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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Jan. 31 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Major sales to new customers around the world and the introduction of breakthrough high- performance computing (HPC) solutions marked the second quarter of Fiscal Year 2006 for Silicon Graphics (OTC: SGID), the company announced today.

IBM hopes that its Aperi open source initiative will open up the storage market and banish proprietary technologies from the sector.

IBM is offering a free version of its database manager, DB2 Express-C, in a bid to lure software developers to work on it. IBM's offering comes fast on the heels of similar offerings by Microsoft and Oracle and joins MySQL and PostgreSQL as free databases that can be easily downloaded.

An interesting research paper by three Harvard scholars, reveals that the apparent weakness of the open-source organizational model - the constraints on close collaboration among programmers - may actually be a hidden strength.

The research implies that open source's advantage doesn't stem from the strength of the programmer community. It stems from the weakness of that community.

The rumor mill is active again concerning a Google Linux distribution. Whatever the case might be someone has posted screenshots of the alleged internal effort dubbed Goobuntu

See here and here

Firefox and Thunderbird may have the headlines, but the all-in-one Web browser/e-mail package lives on in the Mozilla Foundation's brand-new SeaMonkey.

Forget the Desktop! The new computer game is consumers and convergence. By the time Linux wins the hearts and minds of the PC desktop, everyone else will have forgotten that unfortunate analogy from the era when people worked in offices with desks and pushed paper

The Free Standards Group (FSG), a not-for-profit organization that develops and promotes open source software standards, today announced Debian founder Ian Murdock has been appointed its chief technology officer and elected chair of the Linux Standard Base workgroup. As founder of Debian -- one of the most successful open source projects in history -- and commercial custom Linux platform provider Progeny, Murdock brings unmatched experience building open source communities, driving technical consensus and solving Linux distribution challenges. His experience will immediately enhance the open standards initiatives of the Free Standards Group and the Linux Standard Base.

ZDNet UK spoke to Cox last week about a wide range of topics, including the next version of the GPL, software patents, the kernel development process and Linux on the desktop.

Computer science is the womanizer, and math is the pure-hearted girl he won't call the next day.

Linux on HPC clusters seems to be an obvious choice. It was not, however, a forgone conclusion that Linux would end up leading the supercomputing parade when Tom Sterling and Don Becker used it to build the first Beowulf cluster. Inquiring minds want to know "Why Linux on Clusters?"

Cox told ZDNet UK that he thinks many of the changes in GPL 3 are sound: "The majority of it looks very sensible, such as letting copyright information be displayed in an About box, rather than relying on command line instructions [as is the case in GPL 2]. Some of the more contentious stuff has sensibly been made optional," he said, in an interview with ZDNet UK.

KDE 3.5.1 was released today, featuring fixes to over 150 reported bugs and many other small improvements making this the most stable and feature-rich Unix desktop ever

If you're investigating Sun's StarOffice as a replacement for Microsoft Office, you'll need to address the conversion question. While StarOffice can read Microsoft Office documents pretty well, the two products' macro languages are incompatible. Sun's StarOffice Enterprise Tools aim to help. The Professional Analysis Wizard and the Macro Migration Wizard are bundled at no extra charge as part of an enterprise license of SO (though you can't download them from the Web). Whether they can help you depends on how many Microsoft Office documents, spreadsheets, and presentations you need to convert -- and don't expect miracles.

The KDE Project today announced the release of KOffice 1.5 beta 1, the first preview release for KOffice 1.5, scheduled for release this March.

Dutch TV programme Nieuwslicht (Newslight) is claiming that the security of the Dutch biometric passport has already been cracked. As the programme reports here, the passport was read remotely and then the security cracked using flaws built into the system, whereupon all of the biometric data could be read.

The first Icasa licence for an Asterisk-based PBX has been awarded to OpenVoice Holdings. The switching system licence means that OpenVoice's Asterisk PBX may be legally connected to the telecommunications grid.

The state has appointed a new CIO and made it clear that his job will be to forge ahead with implementing the controversial OpenDocument format.

z/OpenGate(TM) is a 2U (3.5 inches) rack mount unit designed for high availability and redundancy featuring a SUSE Linux OS, dual Intel XEON(R) processors, hot swappable power supplies, and internal mirrored disks.

When Massachusetts CIO Peter Quinn resigned his post in December, citing political turmoil that threatened to derail the state’s adoption of an open-standards format for software, the behind-the-scenes battle between open-standards advocates and proprietary vendors went public. On one side sits Microsoft Corp. On the other side are open-standards advocates and vendors. They’re fighting for fair competition that doesn’t give Microsoft undue advantage because of what critics charge are the company’s long-standing relationships with most state governments.

[Ed: The real lesson here is for public officials to stand firm. Be sure to cover your bases, but definitely stand firm. - dcparris]