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Today Oracle announced that it would provide the same enterprise class support for Linux as it provides for its database, middleware and applications products. Oracle starts with Red Hat Linux, removes Red Hat trademarks, and then adds Linux bug fixes.

Disguised price rise for PC builders, Microsoft is effectively smuggling through a price hike for Windows Vista - by making the entry-level version so poor that no-one will want to use it.

Demonstrating a perhaps more aggressive path than anticipated, Sun Microsystems is set to announce the open-sourcing of the core Java platform within 30 to 60 days, Sun President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz said at the Oracle OpenWorld conference on Wednesday morning.

Officially Firefox 3.0 but code named "Gran Paradiso," the application will pick up where Firefox 2.0 leaves off, said Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's director of engineering. Among the features Mozilla wants to get into 3.0 is "Places," the revamped bookmarks tool which was dropped from Firefox 2.0 in April.

Steve Longoria, IBM vice president of Semiconductor Platforms, discusses the collaboration among IBM, Chartered, and Samsung in the open Common Platform technology initiative, and how the move is shaking up the industry's traditional closed model.

VARBusiness Magazine has named Nat Friedman, Novell's chief technology and strategy officer for open source, as its first ever Technologist of the Year. Friedman was honored for innovation in Novell's most recent desktop Linux offering, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10.

Rob Reilly files his review of Firefox 2.0: "The two big things I liked in the edition include enhancements to tabbed browsing and an embedded spell checker. Version 2.0 also has an updated add-on manager that consolidates the add-on extension and theme functions..."

Kubuntu 6.10, codenamed Edgy Eft, is hot on the download mirrors, this release is based on the brand new KDE 3.5.5. For all your photo needs the award winning Digikam is now installed by default and renowned artwork by the beloved Oxygen artist Ken Wimer shines all over. On top of this Kubuntu makes the perfect platform for KDE 4 development and porting KDE 3 applications with all the KDE 4 development libraries available along with Qt 4.2.

French storage drive vendor LaCie is distributing a pair of Linux applications that enable CD/DVD drives equipped with HP's "LightScribe" technology to burn CD labels. Support for LightScribe technology was previously available only on Windows and Mac, according to the company.

IAXed you first

First let's look at something that's a little easier: using IAX trunks. IAX is a more NAT-friendly protocol because it only needs a single port. If you set up IAX trunks between servers, then your SIP traffic will waltz happily through your IAX trunk to your SIP endpoints

The Ubuntu team is proud to announce the release of Ubuntu 6.10, codenamed "Edgy Eft". This release includes both installable Desktop CDs and alternate text-mode installation CDs for several architectures.

A battle over Open Document Format (ODF) and the treatment of open standards is taking place deep in the bureaucracy of the European Commission. The information came to light during aKademy, the KDE world summit, in Dublin last month.

The image of YouTube as a revolutionary alternative to corporate media culture has just been blurred a bit. Here IBM is trying to leverage the YouTube channel with a very well done video about its alphaWorks tech download site and its 10 year anniversary.

The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), sponsor of Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, has announced that the Network File System v4 (NFSv4) for Linux is available in SUSE Enterprise Linux from Novell.

Hasso Plattner, the billionaire cofounder of business software maker SAP, has teamed with IBM and Deutsche Telekom to host a forum aimed at giving open-source software entrepreneurs an opportunity to present their business ideas to venture capitalists and other IT experts.

After a long and ambivalent discussion during the last weeks the project "Dunc Tank" (short DT from now on) has recently started. We consider that to be a major change to the Debian project culture: For the first time Debian Developers are paid for their work on Debian by a institution so near to the project itself.

With this mail we would like to summarize our thoughts about the DT project and the idea behind it. We also want to raise some questions we still consider unanswered and open.

Yesterday Oracle announced its move into the enterprise Linux market, revealing how it may challenge Red Hat. Linux Format got hold of the 'Unbreakable' distro to find out what's going on under the hood. Is it a breakthrough for Linux in the corporate market, or just another RHEL respin? See the article for all the info.

Oracle's announcement yesterday of its "Unbreakable Linux 2.0" program, aimed squarely at Red Hat, understandably overshadowed another announcement Larry Ellison made in the same speech. That announcement revealed that Oracle has joined the Free Standards Group (FSG), at the highest level of membership. despite being active in Linux for many years, Oracle had not previously been a member of the FSG at any level.

Writing software is a complex business - not only do you have to get the enterprise logic of the application correct, typically you also have to deal with multiple other concerns at the same time, such as "what should happen if something goes wrong", "how should I make sure we know what is happening during execution", "how to enforce security throughout my application" and in some languages "how do I handle memory" or "when should I free up memory", etc.

Here is another reader comment that I think is superior to the story:

"it is pretty deep PR for Red Hat, too: Oracle is not only using their base system, instead of developing their own, they're calling it 'Unbreakable Linux.' Oracle is calling RHEL unbreakable; they aren't developing it themselves (when they have the people that could do that!); man, that is pretty deep PR for Red Hat, even if the business perspective isn't rosy. They didn't pick Ubuntu; they didn't pick SuSE: they picked Red Hat."