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So, Mr. Small- and Medium-Businessman, what's holding you up? Don't you need to run a Web site, be able to transfer files around your office, or automate some processes so they run 24/7? Wouldn't you like to put the worry of a virus wiping out your valuable data out of your mind? Have you ever thought about how nice it would be to buy one DVD and be able to load it on all the machines in your company?

So, the shape of the Great Battle begins to emerge. As reported by Fortune magazine, Microsoft's general counsel, Brad Smith, reckons free software infringes on no less than 235 of the company's patents...

"Continuing to spread FUD, with or without the ability to make deals which "validate" it, is the slowest path towards the revolution, but also the one which simply wont do any good for MS either. Its importance will continue fading away while Free Software continues to grow. Microsoft is really out of what they may consider good options here. "

It has been a wild day for friends of FOSS. This past weekend was the opening of qualifications for this year's Indianapolis 500 race; a venue where Linux can introduce itself to much of the world. 22 cars are now qualified, and 11 spots remain open in the field. Today also marks the beginning of active warfare on the Open Source community by none other than Microsoft.

Although I'm still satisfied with my place in the Microsoft development universe, some developers desperately want off the Microsoft treadmill. Mike Gunderloy is a notable example:

The thought of Microsoft suing Sun Microsystems for infringing patents it holds for Microsoft Office seems ludicrous. However, according to a leading open source expert that's what Microsoft will have to do if it is serious about trying to uphold its claim that OpenOffice.org infringes 45 of the patents it holds.

eBay is a great way to acquire hard-to-find collectibles. Trouble is, the best deals are often found in auctions that end in the middle of the night. When that happens, the Biet-O-Zilla (BOZ) extension for Firefox can help you, by tracking auctions and scheduling bids in advance.

Norway has become the latest European country to move closer to mandatory government use of ODF (and PDF). According to a press release provided in translation to me by an authoritative source, Norway now joins Belgium, Finland, and France (among other nations) in moving towards a final decision to require such use.

With the amount of coverage and dissemination this project received, not one of us thought for a moment it would be ignored by people that profess to be the eyes and ears of the Linux Community. Now that we have an accurate idea of how many people have published it to them and it has still been rejected, tells us what we already assumed. The question as to why they haven't covered this has been asked repeatedly on the various sites and blogs in the past two weeks. Finally, someone came forward with some information about it...it's not good.

A week in sunny Spain and the Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded team have opened the way for developers to join the new mobile Linux project.

Many years ago, Bill Gates had a vision: a PC in every home. Understandably, this was his vision in part because of his business was heavily vested in this vision for the future. Why? Because he fully believed this would be happening in part through users running his OS, and hopefully, copies of his other software products. Flash forward to today, by and large, his dream has come true.

As part of its sustained campaign to dominate the emerging world of on-demand applications, salesforce.com has announced a version of the Skype Internet-based telephone software to work with its Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) package.

After getting home from Linuxfest Northwest, I found that I had a lot of decompressing to do. After all, it was Sunday, and Monday was just around the corner. But I must admit that if there is one thing that will keep bringing me back year after year, it has to be the wealth of education that is put at our disposal by those who present each year.

Switching off your computer at the end of day saves about 75 percent of the electricity it uses which could reduce the amount of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere by more than 500kg.

[This advice is obviously for people and businesses that do not have mission critical software running and I am not sold on his statistics either. - Scott]

This article describes how you can back up MySQL databases without interrupting the MySQL service. Normally, when you want to create a MySQL backup, you either have to stop MySQL or issue a read lock on your MySQL tables in order to get a correct backup; if you do not do it this way, you can end up with an inconsistent backup. To get consistent backups without interrupting MySQL, I use a little trick: I replicate my MySQL database to a second MySQL server, and on the second MySQL server I use a cron job that creates regular backups of the replicated database.

As you may remember from our first piece from Linuxfest Northwest , the presenters are not just talking heads that are paid to come and speak. These are individuals that truly believe in what they are sharing with the attendees, and more often than not, visitors to the convention will come away smarter from the experience.

Need to add professional-looking graphs to your Web site? Using Plotr, you can do this in no time and with minimum fuss.

Interesting take on the 235 patent infringements argument, suggesting that Microsoft is running scared of open source and spreading FUD in an attempt to bully people into paying some kind of Microsoft Tax.

Do you suffer from too many pages open on your browser? Do you compulsively open multiple links, just out of curiousity of what might be on the other side? If so, Cooliris Preview may just be the Firefox add-on for you.

Welcome to this year's 20th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! The intensive development period before the upcoming release of Fedora 7 has been marked by several release updates and further complimented by news from Red Hat Summit in San Diego last week. Will this be the most impressive Fedora release ever? Chances are that it will be indeed. In other news, the openSUSE community launches a software portal, Daniel Robbins comments on the latest Gentoo Linux, Patrick Volkerding drops Pidgin (formerly GAIM) after finding an anti-Slackware comment on the project's developer page, and several distributions, including openSUSE, SabayonLinux, sidux and Skolelinux, announce updated release schedules. In the feature story of the week, your DistroWatch editor describes what can happen when the most important piece of computer hardware suddenly decides to stop working. Happy reading!