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I've probably written a dozen or more times about how I think that OpenOffice is the killer app of free, open-source software, and is the software suite that most worries the folks at Microsoft while empowering more and more regular people every day ... but that I have little call to use it myself. That has changed.

At the Geek Ranch we recently made a decision to implement some software in Python. Or, more accurately, I decided and there was no disagreement. Then Python gets picked as the best scripting language in the LJ Readers' Choice survey. That inspired me to write this article (and get ready for Perl and Ruby fans to start yelling at me). To understand my position, you need to understand my background and experience. Yeah, this is is going to be long but I think it is necessary.

Oracle and now IBM seem to have strange ideas about creating a business around open source software for the enterprise. First it was Oracle's Unbreakable Linux program, derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux sans its proprietary bits and supported for peanuts to beat RHEL and similar community projects such as CentOS. Now it's IBM, which has taken old OpenOffice.org code under the now-retired Sun Industry Standards Source License and released it as a proprietary closed source freeware office suite. The first stable release of IBM Lotus Symphony, released last week, has no obvious advantages over OpenOffice.org. The suite is targeted at enterprise customers, at the expense of free and open source alternatives.

The Red Hat Partner Summit kicks off in Boston on June 18, roughly 15 miles from Novell's corporate headquarters. Is it time for Novell to get aggressive, and actively market SuSE Linux to Red Hat Summit attendees? The VAR Guy certainly thinks so. Here's how Novell could steal some of the spotlight at Red Hat's own event.

What does Mozilla - arguably the most popular open source project in the world - use for its telephony solution? It shouldn't surprise you that they use a solution built in open source should it?

Project Gutenberg (PG) collects and maintains a library of public domain books in electronic text format, in an assortment of languages. That's all well and good, but potential readers still need a method to access PG's collection. I recently sat down to test a handful of e-text readers that offer integration with the 24,000 PG titles. Searching on Freshmeat and SourceForge.net turns up five alternatives: GutenPy, Guten, JBook, PyGE, and GutenBrowser. Of those, GutenPy, Guten, and PyGE are all Python applications, JBook is a Java app, and GutenBrowser is written in C++.

Command line is known to be the most powerful way of doing things on Linux. Even though there are GUI tools for almost any task, doing them in the shell is most of the time faster and easier. Not to mention there are so many CLI tools out there, you only have to build a graphical interface in order to use them. It is also the most common way of spreading tutorials or helping new users, since it's less bandwidth consumptive (no screenshots, no explanations like 'go there, click on that, not that, the one below it'). This is a review on the most used terminal emulators in Linux.

The openSUSE Project is proud to announce the launch of forums.opensuse.org, a merger of the openSUSE Novell support forums, suseforums.net, and suselinuxsupport.de - the three largest English-language dedicated support forums for openSUSE. The merged forums at forums.opensuse.org will provide a single forum for the openSUSE community to find support and discuss openSUSE.

After member states filed four complaints against the standardisation of Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) document format, the International Standards Organisation (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in Geneva have responded by postponing publication of the revised specification. As the ISO announced, the planned ISO/IEC DIS 29500 cannot be published until these complaints have been heard. Procedure requires that they be dealt with by the end of June, when the ISO and IEC have to hand over their comments on the complaints to two management committees for a final decision.

Linux Mint, one of the popular desktop distributions that's based off Ubuntu, has come out with version 5.0 "Elyssa" that builds upon the 8.04 Hardy Heron release. Linux Mint 5.0 brings updates to the unique Mint Tools, GNOME 2.22, performance improvements, and other features that come because of rebasing against this latest Ubuntu release. In this article we are taking a brief look at some of the Linux Mint features, for those that have never explored this fast-growing distribution.

It used to be that companies could get away with stealing GPLed open-source code into their own software and no one would be the wiser. Those days are done. Oh, it still happens, but the SFLC’s (Software Freedom Law Center) recent legal actions on behalf of BusyBox’s principal developers have been putting the fear of open-source violations into unscrupulous software companies. In the latest chapter, SFLC has sued Bell Microproducts Inc. and Super Micro Computer Inc. for using BusyBox’s open-source software without honoring its open-source license.

Free-software advocate Richard Stallman has spoken out against the association of open-source software with London's "unethical" Oyster-card system. In an email sent to ZDNet.co.uk on Monday, Stallman criticised the use of open-source software, such as Red Hat Linux, JBoss middleware and Apache web-server software, in the online payment system for the Oyster contactless cards used on London's underground rail network.

The European Union competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, took a swipe at Microsoft on Tuesday by recommending that businesses and governments use software based on internationally accepted standards. Kroes has fought bitterly with Microsoft during the past four years, accusing the U.S. company of defying her orders and fining it nearly €1.7 billion, or $2.7 billion, for violating European competition rules. She did not mention Microsoft by name Tuesday, but encouraged computer users to avoid formats that, like many Microsoft products, are based on proprietary standards.

Scouts honor — the 98-year-old Boy Scouts of America (BSA) organization is adopting open-source software as a path to building better software to support the almost 3 million scouts and 1.1 million adults who make up the group. Faced with the need for a streamlined, organized way for its more than 121,000 local scout troops to find and use software for fundraisers, event registration, facilities maintenance and more, the Irving, Texas-based BSA last month launched a Web site to begin its BSA Open Source Initiative.

A simple how to on getting started with LVM for Linux.

Bernard Dalle explains what the attraction is, how his company Index Ventures sees no shortage of top-flight open source startups following investments in MySQL, TrollTech and Zend, and why he, too, hates software patents.

This guide explains how to set up mod_geoip with Apache2 on a Fedora 9 system. mod_geoip looks up the IP address of the client end user. This allows you to redirect or block users based on their country. You can also use this technology for your OpenX (formerly known as OpenAds or phpAdsNew) ad server to allow geo targeting.

The Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) project allows you install new filesystems without touching your Linux kernel. The filesystems run as regular programs, allowing them to use shared libraries and perform tasks that would be difficult from inside the Linux kernel. FUSE filesystems look just like regular filesystems to other applications on the machine. In this article I'll look at compFUSEd, which is a compressed FUSE filesystem. Using compFUSEd can save a significant amount of disk space for files that are highly compressible, such as many text documents and executable files.

IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratory have built the world's first petaflop machine, a supercomputer named Roadrunner designed to ensure the safety and reliability of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile, IBM said Monday. A petaflop is equal to one thousand trillion calculations per second, and was a highly sought-after goal in the world of supercomputing. Scheduled for installation at Los Alamos in August, IBM says Roadrunner represents a breakthrough in hybrid computing, combining AMD microprocessors found in standard laptops and servers with the IBM Cell Broadband Engine chips that power Sony's PS3 gaming console.

The main post in the article is simply a rehash of what helios stated his blog about a certain school in California. Christian Einfeldt himself clarifies what he needs in order to convince the school in question to adopt a FOSS platform by commenting below the post.