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I am not now and I have never been a chair thrower. No, seriously. In my entire life, I've never once thrown a piece of furniture at a wall. For that matter, I have never in my life said that I would blankety-blank kill anyone, the way a sworn statement in the Google/Microsoft/Dr. Lee litigation says Steve Ballmer has.

I'm not saying I've never been angry. I know how to feel angry, but in my biggest quarrel ever, I can't recall even thinking about throwing furniture. For that matter, I can't remember my biggest quarrel ever. It takes a lot to make me mad, so it's a rare event.

So, imagine my surprise to learn from Daniel Lyons' article in Forbes that I hate MySQL for entering a partnership with SCO, and I summoned its CEO, Marten Mickos, to appear before a "Stalinist show trial" here on Groklaw, which he felt obliged to endure, "cackling" fanatic commenters and all, in hopes of restoring his reputation. As it happens, Marten and I were just discussing which day to publish an article he has written for Groklaw, so we were both surprised.

The open source productivity application OpenOffice.org has been downloaded almost 50 million times since the project was started, according to the company that founded the project, Sun.

A Linuxchix Africa workshop at Wits University in Johannesburg next week aims to improve the open source skills of women from townships and rural areas. In the long-term, the organisation plans to take the training model all over Africa.

Gervase Markham has announced that his second online newspaper column has been published on Times Online, the website of The Times newspaper in the United Kingdom. In the column, entitled Open formats make history - and maintain it, Gerv discusses how the decision of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to use OpenDocument is the start of a move towards people reclaiming control of their data.

The Ubuntu team is proud to announce Ubuntu 5.10 Server, the first release of Ubuntu designed especially for server environments.

Concurrent, a leading provider of technology solutions for mission-critical applications, is entering a new line of business by offering stand-alone software for Linux application developers.

The company believes that a shift is occurring in emerging markets as the number of customers demanding technology solutions based on open source and open standards continues to accelerate. According to an IDC study, industry sales of Linux servers surpassed the $1 billion mark in revenue for the fourth consecutive quarter, while in the second quarter of 2005 worldwide Linux sales grew 45 percent.

Mozilla Firefox has now been downloaded over 100 million times since its release less than a year ago.

Opinion: It's a big stretch to think that Oracle has ruthless plans to destroy MySQL.

I admittedly was caught off guard at Oracle's recent acquisition of Innobase, makers of a transactional storage engine that works under the covers of MySQL, the popular open source database.

For a long time, data warehousing on a terabyte scale has been the preserve of the largest and wealthiest corporations - retailers, telecoms companies, banks. The reason is simple - cost.

Customers of the high-end data warehousing vendors - NCR's Teradata, IBM and Oracle - typically spend more than $1 million a year with their supplier just on upgrades and maintenance. Initial purchase prices reaching into eight figures are not uncommon. The technolog- ists justify that not just by the value that their products deliver, but the cost of developing the algorithms, the parallel hardware and the proprietary database engines that drive the data analysis.

Earlier today we posted an article about the dispute between the Debian Project and the former Debian Common Core Alliance, now known as the DCC Alliance. Before press time we had not received a response from DCCA leader Ian Murdock, the founder of Progeny. Now we have.

Besides candidates for the FSF (Free Software Foundation) Award for the Advancement of Free Software, the FSF is now also asking for nominations for a new annual award: The FSF Award for Projects of Social Benefit. Whereas the first award recognizes the achievements of persons who have made a major contribution to the progress of free software, such as by developing, documenting or distributing the same, the new prize will highlight projects that use free software or ideas developed by the free software community in a socially beneficial fashion.

"We are not anti-open source," says Martin Taylor, Microsoft's general manager of competitive strategy. In fact, he makes a point of hiring people with Linux and open source skills for his R&D team and Linux lab.

Portable Firefox is a fully functional package of the Mozilla Firefox web browser optimised for use on a USB key drive so that you can keep your browser preferences with you on the go.

Portable Firefox has some specially-selected optimisations to make it perform faster as well as a launcher that allows most of your favourite extensions to work as you switch computers.

It also works from a CDRW drive (in packet mode), ZIP drives, external hard drives, some MP3 players, flash RAM cards and more It won't run from read-only media like a CD-R, though.

You can download it from their web site - Ed.

ORLANDO, Fla., EDUCAUSE Booth #903, Oct. 19 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- In a significant corporate move to bring the benefits of open source to education, Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) today announced it will spin off the Global Education and Learning Community (GELC) as a nonprofit organization serving the needs of the education community.

The OpenPKG project released version 2.5 of their unique RPM-based cross-platform multi-instance Unix software packaging facility.

One of the reasons why people switch to Firefox (also on the Linux platform) is the assumed security of the browser. Nonetheless, several vulnerabilities were found in Firefox the last few months, so the browser may be the weak spot in the security of your Linux-desktop.

Trying to address this problem, I researched two ways to make browsing under Firefox more secure: chrooting it, or making a seperate browse-only account. Both of them don't work. This article discusses why, and the possible solution.

A recent bus trip and tour of Oregon State University's Open Source Lab (OSL), and its cavernous collection of "the most important racks in open source," had political and technological progressives sitting side by side.

Lacking permission from the Debian project to call itself Debian anything, the Debian Common Core Alliance has agreed to change its name to the recursive DCC Alliance, but, according to Debian, has so far refused to remove Debian's logo from its own logo or issue any formal press release about the change or why it took place.

Nick Langley writes: "Linux is a freeware, Unix-type operating system that is distributed along with its source code so users can make changes and then redistribute it.

"There is a strange imbalance in the Linux world. At one end it is dependent on a handful of talented individuals, with constant speculation about overwork,...... burnout and slowing down of creative effort. At the other end, thousands of the world's best-paid IT staff are promoting and selling it, and repackaging it to meet the demands of corporations and governments."

Nick has written an introduction to the uninitiated it seems, which is something we see more of daily. These are the types of stories we saw in the mid-1990's as Microsoft began to conquer the mightly Novell with Redmond going from 5% of the market to its current position. - Ed.

- Multimedia Access Platform to Enable Profitable Delivery of High-bandwidth Video/IPTV, Multimedia and VoIP Services to the Mass Market