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Survey reports open-source will lead the way by decade's end.

A survey being compiled by Saugatuck Research so far shows that open-source technologies will achieve high-penetration rates across the entire core software stack by 2010. More specifically, the survey, "IT Trends and Directions," reveals that open-source operating systems, development tools such as Eclipse, and application servers such as Apache will lead the way in market penetration by the end of the decade, with 28.2 percent, 28.0 percent and 25.6 percent, respectively.

MapServer Technical Steering Committee Members, the University of Minnesota and the DM Solutions Group Join Autodesk, Inc. in Establishing an Open Source Foundation Dedicated to Driving Innovation and Expansion of New Web Mapping Technology and Creating Broad-based Market Development Opportunity

ED - Why not include AutoCAD too?

The city of Paris is accelerating its move to free and open-source software as part of a strategy to reduce its dependence on suppliers. It plans to replace more of its software, both on servers and desktops, with open-source.

Sam Walton Taught Google More About How to Dominate the Internet Than Microsoft Ever Did Play to your strengths. That's the key to success in any industry. This is the week I promised to explain where I think Google is headed, and playing to the company's strengths is key if they are going to do what I think, which is effectively take over the Internet. Oh they won't steal it or strong-arm us. They'll seduce us into giving it to them. And I am not at all sure that's a bad thing.

from the something-for-nothing dept. CosmoPOD.com offers free remote KDE desktops over NX. Anyone can sign up to have their own desktop accessible from any computer with a network connection. CosmoPOP uses KDE's Kiosk framework to ensure security for their system. To find out more about the service and why KDE was the chosen desktop, KDE Dot News spoke to the man behind CosmoPOD, Stephen Ensor. Read on for the interview.

"It's not going to work," Mr. Allchin says he told the Microsoft chairman. The new version, code-named Longhorn, was so complex its writers would never be able to make it run properly. [Jim Allchin] The news got even worse: Longhorn was irredeemable because Microsoft engineers were building it just as they had always built software. Throughout its history, Microsoft had let thousands of programmers each produce their own piece of computer code, then stitched it together into one sprawling program. Now, Mr. Allchin argued, the jig was up. Microsoft needed to start over.

Microsoft Corp. has launched an assault on a Massachusetts government plan to move computer networks at all state agencies onto an open-file format by January 2007. Such a move, if approved, could displace Microsoft's profitable Office software and, if followed by other government bodies across the country and abroad, could threaten Microsoft's dominance on desktop computers in the public sector. The company now holds more than 90 percent of the global market in office productivity software.

In the closing of his article What Linux needs to succeed, Paul Murphy writes of Linux devotees:

Stop trying to make Linux look like Windows, don't put those [Windows] people in charge, and don't let anyone pretend that Linux is some kind of cheaper Windows replacement. Linux is what it is: Unix, and it takes different reflexes, different ideas about networks, about the role of the computer, about data storage, and about application management to make it work.

While I agree with a number of his conclusions (such as the relative strengths of Solaris, BSD, and Linux distantly followed by Windows), I think he misses the point.

The comment period for the new draft Massachusetts office-file-format policy ended last Friday the 9th. During the week before that date, there was some pretty intense back-room politics going on. There are a ton of industry associations and lobbying groups, including: Mass Software Council, Technet New England, Mass High Tech Council, Mass Network Communications Council, Associated Industries of Massachusetts, and AeA. You can bet that every one of them was coming under pressure last week to speak up pro or contra the state’s position. Since you have IBM and Sun on one side of this issue and Microsoft on the other, you can also bet that they were getting pulled both ways. I’m pretty sure that a lot of them ended up with a statement along the lines of “On the subject of the new draft from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, we’re in favor of motherhood and apple pie.” But, I got my hands on a copy of the other side’s talking points, and I think they make interesting reading. [Update: I hear unoficially from someone at Adobe that they’re “generally happy with how things went”, so I was wrong, sorry. Fixed.]

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - The free software foundation said on Tuesday it would start adapting rules for development and use of free software by including penalties against those who patent software or use anti-piracy technology. Free software needs to be licensed under specific rules to guarantee that it can be freely studied, copied, modified, reused, shared and redistributed. The Linux operating system kernel is one of the best known examples of free software.

Eric Laffoon, the project lead for KDE's Kdewebdev module, takes exception to Butler's arguments and makes the case for his view on the issue of Qt, below.