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Debian announces the winner of the election...

The law of unintended (or maybe intended?) consequences applies in spades to open-source operating systems. Open source drives innovation and choice, but too much choice drives enterprises back into the arms of what they know best—namely Windows.

By now everyone has probably heard that Microsofts solution for computer malware is a complete wipe and reload of the operating system. Now, as extreme as it sounds, it isn't completely out of the realm of the reasonable. Of course, most people will argue that you can avoid the, seemingly, unending security problems and exploits that are famously associated with Windows by simply switching to another operating system. But, the solution may be a little more involved than either of those two choices.

Google's plan to provide free wireless Internet access in San Francisco is raising concerns among privacy advocates.

Hmmm... Google spying on people as usual, eh? I thought all search engines did that.

"At a company level, is any publicity good? Yes and no," said Marc Fleury, JBoss CEO. "We've been smart, shrewd, aggressive and in-your-face. We're growing in spite of the rest of the industry trying to kill us from Day 1. That bad boy image actually gave us a lot of traction in the beginning."

Simula was started by Winston Damarillo, founder of Gluecode, which he sold to IBM last year. Simula is working on helping put together a collection of ventures that build software based on a shared stack of open-source components.

"Red Hat has been supporting a free Linux distribution for over ten years, and Red Hat will *always* support a free Linux distribution," wrote Fedora project leader Max Spevack in a posting to the Fedora Project listserv last week. In the detailed posting he wet in to outline that Red Hat was "restructuring" the Project...and disbanding the Fedora Foundation.

Sometimes our vision is seen differently by others. Gee, you don't suppose it might be the name of the foundation, do you?

Sybase ASE was named 'Best Linux Database,' triumphing by a wide margin over offerings from MySQL, Oracle and Ingres/Computer Associates. SYS-CON, the parent publishing company for LinuxWorld Magazine, tallied votes from over 17,000 of its readers and announced the winners.

I'D LIKE to say a big thank you to all of those of you who wrote in with praise for my recent analysis of Apple’s Boot Camp and its prospects for changing the business computing landscape.

NVIDIA just released version 1.0-8756 of their Linux display drivers. Changes include: Adds support for GeForce 7300, GeForce 7400 Go, GeForce 7600 and GeForce 7900 GPUs.

Portable GIMP is the popular the GIMP image editor packaged as a portable application, so you can take your images with you and do your editing on the go.

There are many opinions as to why most virus writers write their code to affect Windows but for the most part seem to ignore Linux. Some think this represents an "apples and oranges" situation since each operating system kernel is dissimilar from one another. Now we see a "proof of concept" virus that can affect both Windows and Linux...

A database problem with a U.S. domain name registrar exposed sensitive financial and personal information relating to thousands of domain name registrations, a Dutch company said Friday.

Coverity, makers of a source code analysis solution, today announced preliminary findings showing that open source developers fixed a software defect every six minutes in the week following Coverity's analysis that established a baseline metric for software quality.

The upstart database company is developing its own transactional storage engine, which can effectively be used as a replacement for the Oracle-acquired technology, executives said.

"Despite what we are hearing, and considering the public track record of this administration, I simply do not believe their claims that the NSA's spying program is really limited to foreign communications or is otherwise consistent with the NSA's charter or with FISA," Klein's wrote. "And unlike the controversy over targeted wiretaps of individuals' phone calls, this potential spying appears to be applied wholesale to all sorts of internet communications of countless citizens."

Also at Wired: Wiretap Whistleblower's Statement

Klik is a fantastic system which allows users to install an application without worrying about dependencies and without being root. I was lucky enough to talk to its author.

We have open and shared formats for word processing, spreadsheets, vector graphics, audio and video, site subscription feeds, and all sorts of other computing activities -- but every damn blogging and content management system (CMS) package is an island unto itself. It's time for a shared format that lets users move content from one package to another.

In this eWEEK Labs TestRun podcast, Technical Analyst Michael Caton discusses open-source portal products with Labs Director Jim Rapoza. (Podcast #61)

atsec information security is proud to announce completion of its Common Criteria evaluation of Red Hat Linux 4 Update 2 at evaluation assurance level (EAL) 3 in just six months. The accomplishment adds to atsec's unparalleled reputation for timely completion of Linux evaluations; since December 1, 2004, atsec has initiated and completed five Linux evaluations at EAL3+ and EAL4+ for three different customers. The timely completion of evaluation projects is critical if sponsors are to reap maximum benefit from their investment. atsec's proven success in timely evaluation of Linux products is attributable to the extensive experience of its Linux product evaluators, its ongoing working partnerships with Linux product sponsors, and its excellent relationships with the Common Criteria certifying and validating bodies.