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A while ago Roy Russo had made a comment to the effect: "OSS needs to stop competing on price". Regardless what you read about him on the Interweb, I say, he's a smart guy! ;-) I've never really looked at the price of Windows vs. RHEL or Ubuntu. The simple answer is that CentOS/Fedora (near RHEL replacements) and Ubuntu are free without commercial support, so end of discussion. But, if you want commercial support and consider a typical Windows replacement cycle (~5 years), it seems that Windows is actually cheaper than purchasing RHEL+support or support for Ubuntu.

It has been said that the most important missing killer app for Linux is a free Adobe Photoshop clone. In this series we'll correct that assertion, and then move on to bringing high-quality digital images to life in Linux itself, without having to use icky old Windows, or spending a pot of money.

djbdns is a very secure suite of DNS tools that consists out of multiple parts: dnscache, a DNS cache that can be used in /etc/resolv.conf instead of your ISP's name servers and that tries to sort out wrong (malicious) DNS answers; axfrdns, a service that runs on the master DNS server and to which the slaves connect for zone transfers; and tinydns, the actual DNS server, a very secure replacement for BIND.

Automattic, the parent company of popular open source blogging platform WordPress, announced this week it received $29 million in funding from four investors who will take a minority stake in the company. Though this isn't the first round of financing for the not quite three-year-old company, it has drawn a lot of notice because one of the investors is the New York Times. It's an unusual pairing of two industries -- blogging and conventional media -- typically thought to be at odds with each other.

Linux is not just for computer whizzes. In fact, buying Linux and learning how to use it are easier than ever, thanks to the open-source operating system's expanding presence in affordable computers and mainstream retail outlets. In quick succession, the number of mass-market, sub-$200 desktops has tripled--from one to three--in less than three months.

Netherlands-based systems integrator Deciso is shipping a 1U Appliance Development Kit (ADK) for routers, firewalls, and other rack-mounted network appliances. Based on PC Engines' ALIX single-board computer (SBC), the 19" ADK comes preinstalled with Voyage Linux.

Every field of knowledge has writing that defines the field. In the open source field one of the key essays is “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” by Eric Steven Raymond, or ESR as he is often known. In the essay Eric S. Raymond compares and contrasts the cathedral as a highly structured, highly organized approach of creating software against the faster adapting less structured bazaar like approach used in open source. In this interview Mr. Raymond talks about a number of the projects he is involved in.

Over the last several years open source has grown in stature and maturity, becoming more worthy in the eyes of corporate buyers and investors. Everyone could point to Red Hat, which dominates the Linux operating system space, as the poster child for open source but few other “pure” open source companies rose up to that level. Sun has gradually been making its vast portfolio of software open source under various licenses, embracing the notion of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software). “Volume drives everything, and developers are picking free and open source software,” Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has said.

Just some quick points worthy of clarification: Moonlight is not Silverlight. Microsoft does not support GNU/Linux as far as Silverlight is concerned. Novell merely plays catch-up trying to implement something which Microsoft refuses to make available for GNU/Linux. There is no promise of full compatibility and future support. Microsoft can (and will) change it any time it wishes to suit other business goals such as O/S competition, application integration, Web services, or advertising.

Personal computer (laptop and desktop) prices may have crashed. The low price tags, however, can be misleading - especially for first-time buyers. Consider this. All low-cost laptops and desktops come pre-loaded with a Linux OS or a DOS version (obsolete on desktops). The installation of a legal Microsoft operating system (OS) and office suite (for word, excel, etc) will increase the price of the desktop or laptop by 20 to 35 per cent.

[Here's my submission for FUD-of-the-Week - Sander]

In the next three days, every Linux or Unix people will start the thirty years of countdown before the unix timestamps overflows. This bug is called Y2K38 and it affects all unix-like operating system which represent system time as the number of seconds since January 1, 1970.

new world from the old one, even though it is glaringly obvious once you’ve crossed over. Empirical evidence is one way to bridge the gap. To that end, I want to show some solid evidence for the “impossible” things that commons-based peer production (CBPP) has already accomplished—things that the old conventional wisdom would tell us “can’t be done”. This week, I’ll look at what is probably the most obvious case: free software.

The developers at Fluendo have been working on an open-source, cross-platform media center application called Elisa. Version 0.3.3, which was released last week, includes a complete user interface overhaul that dramatically improves usability. Elisa offers all of the basic features one would expect from a media center application, including support for video and audio playback as well as image slide shows.

Applications can ask the Linux kernel to report changes to selected files and directories. I created the Kernel Filesystem Monitoring Daemon (kfsmd) to make monitoring filesystem changes simple. There are packages available for both 32- and 64-bit Fedora 7 and 8 and Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy, as well as 32-bit packages for openSUSE 10.3. You can also download a repo file, which can be used with Fedora 8 and yum. Placing the repo file into /etc/yum.repos.d allows you to install kfsmd and its dependencies with yum install kfsmd on a Fedora 8 machine. You can also compile directly from source if that is your preference.

According to a press release issued earlier this month by Finjan, a security research firm, compromised Web servers are infecting thousands of visitors daily with malware that turns their Windows machines into unwitting bots to do the bidding of an as yet unidentified criminal organization. Security firms ScanSafe and SecureWorks have since added their own takes on the situation, though with varying estimates on the number of sites affected. All reports thus far say the compromised servers are running Linux and Apache.

The Nemo project is a new, experimental file management tool for Linux that provides a unique calendar interface and leverages indexing systems like Beagle and Tracker. Documents, PDFs, images, videos, and compressed archives are displayed as items in a calendar based on the dates that the files were last modified. The calendar view can be customized to show a day, week, month, or year.

Litrix Linux is a distribution developed in Brazil and based on Gentoo Linux. As with Gentoo, users are left to do some of their own configuration, but with good hardware detection and the Litrix Central configuration tool, building your own personalized Linux system is a little easier than you might expect.

Hewlett-Packard is taking a giant leap into the field of open source governance -- the managing of free software within corporate systems -- with three announcements today. FOSSology, an open source project for the development of governance and FOSSBazaar, a Web site to focus discussion about governance, are being development with open source corporate partners, while the Open Source Health Check is the name for HP's own collection of governance consulting services.

Last week, we began a multi-part series looking at the soon-to-be ten years of LWN. At the end of that episode, we were coming to the realization that the training business was, perhaps, not going to perform quite as well as our spreadsheets had suggested it might. It turns out that spreadsheets created with free software can be just as deceptive as those done with proprietary programs - who would have ever guessed? So we decided to look into whether it might be possible to make some sort of deal with some other company - preferably one with some money - to keep the show going.

I have been asked to review the XO computers from the One Laptop Per Child project. This is the first in a series of blog posts about my experiences, as well as those of some children with whom I will be working. I could easily gush over it or complain about how small the keyboard is in a single article, but I think the XO requires a more in-depth review than that. So I hope you'll join me as I explore these interesting tools aimed at children.