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The audio recordings from the presentations at SCALE 7x are finally available. The links for the talks are on the Conference Schedule. If there's no link for a session, it either means it wasn't recorded, or the recording wasn't usable for some reason.

Microsoft knew this day was coming. This was the reason it desperately wanted — no, needed — to take down Netscape in 1996. Netscape wasn’t just trying to build a program for reading text and photos across a network of connected computers. Netscape was trying to build a new platform - the ultimate platform - to run software and share information instantly and on a global scale. And no one understood that better than Bill Gates.

Highly-paid executives who led their financial institutions into failure get to keep their jobs and handsome paychecks, while the grunts who do the work get canned. Meanwhile, governments everywhere are reacting in their usual manner, by drafting galactic-sized reams of new rules and regulations. Which will supplement and not replace the old galactic-sized reams of rules and regulations. The burden of this record-keeping is going to fall on IT staff-- are you ready?

License proliferation has been a hot topic amongst the open source community for the past couple of years. I am happy to report that the Eclipse Foundation and IBM have collaborated to do our bit to help by superseding the Common Public License (CPL) with the Eclipse Public License (EPL). This means that the CPL will no longer be considered an active open source license.

Synergy. Total IT solutions. Some folks in the channel media are falling all over themselves calling the Oracle-Sun deal a “slam dunk” for solutions providers. Um, The VAR Guy begs to differ. Here’s why.

In one of the worst marketing moves for an upcoming operating system I can ever recall, Microsoft has said that it will limit to three the number of applications people can run simultaneously on many Windows 7-equipped netbooks. I can't think of a better way to kill demand for the new operating system. The Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft will sell a Starter edition of Windows 7 on netbooks. That Starter edition will only allow people to run three applications at the same time. If they want to run more, they'll have to pony up with more money, although the article didn't say how much more money they'd have to pay.

Enomalism ECP (Elastic Computing Platform) provides a web-based control panel that lets you design, deploy, and manage virtual machines on one or more host systems (in the case of multiple systems, we speak of a cluster or cloud). This article shows how you can use Enomalism (also know as Enomaly) to manage KVM guests on one Fedora 10 server.

The first bugfix-release of xfce 4.6 has been released & is now updated to version 4.6.1. Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment for unix-like operating systems.

For those that missed it, Xfce 4.6.1 was released this week. It features a series of bug-fixes and minor improvements atop the recently released Xfce 4.6.0 code-base...

In a recent survey by Packt Publishing, 70% of software developers said that they have donated time, money, or both to open source projects. However, with large projects like Wikipedia receiving over one million dollars from just three charitable foundations last year, the question remains whether open source really needs individual contributions from developers to survive.

The enterprises, vendors, developers, analysts, and journalists I speak with regularly are mostly pretty savvy about the basics of open source at this point. Even if they're not licensing geeks or otherwise expert in all the minutiae and subtle implications of open-source development, community, and usage, they generally have the important basics down.

Fred Trotter writes: I have recently been asked to testify at the NCVHS hearings on meaningful use (see forwarded message below). This is very likely because I have been working as a representative of the FOSS community with CCHIT to resolve the basic incompatibility with current CCHIT certification and FOSS EHR systems. For a decent summary you can read the CCHIT category on my blog or read some of the mainstream blogs: slashdot and ZDnet Now I will be asked to testify on what 'Meaningful Use' of EHR systems means from a FOSS perspective. I am having discussions on what I should cover on both Hardhats (VistA community) and OpenHealth (larger FOSS community). Feel free to email me off-line (fred dot trotter at gmail dot com) or simply reply to this thread, with your thoughts.

The "Proprietary Tax" makes Linux's true cost come out to $1000 cheaper than Windows or OS X, due to the excessive software and cat litter costs associated with proprietary operating systems.

Red Hat commissioned the Georgia Institute of Technology – Georgia Tech, to research the state of open source around the world, and has now presented the results of the research as the Open Source Activity Map and Open Source Environment Map. The interactive maps let users see how the seventy five countries examined for the project, rank globally. The activity map is based on concrete factors; existing open source and open standards and numbers of open source users.

The economic situation is eating into your profits, and the MS Office licenses look more expensive than before. OpenOffice.org is a free office suite that includes a word processor, spreadsheet, slide presentation, drawing program, and database. It’s compatible with practically all operating systems and runs well on old and new computers alike.

Ubuntu 9.04 - officially launched today and due to be ready for download on Thursday - is a worthwhile upgrade for Ubuntu fans. Ubuntu steward Canonical has been working hard to improve the look and feel of Ubuntu and the Jaunty Jackalope edition brings quite a few refreshing touches to the old exterior. The default theme is still the familiar brown, but numerous small improvements to dialog boxes, splash screens, and a flashy new login screen give Ubuntu a slicker, more professional feel. There's also a new theme named New Wave that's a nice mashup between the DarkRoom and the default Human theme.

Did Larry Ellison do something right this time? Oh, say it ain't so.

You've probably heard the phrase "Write once, run anywhere." But if you want to write for an application that runs in a cloud, you really have to know what you're doing. Here in Part 2 of this "Realities of open source cloud computing" series, learn how to write an application using PHP to run on the Aptana cloud computing platform. Explore some of the critical design differences between a cloud application and a traditional N-tier application. The concepts are illustrated with a seemingly simple application, using familiar open source technologies, that taps into the strengths of cloud computing.

Following weeks of speculation over whether and on what terms IBM would purchase Sun, it's now database giant Oracle which is to take over the ailing business, with the result that OpenSolaris, Java, MySQL and OpenOffice are now under new management.

I'd thought about Oracle buying Sun. But, then I thought, "Larry Ellison isn't that dumb." Well, I was wrong. Ellison is that dumb. Oracle is buying Sun in what may be the most moronic technology acquisition of the 21st century. I've looked at the Oracle/Sun deal. I've read Ellison's explanation as to why the buyout makes sense. I don't see it. I don't see any upside to this deal. And, on top of that, Oracle, which spent $7.4 billion for Sun, vastly overpaid for the company. This deal will make money for Sun's executives and stockholders, but it will prove to be a disaster for Sun's users, developers, and employees.