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Phoenix Arizona-based open source company Unicon said today that it has hired a new open source expert to serve as its software architect. Unicon, which supports development of portals for colleges, universities, and other higher education institutions, said that John A. Lewis has joined the company to direct its open source efforts. Lewis is the lead developer of the Spring Portlet MVC, a JSR-168 compliant portlet APi for the open source Spring Framework project. Lewis was previously CTO at Arcanum Education Solutions and director of product development for Entrada Software.

I know that if I start listing reasons it is going to seem kind of shallow, but you need to understand where I am coming from. Maybe this way, when you meet someone new, you will be better prepared. And Just what does this have to do with Linux...? Trust me.

JANUARY 09, 2006 (COMPUTERWORLD) - Two software companies are beefing up their Web applications using Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) and contributing parts of their products to the open-source community to try to spur further Ajax development.

Before you start flaming, please understand that both I and the author of the news article are open source PROponents. We like open source. I've made a career of it.

But that doesn't mean open source is somehow infallible. Sometimes the comments here read like a devout Catholic thinking I've started a smear campaign against the immaculate conception. Keep in mind that it's just software and that it can always get better. Things get better as we find their bugs and improve them.

So, with that caveat....

Proponents of the open-sourced GNU/Linux operating system are quick to compare it favorably to Microsoft Windows, citing a series of advantages for their favorite OS. The first one to come up is invariably price, an area where Linux can always claim victory, as US$0 is a difficult target for any closed-source software company to beat. However, price alone is rarely a convincing argument for switching operating systems, so other benefits are quickly put forward.

Ziff Davis' CIO Insight Research Study named Red Hat the leader in vendor value and overall satisfaction according to US senior-level IT executives surveyed.

With Linux continuing its struggle to convince the world's businesses that it's a viable Windows alternative, ZDNet asks in a four page analysis if the pending release of Windows Vista could finally provide the boost it's been waiting for.

FC4.netdev.7 (kernel-2.6.14-1.1656_FC4.netdev.7) is now available.

A long-hyped version of the Solaris operating system for IBM's Power processor appears close at hand.

January 9, 2006 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- C3, the Corporate Channel and Computing Expo, announced on Monday that Red Hat (redhat.com) CEO and chairman Matthew J. Szulik will deliver the keynote address at its second annual exhibition and conference. The event will be held June 27 to 29, 2006 at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City.

"Most of you have probably heard of Ruby on Rails and may be wondering what exactly it does and how you can try it for yourself. Put simply, Rails is a web application framework that uses the model-view-controller software design pattern to allow for rapid development of web applications. This article will cover how to install Rails on Debian and how to configure it to work with Apache and a relational database of your choice."

First FIPS 140-2 compliant performance optimization software delivers expanded security for Government sector

Two vulnerabilities were identified in ADOdb, which could be exploited by remote attackers to execute arbitrary commands. The first issue is due to an input validation error in the "server.php" test script that does not properly validate the "sql" variable, which could be exploited by attackers to execute arbitrary SQL queries (when the MySQL password for the root user is empty). The second flaw is due to an input validation error in the "tests/tmssql.php" test script that does not properly validate the "do" parameter, which could be exploited by remote attackers to call arbitrary PHP functions.

Welcome to our issue number 28 of Fedora Weekly News.

Red Hat warned of a flaw late last week in mod_auth_pgsql, an Apache module that allows authentication against information in popular open-source database PostgreSQL.

For the second consecutive year, Red Hat Inc. ranks among senior level IT executives as the leader in vendor value and overall customer satisfaction, according to results of a study by trade publication CIO Insight.

The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) last week announced a value for money review of Microsoft's educational licensing programme, and a second looking at ways of improving home ICT access for school pupils.

Many people sympathetic to the free market are not at all sympathetic to open source. I used to be one of these people.

Newark, UK, January 9th, 2006
AVG UK, the official business partner of Grisoft, makers of the award-winning AVG Anti-Virus software, has introduced a new free version of its software specifically for the Linux desktop.

A while ago I moved the debianHELP site to another server and was faced with the prospect of building the box from scratch. To me, handling Apache or MySQL is no problem, but I loath setting up virtual email domains. Being of the lazy sort, I decided to examine free software hosting control panels and to install one on the box I was going to build.