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Conventional wisdom says that powerful individuals drive open source by working against the grain to institute a methodology of sharing that would balance the power between software vendors and users.

While this makes for an entertaining narrative, there is quantitative evidence to the contrary. The reality is that placing too much emphasis on individual players in the open source movement ignores overarching economic trends that drove open source development and adoption.

The Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, controlled by ground systems that were among NASA's heaviest use of open source to date when launched in 2003, are still working on the Red Planet, long after their mission was slated to end.

For some solution providers, providing customers with solutions based on open-source software is becoming not only an option to consider when doing development projects, but a primary focus. Cignex Technologies, a solution provider and consulting firm in Santa Clara, Calif., has seen open-source technology projects become a major part of its business since the company opened its doors five years ago.

The movement towards open-source software and standards in South Africa has received another boost from a government project, with the eThekwini (Durban) municipality basing its intranet and internet portal, Durban.gov.za, entirely on open-source tools.

[Ed: From, the "You're Not Kidding This Time, Right?" department we get:]

(BNamericas.com Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)Mexico and Latin America ought to opt for open source software as a means of closing the digital divide, Mexican daily Reforma quoted Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW) president and COO Jonathan Schwartz as saying during a recent visit to Mexico.

According to Schwartz, the principal benefit of open source is being able to avoid paying license fees because the software is developed by a community of manufacturers worldwide.

Co-ordinator of the Free Software and Open Source Software Foundation for Africa, Bildad Kagai, is preparing to hand over the reigns of the regional association to the Meraka Institute at Idlelo2. Lunga Madlala caught up with him.

p2p news / p2pnet: Sam Nurmi, founder of Sweden's largest Swedish web hosting operator, Loopia, says he'd like to help Mozilla's Firefox compete with the likes of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. So he's set up a site tagged HelpFirefox.com. The idea is to sell one million pixels on the page for a dollar each and give the money to the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, which develops Firefox, says The Local.

Opinion: When comparing Windows and Linux patching, there's a clear winner, and it's not Microsoft.(Linux-Watch)

World-renowned IT visionaries Cory Doctorow, noted author and fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Eben Moglen, chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center, will give keynote addresses at the second annual Red Hat Summit in Nashville, Tenn.

The Summit will be held May 30-June 2, 2006 at the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center in Nashville. The event will feature a number of well-known industry speakers, hands-on technical workshops, a technology lab, roundtable discussions, and product demonstrations. It also will feature sessions on key open source issues and technologies -- including security, virtualization, and storage, organizers said.

Commercial Linux distributor Novell has put out its Service Pack 3 for its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 implementation of the Linux 2.6 operating system. The update includes all of the security fixes and patches for SLES 9 since SP2 shipped in August 2004.

Stepping up the community's efforts to get OEMs to offer real options when it comes to the software we get with our computers.

Alien Drive Systems states - The AlienDrive System is a Live CD based on the SLAX Operating System. AlienDrive Live CD 1 is now available to download. LinShots has taken Alien Drive on a quick tour. Be sure to check it out.

Neuros Audio will reportedly shift two product to Linux, and launch a third based on open source software. Existing Neuros products being transitioned to Linux include a portable media player (PMP) and a media recorder, while the new product will be a music server, according to an article at The Register Previously, Neuros announced plans to switch its 442 to Linux. The 442 (pictured above), a PMP with a 40GB or 100GB harddrive, is the product Neuros is best known for.

TheLinuxWhine.com is a newly created website dedicated to bringing the Linux community into a forum to gather and discuss ideas about Linux software improvements.

IBM has announced its 13th successive year as patents king while cheering a community and government backed program to "improve" the quality of US patents.

You can create and compile a KDE/Qt project from an IDE like KDevelop or you can do it the old fashioned way via the command line. Here is how...

If you are a security developer and need to interface a Java application with the local operating system user registry, what do you do? This article gives you the answer: UNIX/Linux PAM-compatible systems that use authentication based on the GNU MD5 extensions to the crypt() system call. A pure Java implementation of MD5 crypt can provide a simple interface that can be used by Web applications to authenticate against the local UNIX registry.

The Free Standards Group (FSG), a nonprofit organization dedicated to developing and promoting open source software standards, has announced the opening of a Linux certification lab in the People's Republic of China. The lab will certify Linux distributions and applications to the Linux Standard Base (LSB) and will be maintained by the FSG and the China Electronics Standardization Institute (CESI)

Ubuntu Linux founder Mark Shuttleworth will give the annual report on his hot, Debian-based distro at the 2006 Debian Developers Conference (DebConf), set for May 14 through 22 in Oaxtepec, Mexico.

Businesses, educational institutions, governmental agencies and other organizations around the world are converting1 their computer operating systems from Microsoft Windows to Linux at an increasing pace. They are likewise converting their application programs from commercial software to free software (also referred to as open source software). There are at least 25 reasons for this situation, including: