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Leave it to Bill Gates. There’s a reason he’s the richest man in the world. The software isn’t great, but it’s good enough to do the job. Unfortunately, the “job” isn’t just personal productivity, it’s technology lock-in. It’s all about creating a new generation of computer users who are hooked on Windows and programs that run under the proprietary operating system.

Hugh MacLeod is at it again. He asks the question, if open source is so great, where are all the open source billionaires (as if that is the right way to gauge the success of the software)? Never mind that we could ask the same question of proprietary software: "Where are all the proprietary billionaires?" There just aren't that many.

California remains the fertile crescent of the US technology industry, employing more tech workers and paying higher wages than any other state.

Red Hat has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the business of MetaMatrix, a provider of data management and integration software. Once the transaction is completed, in approximately 60 days, MetaMatrix will be integrated into Red Hat's JBoss division

Oracle's venture into the Linux market was called "a bit disingenuous" by a Red Hat executive speaking at the MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, Calif. on Tuesday. The executive, Michael Evans, Red Hat vice president of corporate development, speculated that Oracle wants to contain open source.

As Red Hat's modifications to the Linux kernel to improve real-time scheduling near completion, their director of emerging technologies, Tim Burke, has been pushing for its use in the business world. This is a prime example of the beauty of open source and the GPL, and the growing fallacy of closed-source.

Speaking to consumer PC mag PC Pro, security guru Eugene Kaspersky said that the lukewarm reception of Vista will result in defections to Mac OS and Linux, thus making them more attractive targets for malware writers.

[FUD of the week candidate? They've been saying this for years and it hasn't happened yet. — Sander]

"My trip to Hamburg was the occasion to visit the Sun's OpenOffice.org team, that is, the original team behind OpenOffice.org and StarOffice. I had a great time there, and the Hamburg team was a very pleasant company. I found out that OpenOffice.org and Sun in general are in a much better shape than they were just 8 months ago."

Xandros today announced that Xandros Server 2.0 is the first product to be certified by the Linux Foundation through use of the LSB Distribution Testkit (LSB DTK). Xandros engineers worked closely with their Linux Foundation counterparts in perfecting the new, automated testing procedures that will facilitate broad application developer support to Xandros Server 2.0 and all other standards-based Linux operating systems.

OpenBusiness took the opportunity at MiniBar to interview Mark Shuttleworth and he took us on a space ride through the Ubuntu galaxy Open Source land. Mark told us about Ubuntu’s unique business model - being absolutely free to use - but making a revenue in the surrounding ecology. Listen to our first TechTalk.

RedHat has rejigged its JBoss offerings in a move it reckons will make it the default choice for businesses that have had enough of the proprietary world. It has also signed a deal to acquire MetaMatrix, which it will integrate into its new JBoss product set.

Rawstudio is an open source, GTK+-based RAW photo converter. It takes a straightforward approach -- no outside-the-box interface designs, no fancy frills. The result is an easy-to-use application that is stable enough for everyday usage, even though it is still undergoing constant development.

Linux is pretty good at harnessing processor speed, and Chastain Motorsports is hoping to snare some of that effect to propel their Panoz/Honda to victory. The distinctive Penguin logo, "Tux," has been affixed to the nose of the 200+ MPH car in anticipation of meeting a donation goal.

The opening keynote talk at the 2007 Embedded Linux Conference was given by Thomas Gleixner. Thomas has been a significant contributor to the kernel for some time; most recently, he is the force behind much of the high-resolution timer work which has been merged for 2.6.21. His experience with the embedded Linux industry has prompted him to put together a talk on how that industry works (or doesn't) with the development community. When things go badly, he says, the result is a true nightmare.

BackTrack is a live CD Linux distribution that focuses on penetration testing. A merger of two older security-related distros -- Whax and Auditor Security Collection -- BackTrack bundles more than 300 security tools.

Daphne Chung, research manager for infrastructure and middleware software at IDC Asia-Pacific, noted that as much as 83 percent of the US$15 billion Asia-Pacific enterprise software market is now exposed to open-source software. This includes areas such as enterprise resource management applications, customer relationship management and operating systems.

This tutorial describes how to rescue data from a single hard disk that was part of a LVM2 RAID1 setup. Why is it so problematic to recover the data? Every single hard disk that formerly was a part of a LVM RAID1 setup contains all data that was stored in the RAID, but the hard disk cannot simply be mounted. First, a RAID setup must be configured for the partition(s) and then LVM must be set up to use this (these) RAID partition(s) before you will be able to mount it. I will use the Knoppix Linux LiveCD to do the data recovery.

Jailing is a mechanism to virtually change a system's root directory. By employing this method, administrators can isolate services so that they cannot access the real filesystem structure. You should run unsecured and sensitive network services in a chroot jail, because if a hacker can break into a vulnerable service he could exploit your whole system. If a service is jailed, the intruder will be able to see only what you want him to see -- that is, nothing useful. Some of the most frequent targets of attack, which therefore should be jailed, are BIND, Apache, FTP, and SSH. SSHjail is a patch for the OpenSSH daemon. It modifies two OpenSSH files (session.c and version.h) and allows you to jail your SSH service without any need for SSH reconfiguration.

Learning Javascript by Shelley Powers is a good introduction to the revived world of Javascript which underpins much of Web 2.0.

An open-source engineering project is currently under development in Canada. The project aims to create a new power plant design that will use a combination of solar and geothermal energy for use in more distant locations without polluting the environment. Comprehensive coverage appears here for the first time.