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What has caused the effective price of virtualization to head toward zero -- and how? In contrast to many who seem to feel that open source and proprietary software operate in two parallel but separate universes — that open source is used by people who can’t afford ‘real’ software, while proprietary commercial software is for organizations that need reliability, scalability, and all the other ‘abilities’ — I believe that open source is already challenging the proprietary software world.

Now that others have built a translator for ODF/Open XML interoperability after the Commonwealth of Massachusetts put out a call for one, Microsoft announces it would like to sponsor an "Open Source" project to build one of its own. What need is this filling? I'd say Microsoft's need to stay in the game. Can there be any other reason to duplicate work that has already been done?

No; WiMAX is not dead. For those of you who don’t know: it’s the new IEEE-802.16 standard, and now Intel, Motorola, and others are investing really big money into it.

The company is setting up an open-source project to create a series of tools that translate between the OpenXML and OpenDocument formats.

Since a contractor used an FBI agent's password and ancient off-the-web utilities to repeatedly crack the Bureau's network, people are starting to ask questions. Problem is, they're the wrong questions. After blowing $581 million on its failed Trilogy IT boondoggle, the FBI re-badged it, then re-sold it to Congress for another $500 million. Unfortunately, the Inspector General's report shows that the "lack of people who know what they're doing" persists. Does J. Edgar Hoover's old team have the minimal competence required to protect itself in the Internet age?

Ron Gilbert can’t find any support for his new game project. Who’s to blame? Well, Gilbert cites unimaginative publishers who are too short-sighted to appreciate his concept. Perhaps it’s time that Gilbert considered the alternative to proprietary game development. Perhaps it’s time we offered him this alternative.

Solaris and PostgreSQL love in

An integrated suite of open source middleware stacks featuring Solaris and PostgreSQL, potentially offered to developers as a service, are on Sun Microsystems' radar.

Wow - now even high profiled, long term MAC users get it: read all about it here. I guess that’s what’s happening if you (as a company; in this case Apple) give up too much of your own profile and switch to using what everyone else builds in as well.

Start-up Trinity Audio Group (TAG) is using Linux and open source audio applications in a small, portable, inexpensive digital audio workstation (DAW) claimed capable of professional-quality recording and mixing. The Trinity DAW is based on an Intel PXA270 processor, and targets field recordists, podcasters, and producers.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds announced the first release candidate for the upcoming 2.6.18 kernel, "the merge window for 2.6.18 is closed, and -rc1 is out there". He noted that the changes are extensive, "the changes are too big for the mailing list, even just the shortlog. As usual, lots of stuff happened. Most architectures got updated, ACPI updates, networking, SCSI and sound, IDE, infiniband, input, DVB etc etc etc." Find the shortloghere. Linus went on described additional changes:

"There's also a fair amount of basic infrastructure updates here, with things like the generic IRQ layer, the lockdep (oh, and priority-inheritance mutex support) stuff by Ingo&co, some generic timekeeping infrastructure ('clocksource') stuff, memory hotplug (and page migration) support, etc etc."

Like all pieces of electronic equipment, computers have a tendency to malfunction and break; if you have never experienced kernel core dumps or unexpected crashes, consider yourself lucky. Many common hardware problems are caused by bad RAM modules, overheated or broken CPUs, or bad sectors or clusters on hard disks. In this article we will introduce you to some open source tools you can use to trace these problems, and thus save time, money, and headaches.

Recently, Qlusters announced some of the progress it is making with openQRM, its open source systems management solution for virtual environments and data center automation. Since the product was launched in January, Qlusters has seen more than 17,000 downloads, and the number of active contributors to the project has doubled. It has also garnered some recognition in the form of achieving finalist level in three categories of SourceForge's first annual community Choice Awards, and was named "One to Watch" in a recent review of open source systems management solutions by Computer Business Review. In May Qlusters co-founded the Open Management Consortium, which seeks to establish conventions and standards to enable open source integration and interoperability. Qlusters launched this group along with five other companies, and there are now more than twenty members. The cofounders include Ayamon, Emu Software, Symbiot, Webmin, and Zenoss.

It is no secret that Novell has been losing legacy Netware customers. It is also no secret that incoming CEO Ron Hovsepian has been directed by the board to turn things around quickly – some say within six months. The question is whether putting a super salesman like Hovsepian in charge of the show is the answer or does the problem lay with Novell’s overall business strategy.

Network Appliance recently introduced an operating system to power its storage for high-performance Linux computing clusters in large-scale computational systems.

Mike Rudolph To Lead The SourceForge.net Marketplace Effort

Forging ahead with the same business model for more than 12 years might seem old hat to some in the constantly changing world of information technology, but business customers say Red Hat wears it well.

The issue of open source languages and the availability of development tools is a thought process I was having the other day. One of the key tools in the GNU space is the GNU C compiler. Up until its availability on Unix (long before the Linux kernel came on the scene), developing on Unix was limited to whatever tools were made available by the Unix vendor.

India, once seen as fertile ground for open-source software, has yet to embrace the development model in the way many hoped it would. As a developing country with an emerging pool of talented, industrious programmers, India was once seen as a natural fit for open-source software. But today, while the country has software developers by the thousand, only a fraction of them do work in the open-source area.

Ubuntu Linux (other Linux distro also able to save data on external USB hard disk or USB pen drive) has this nifty feature that allows saving both data and desktop settings.

'casper-cow' is a special label on an ext2/ext3 filesystem or partition. You need to use e2label command to assign the label on USB pen or hard disk drive. If this label found Ubuntu Linux will use the USB device to store desktop information as well as your data/applications. The idea is very simply, "you should be able to carry your desktop anywhere, anytime".

Programmers on Perl and other languages can take advantage of the latest stable release of the GTK+ toolkit to facilitate rapid application development.