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While one would imagine that trying to mass market proprietary software that is intended for an open source platform would be problematic, there are some major advantages.

Open-Xchange, which promotes open source groupware to more than 500 resellers and integration partners worldwide, plans to host its first partner summit on October 8 in Germany. Here's the scoop, the opportunities and the challenges facing Open-Xchange.

In Is Chrome OS Too Orwellian Or Big Brother-ish?, Chris of The Coffee Desk examined the reach of Google into our private spaces, both cyber and real. That really struck me – I knew just what he meant, because last week I had a near-miss experience with yet another in the endless series of assaults on privacy. This one came from a relatively new entity in the Microsoft hegemony, Qwest by Windows Live.

VDrift, TORCS and SuperTuxKart are 3 free, open source car racing games which run on Windows, Linux and MacOSX.

One of the significant disadvantages of being an early adopter of any new technology is what comes after it, specifically, the improvements that every technology experiences over time. Such appears to be the case for those who rushed to pick up the G1 — the first Android phone on the market — as questions have begun to pop up over whether the device is in line to see its last update.

According to the change notes for the current development branch the next release of the GIMP image editor will be licensed under the GPL3 and LGPL3. GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program, is currently being redeveloped as the unstable development version 2.7, preparing the way for version 2.8 which will be the next stable version expected for release by the end of the year.

While Sun Microsystems puts their weight behind the GNOME desktop environment for Solaris and OpenSolaris, there are developers that do work on providing a quality experience for KDE on OpenSolaris. However, getting KDE to run on a clean OpenSolaris installation can require building KDE from source and taking various other steps. Fortunately, for KDE fans, there is now the Korona distribution, which brings KDE 4.3 as the default desktop environment to an OpenSolaris stack.

Remember Mindcraft back in 1999? Not many people do. It was when Microsoft "proved" Windows NT was faster than GNU/Linux. That backfired, and so has Microsoft's latest paid benchmarking: this time of Internet Explorer 8 vs. Firefox, by NSS Labs. It just goes to show that Microsoft is now officially worried about Firefox in the browser sector.

Canonical’s Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) and Microsoft’s Windows 7 are expected to debut within days of one another in October 2009. Some open source pundits will surely hype a showdown between the two operating systems. But Canonical will need to carefully communicate the broader Ubuntu 9.10 story to media, customers and partners. Here are seven potential steps to success for Canonical and the Ubuntu 9.10 launch.

Open-source Java clustering startup Terracotta is today expected to announce an acquisition that'll potentially boost the speed of clustered Java applications. The company said it's buying the IP behind the Apache-licensed Ehcache along with Ehcache founder Greg Luck, who'll be joining the Terracotta team. The goal is to integrate Ehcache with Teracotta.

So Microsoft is going to decide how big a netbook can be to be a netbook then? Anything larger than 10.2" doesn't get Windows 7 Starter Edition, must pay more for another version that will run even slower on a netbook. Could be good news for Linux, as OEM XP licenses expire and Windows 7 becomes the only alternative.

The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 1.8.2 for Linux today. Bordeaux 1.8.2 adds support for Apple's QuickTime 6.5.2 Player, IrfanView 4.25 the extreamly popular image viewer and editor. This release aslo bundles in Cabextract, Wget and Unzip to remove external dependencies. Our winetricks script has been synced to the latest official release, Steam should now install and run once again, There has also been many small bug fixes and tweaks.

LAMP is short for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. This tutorial shows how you can install an Apache2 webserver on a CentOS 5.3 server with PHP5 support (mod_php) and MySQL support.

It takes money to make money, and commercial Linux distributor Red Hat knows this. Red Hat has made no secret of the fact that it wants to get more of its sales through indirect channels. This is not just a matter of shifting the burden of sales to resellers, as is the case with most server makers, but is also a means of keeping Red Hat's overall revenues growing so it attains its long-term goal of becoming a $1bn, profitable software company.

While betas of Microsoft's Silverlight 3 platform have been available for a number of months after being announced in the last half of 2008, their free software implementation of Silverlight, which is known as Moonlight and developed largely by Novell with the Mono developers, has lagged behind.

Microsoft has attempted to block the court-ordered end to sales of Microsoft Word over a patent dispute. But court papers show that company officers were aware of the patent when they took the infringing action.

Open source Silverlight clone gets new milestone release as it races towards feature parity with Microsoft. A key element of the Silverlight framework is its ability to handle high-quality video and audio codecs. Thanks to a deal worked out between Microsoft and Novell, Moonlight includes the Microsoft Media Pack, which is a set of proprietary codecs that Microsoft is making available to Moonlight users, free of charge. As a result, the codecs installed through Moonlight are actually licensed by Microsoft, which in turn has licensed the video and codecs technology from its respective patent holders. "Novell is not actually paying Microsoft for the codecs, and in a manner of speaking, Microsoft is footing the bill for the codecs," De Icaza said.

Head First Networking, eh? I'm familiar with the Head First series, having reviewed a number of such books before. Head First books are generally successful at teaching a technical topic to a moderately to severely distractable person. I was curious how teaching networking would fit the bill, particularly since "networking" as a technology, is so vast. Head First books tend to be beginners books, so I wasn't expecting a huge amount of detail or advanced knowledge. The typical audience for this series is late high school/early college, so I thought at best, the content would more or less map to CompTIA's Network+ certification.

Anyone who reads the Linux technical press, Linux blogs, or the comments section of DistroWatch Weekly knows that there has been a lot of discussion, dissatisfaction, and even anger over the state of Intel video drivers for Linux. In a nutshell and without going into the nuts and bolts, Intel made significant changes to the drivers for their chipsets, introducing new technologies that were designed to radically improve performance.

There are a lot of bogus VPN (virtual private network) products sold for big bucks that are not real VPNs at all, but SSL portals. OpenVPN is a genuine secure VPN that supports both site-to-site tunnels, to create a nice secure WAN on the cheap, and remote individual clients. Eric Geier shows us how to use the Untangle gateway to set up a good stout OpenVPN server the easy way.