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Former Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony has shown all the loyalty of a free agent athlete. Just a few months after resigning from Linspire, Carmony has traded in his old company's Linux operating system for Ubuntu.

The concept of a Electronic Medical Record (EMR) 'source code escrow' had to be dreamed up by proprietary EMR marketing departments. Source code escrows give a false sense of security and confuse buyers from getting the real thing: Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) licensed EMR software. Source code escrows sound good on the surface but even a cursory examination reveals many practical flaws. A source code escrow is defined by Wikipedia as a:"...deposit of the source code of the software into an account held by a third party escrow agent. Escrow is typically requested by a party licensing software (the licensee), to ensure maintenance of the software. The software source code is released to the licensee if the licensor files for bankruptcy or otherwise fails to maintain and update the software as promised in the software license agreement."

I've been pacing the chumby maternity ward for nearly a year, waiting for this unique wireless device to see the light of day. I recently took delivery of my own little bundle of chumby joy and, at first look, I think it will make a great addition to my growing gadget family.

For those who are tired of cleaning out an inbox full of junk, Roaring Penguin's latest anti-spam software has been released. Although it isn't open source, as the Penguin-based company name might suggest, there is a version for small enterprises which can be used free of charge.

Ubuntu 7.10 arrives Oct. 18, and not long after that Dell will start shipping that version of the Ubuntu Linux desktop on its laptops and desktops. "We will offer Ubuntu 7.10 preinstalled on our systems soon," said Anne Camden of Dell corporate communications, in an e-mail interview. "For customers who are interested in updating their existing Ubuntu systems, we advise them to visit the Ubuntu 7.10 page on our wiki, which will go live [Oct. 18] after the official launch."

Former Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony was pretty gung-ho about the company's upcoming release back in June. He said it would "fill some key holes in our current offering." Unfortunately Linspire 6, released last week, lacks the refinements you'd expect in a distro you pay $50 to download. It drops some key distinguishing features, and in return gains only some Microsoft technology as spelled out in the Microsoft patent covenants Linspire agreed to. This release seems to be about deferring to Microsoft.

Linus Torvalds, head of development for Linux, comments on the operating system, its rival Windows, what motivates software developers and the occasional messiness of free choice.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, will announce its third annual desktop Linux survey on Oct. 17. This survey is not designed to measure how popular the Linux desktop is or how popular one desktop distribution is over another, although it will also measure some of that kind of information. What the survey is really designed to do is to pinpoint areas of user need in order to focus development efforts and accelerate the global adoption of Linux desktops and clients.

Linux vendor Novell is heading off after the small business sector now with its latest release, the Novell Open Workgroup Suite Small Business Edition (say that in one breath). The suite is a desktop-to-server setup that the company says is tailored to meet the needs of small businesses.

Theoretically, search engines should find all the best Web sites and rank them at the top of their search results. Unfortunately, due to the gap between artificial and human intelligence, this doesn't always happen. Users have the ability to alter the rankings by doing search engine optimization (SEO) -- a two-edged sword that can either be beneficial or harmful, depending on whose hands it's in. You can improve your site's search-engine rankings by using free or open source software (FOSS) tools for SEO.

One of the biggest gripes the FOSS community has with respect to Microsoft's business tactics is that its longstanding exclusionary agreements with hardware vendors has stifled genuine competition. This is the very issue of one of two claims Novell will be allowed to press against Microsoft in their anti-trust lawsuit.

Wine-Review has posted a article about running phpDesigner 2007 Professional 5.5.2 on Linux with Wine.

In a surprising announcement, which will no doubt stir up the open source community, the Open Source Initiative said that it had approved two of Microsoft's licences as being fit for open source software.

In this guest column, technology marketing consultant Kim Brebach, who last month published an essay titled "13 Reasons why Linux won't make it to a desktop near you," discovers why desktop Linux has thrived despite what he terms its "troubled childhood."

Openads, formerly known as phpAdsNew, is one of the more successful open source development projects. Its online advertising software is used by many thousands of domain owners who want to make a profit on their Web content by selling advertisements. Scott Switzer, the project leader, recently went commercial with the project, securing $5 million in venture capital and a new CEO straight from Skype. The key to the company's success? "I have really seen the value in what a community can give to a software project," he says.

I never read the manual. That can be a detriment in Slackware, baffling at the command line, soul-killing in FreeBSD (OK, that's just my experience) and ... just slightly irritating in Ubuntu. I have saved network settings for home (dynamic IP) and the office (static IP) -- a feature that didn't work at all in Xubuntu but is operational in Ubuntu 7.04 -- but I was baffled as to why, when changing from one of the saved settings to the other, the change would not go into effect unless I rebooted.

The KDE community today released KDE 3.5.8. While the developers' main focus lies on finishing KDE 4.0, the stable 3.5 series remains the desktop of choice for the time being. It is proven, stable and well supported. The 3.5.8 release with its literally hundreds of bugfixes has again improved the users' experience.

Welcome to a new blog here atLinuxJournal.com,"Linux Products Insider". I'm James Gray, Products Editor atLinux Journal. After the spam has been deencrusted and hucksters repelled, I'll use this space to update you on the latest and greatest products and services that I find using my secret channels. This week, I had the chance to take part in a press conference with Mark Shuttleworth, Founder of Ubuntu. Read on to learn why Shuttleworth's is so fired up about the new Ubuntu 7.10"Gutsy Gibbon" (available this week), as well as why he thinks Ubuntu is so darned successful.

One of my favourite tools (that I use almost everyday) is PuTTY. I use it both on Windows (very useful because Windows has no SSH client) and on Linux. It is a program that enables SSH connections using a graphical interface. It also allows for the establishment of SSH tunnels as well as omitting some of the restrictions to Internet access.

uShare is an UPnP (TM) A/V & DLNA Media Server. It implements the server component that provides UPnP media devices with information on available multimedia files. uShare uses the built-in http server of libupnp to stream the files to clients. We discovered uShare as an way of connecting Microsoft's XBox360 to a Linux PC.