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“What's in a name?” some bloke in the sixteenth century once asked. As Microsoft knows, quite a lot. What you call something can have a major influence on how you think about it. So how Microsoft talks about free software is important – not least for the clues that it gives about its latest tactical move to defang the open source threat.

Today, the Linux Foundation is releasing a report that shows just how valuable FOSS can be. The authors find that recreating Fedora 9.1 (the free distribution upon which Red Hat's current Linux release is based) using traditional proprietary methods would cost $10.8 billion. They also find that the cost of creating the Linux kernel alone would be $1.4 billion.

Mozilla released the first workable alpha version of its new Fennec mobile browser last week, showcasing a new interface optimized for small-screen devices. Despite the slimmed-down look, however, Fennec makes use of the same Mozilla technologies under the hood that are well-known in Firefox. In my testing on my own handheld device, I found Fennec an enticing browser with a well-thought-out interface.

After many years of being an Amarok fan, I was introduced to Banshee. Banshee fast became my media player of choice, due to its ability to handle video and audio files, as well as stream internet radio and podcasts.

While listening to the Transforming Education Panel at the Microsoft ICT for Development Conference, I was struck by how much this conference is a direct result of the hype around One Laptop Per Child. If it wasn't for Nicholas Negroponte's vision for a whole new technology application, low-cost laptops for education, I doubt that Microsoft would be courting the development community so intensely or expanded its Unlimited Potential program. It sure would not have extended Windows XP's working lifespan.

When Ben Rousch joined Van Dam Iron Works close to a decade ago, it didn't take him long to move off a proprietary network operating system and start experimenting with a Linux server. He changed horses again, to a Windows server, but today Van Dam is back in the Linux fold -- lesson learned. Rousch, manger of information systems at the metals and structural steel fabricator in West Michigan, says that the company's IT network largely consisted of a Novell server and Windows 98 clients when he arrived back in 2000.

Earlier this week the ASUS Eee PC celebrated its first birthday (with a full birthday party and cake at LAPTOP Magazine). It was one year ago that the Taiwanese company began selling its first sub-notebook (which would form a new category known as netbooks). The little Eee PC 701 not only would spur on a whole Eee brand for the company and line of different sized Eee PCs, but it would push the competing notebook manufacturers into the netbook market as well.

"We're seeing organizations still willing to work on new systems," Miller claimed. "We're seeing people leaving financial institutions like Lehman Brothers or Bear Stearns and starting new organization that need new installs. We're seeing a lot of opportunity in all this doom and gloom."

Asus CEO Jerry Shen has denied claims that consumers are sending back more Linux netbooks than they're returning Windows-based models. Speaking in an interview with Laptop Magazine, Shen said return rates were the same for both operating systems. "I believe the Linux and Windows have similar return rates," he said, adding that the Linux option was particularly popular in Europe.

Making good on a promise it made at the very beginning, Google has today announced that the source code underpinning its Android platform for mobile devices is available for free to anyone who wants a crack at it. The code is being provided through the newly-announced Android Open Source Project, which will give the public at large the opportunity to make contributions to the platform's all-important core -- a first for a mobile operating system with true mass-market appeal. Theoretically, the move should position Android to benefit from a fairly democratic, speedy evolution, and it'll also give anyone with a few spare chips lying around the chance to build a smartphone of their own without shelling out a dime in licensing fees.

After the glut of netbooks on the market, Imovio, an offshoot of U.S. company Comsciences, presents the iKit Multimedia Messenger, a palm-sized netbook with Linux. The device is equipped with Bluetooth and WLAN and is perfect for chats and email, although it brings along other applications.

Last year we started a new campaign tradition — the Commoner Letter series. As I’ve said before, and will definitely say again, the campaign is about building support — rallying our community members around the importance of supporting Creative Commons and the openness our tools help enable. Over the next three months, five prominent members of the CC community will share with the world why they support CC. If you’re interested in CC and issues of openness and access, this list is for you.

In an announcement on his blog, the UK's OpenOffice Marketing Manager, John McCreesh, states that in the first week of its release, OpenOffice.org 3.0 registered over 3 million downloads. Yet the project only records downloads from the so-called Bouncer website.

This is so funny. Yet another "history" of Linux. I'm deep into writing an article on the Apple-Psystar litigation, to rebut some of the absolute nonsense I see being written about it, but I have to take a brief detour to share something with you, so you can laugh too. I put in News Picks a couple of days ago the farewell letter of ex-hedge fund manager, Andrew Lahde, who is one of the few who predicted the current Wall Street meltdown, and one of the things he suggested was that great minds get together and come up with a new "system of government that truly represents the common man’s interest....This forum could be similar to the one used to create the operating system, Linux, which competes with Microsoft’s near monopoly."

In this installment of the classic Networking 101 series, Charlie Schluting walks us through the whys and wherefores of the OSPF, the popular and robust interior gateway protocol.

After the release of Linux 2.6.27, kernel developers are currently busily integrating patches for the next kernel version into the main development branch of Linux. This usually involves discarding some old code and adding new code though on balance, there are usually more new lines than old ones, making the kernel grow continually.

Adobe does not provide a Flash player 10 final for 64 bit Linux systems. This quick howto explains installing the Adobe Flash plugin 10 under 64bit Ubuntu Linux system using a shell script.

STUX 2.0, released last month, is a remarkable improvement from the 0.9.2 release I reviewed a couple years ago. While the look and feel of the Slackware-based distribution have stayed pretty much the same, STUX lacks the glaring technical problems that made it unusable on the previous occasion.

Today I was not in the mood for testing applications and making some review, and although the new Flock 2.0 would deserve my attention, I think I'll cover it tomorrow. So instead of a review or a tutorial, I decided to write something more like a lecture, so you won't need any technical knowledge to read it. Surfing on the web got me an idea: how about an article to pick up a Linux distribution? And, to be more precise, what about an article to explain why Ubuntu or Debian? Since these are also the only two distributions I'm familiar with, here I am, writing this.

IBM is targeting midsize business customers that use Linux with a new "baby" mainframe that costs just a fraction of the amount charged for the high-end mainframe IBM released in February. The System z10 Business Class (z10 BC), announced Tuesday and generally available now, follows in the tradition of IBM refreshing its primary mainframe product and then following up several months later with a stripped-down, cheaper version, says Forrester analyst Brad Day. But the so-called “baby mainframe” is a pretty strong machine on its own, and lets IBM compete more aggressively against various RISC and Itanium-based servers as well as high-end x86 and x64 machines, Day says.