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Information about HP clusters is hard to find. Not only is the market relatively small, but clusters are often home grown affairs that are off the radar screens of traditional market watchers. How then do we find out information on clusters?

In fall last year, Checkpoint announced its plans to take over Sourcefire, which sells Marti Roesch’s famous Snort intrusion detection & prevention system, for a sum of about 225 Million US-Dollars. Now, two weeks ago, after an investigation through the US government, the offer was withdrawn and the deal was cancelled.

The home affairs department has taken the government’s commitment to open source software to heart, with plans to install the Linux operating system at its 635 foreign missions, border posts and local offices.

The popular community Linux distribution positions itself for enterprise use with a new certification program. (Linux-Watch)

A recent interview has DBAs talking about the merits of the open source PostgreSQL database management system (DBMS) as compared to Oracle – and their opinions truly run the gamut. In that interview, Robert Treat and Jason Gilmore, co-authors of "Beginning PHP and PostgreSQL 8: From Novice to Professional," said that PostgreSQL 8.0 is much more than just a back end for Web sites. In many situations, the authors say, PostgreSQL can be used instead of or as a complement to Oracle and other DBMSs.

All around the world, a growing number of companies are finding more uses of open source software in their businesses. What began as edge of network and infrastructure applications has spread throughout the middleware stack and today includes business applications as well. Customers have many reasons for switching from proprietary products to open source products and not the least of those reasons is to save money.

Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) servers such as Courier-IMAP and Cyrus IMAP may work well, but they’re complicated to install and configure. I'll show you how to set up your mail server quickly and securely using Dovecot, an open source IMAP and Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3) server for Unix-like operating systems.

Independent of any apprehensions, there is comment that I really found important: "HP is providing customers with single source accountability for integrated stacks." The key word here is "accountability". A frequent argument against open source is that there is no one to "blame" if something goes wrong, so this is a good start.

One of the benefits of the Open Source software phenomenon that has not been given a great deal of attention is how much power it puts in the hands of the software developers at the coalface.

Winners of the first-ever SourceForge Community Choice Awards were announced in the Slashdot Lounge at LinuxWorld Expo yesterday. Robin Miller was on hand for the event and said, "The award ceremony was a wild scene, with SourceForge.net workers and OSTG marketing people throwing T-shirts and kazoos into a standing-room-only crowd." SourceForge.net, like NewsForge, is a part of OSTG.

In a keynote at the LinuxWorld conference in Boston, Bill Hilf, Microsoft's general manager for platform strategy, said that the site is aimed at improving the dialogue between Microsoft and open source developers. "One of the most interesting things about open source is the feedback loop," Hilf told delegates.

New Life Sciences Application Suite and Red Hat Enterprise Edition Support Enable More Organizations to Increase Productivity, Reduce Costs With Clusters

Open source startups are changing the rules of the traditional enterprise software market. At least that's what a panel made up of MySQL, JBoss, SugarCRM and XenSource heads and moderated by VA Software chairman Larry Augustin was happy to proclaim loudly and clearly.

Venture capitalist and MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte, the man behind the $100 laptop, thinks Linux is bloated and needs to slim down. He has “criticized the software industry, including those building Linux, for churning out bloatware that slows down even the fastest PCs.” He thinks Linux is not a viable option to choose when selecting an operating system for his $100 laptop to run on.

Bill Hilf, Microsoft's director for platform technology strategy, plans to cover the licensing of virtualization file formats in his keynote speech.

Tectonic has learnt that the South African Revenue Service tender that could see 14 000 Windows machines migrated to Linux has been frozen until SARS wraps up its financial year-end.

Software licences are an outdated way to force users to pay for the marketing and sales costs of the code, according to members of a panel on open source enterprise software at the LinuxWorld conference in Boston. "We may get to the licence becoming an historical footnote of how software business was done," said Marc Fleury, founder and chief executive at JBoss, which makes open source application servers.

News Analysis: Quiet but key moves in the desktop, database and virtualization fields suggest that LinuxWorld has become, first and foremost, a business trade show.

The LPI and Canonical have teamed up to offer certification for the Ubuntu Linux distribution, with examinations scheduled to launch in Johannesburg during LinuxWorld on 16 to 19 May.

In a mobile phone market "plagued" by an abundance of legacy operating systems, PalmSource hopes that its Access Linux Platform (ALP) will become a leading alternative to Symbian and Microsoft's Windows Mobile. "What Linux has done on the PC and server can also happen on the phone and handheld," Didier Diaz, vice president of marketing at PalmSource, said during a presentation at LinuxWorld in Boston.