS 2.1, zisofs, and Cloop. Other improvements include an increase in the maximum directory size from 512 KB to 128 MB, and up to a 25% performance increase in the mksquashfs utility.

Worldwide Market for Packaged Software on Linux Projected to Reach $14 Billion by 2008

As takeup of Mozilla's open source browser continues to increase, the group is to take out another ad in The New York Times, which it says will contain something unexpected

Connecting road warriors with a full-blown open-source VPN solution. If your company has people on the road, such as sales or technical people, a VPN is a good method for letting them access data on the company network. Many different VPN solutions can be bought, but many are free. Here, I discuss only solutions you can set up without buying a commercial VPN product.

db4objects, Inc., the company that produces the object-oriented database engine called db4o, last week released it under the terms of the General Public License (GPL). CEO Christof Whittig hopes that the release of the database engine as open source will encourage embedded applications developers to give it a try. It's a big move for a company that earlier this year listed the price of its source code at $40,000.

Among open-source users, "Only 7 percent of companies work with multinational open-source software providers such as Novell or Red Hat, while most of the rest train their employees or hire independent professionals," Trends Consulting director Raul Bauer was quoted as saying.

Linux Bangalore/2004, India's biggest tech-fest for free and open source software was held in Bangalore, the country's IT hub, last week. Attendees from many countries got to see more than 80 presentations delivered by 62 speakers in a span of three days.

A new study has found that Linux is more secure than most commercial software -- results that echo what its proponents have long said. A four-year study released today by Coverity, reports Linux has a low bug count, making the code more stable and secure. The 2.6 Linux production kernel, now being shipped with software from Novell and other Linux vendors, contains 985 bugs in 5.7 million lines of code, far below the industry average, said Seth Hallem, Coverity's CEO.

Novell's newest Linux certification has broken into the Top 10 "Hot Certs" for 2005, an annual ranking of technical certifications by CertCities.com, a leading certification publication.

An extensive review using a source-code analysis tool finds that the Linux 2.6 kernel has 0.17 bugs per 1,000 lines of code, compared with the 10 to 20 bugs per 1,000 lines generally found in commercial software packages.

I urge you to consider leveraging the free resources available and trust you already have the motivation, the people and resources under your employ to create something durable and important for people all over the world. One way to move ahead is by scanning the works of the libraries of Stanford, Oxford, Harvard, the University of Michigan, the New York Public Library and others into the OASIS "OpenDocument" File Format of the OpenOffice desktop office suite. This will guarantee public access to the libraries' contents as well as indirectly promote Google's interests in search.

South African Linux training company Afribiz is spearheading an effort to have more than 200 applicants sit the LPI (Linux Professional Institute) examinations in just one day next year. Kin le Roux of Afribiz says the only other country that has attempted this before is China which did it earlier this year. "Obviously we would like to do even more than China did," says Le Roux.