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The whole sky-is-falling motif isn't confined to just cable news outlets, it seems. In the world of technology journalism, arm waving and teeth gnashing are becoming de rigueur as well.

Take this week's example: As Roundup was off to the virtual presses last Friday, Oracle was announcing that it had purchased a small Finnish software company known as Innobase Oy. Based on the hysteria that followed, you would have thought that the world was about to end or that Madonna was becoming a housewife.

Y ou can tell open-source software is no longer a geeky movement of Windows renegades when so many of its users actually wear ties. A flock of them, mostly public-sector employees, have descended on Portland this week to discuss how using unlicensed, open-source software can save their departments money and help them operate more efficiently.

Eric Schonfeld writes: "Forget about Linux on the desktop. The next stage of open-source adoption will occur in enterprise software." This is the propaganda JBoss management wants to get across. One of their Public Relation Firm's employees wrote me and wanted to make sure that we pointed out that JBoss is not Linux. Well Dr. Fleury, you right. JBoss will never measure up to Linux and I'm glad you have realized that. - Tom Adelstein

Well-respected analysts, though, are cautioning that the move to Vista should be slow and deliberate - if you move at all. See this week's Windows Networking newsletters for more on what the Gartner Group and the Burton Group have to say about Vista (you'll be able to read those newsletters online later this week, if you don't already subscribe to it).

Project had intended to observe occasion with 2.0 release, but that's been pushed back slightly.

IT director Bryan Tidd started the city of Canton, Ga., on the road to Linux and open source software (OSS) as soon as he got that job in 2000. A devotee of Linux since trying Red Hat Linux 5.0, Tidd plans to move as much of the city's IT systems to Linux and open source as he can.

While the Tectonic team may wax lyrical of the new Ubuntu Breezy, we decided to find out what the experts think. Hidde "HiddenWolf" Brugmans is a Dutch Ubuntu fan, contributor to the Ubuntu Dutch translation project (Ubuntu-nl), and a wealth of information and help for those who find their way to the #ubuntu IRC channel on irc.freenode.net.

The German City of Mannheim this week outlined its migration plan to the Linux platform. Or, as the town in the grand-duchy of Baden puts it, “we are aiming to become fit for the future." A year ago, the German town at the junction of the Rhine and Neckar Rivers already got the go-ahead of the project.

Unlike earlier incarnations, SuSE 10 has enough drivers that you can easily take it on the road.

Researchers at the CSIR are gearing up to release OpenPhone, an open source telephonic e-services solution, on later this month. It aims to give people access to information and governmental services over a standard telephone service using touch-tone dialling and voice recognition.

The KDE Project has published Version 3.4.3 of its Unix/Linux Desktop. According to an announcement by the developers the release in question is a maintenance release which removes bugs that have been discovered since the previous version. KDE was meanwhile available in 51 languages, the announcement says; a KDE language pack for Afrikaans had been released recently. Information on the details of the changes in KDE 3.4.3 are to be found in the Changelog.

Stirling University has moved its SAP payroll and human resources (HR) system to an open source Red Hat Linux operating system.

The university implemented the Red Hat system when the server running the HR department’s SAP application started to suffer performance problems following an upgrade.

A new version of open-source database MySQL will be released next month, aimed at attracting more businesses. Version 5 is the most significant update in the database's history, the company behind it said. It adds a number of features considered important for companies that have long been available from market leaders Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. Chief among them are triggers, views and stored procedures.

So, you became excited and made a raft of changes to Firefox in one fell swoop? You can't remember what all those tweaks involved, but you've already noticed some feature or function that's not working the way it should. The fault probably does lie with something you did, but occasionally that's not true. Let's discuss a couple of very common, not-your-fault problems you might stumble across, and what you can do about them.

KDE 3.4.3 has been released. This release includes many bugfixes and increased translation coverage compared to previous versions.

Last time we learned the vocabulary and the concepts. Now we're ready to look at the code that will let us interact with OOo Calc.

At this year's LinuxWorld show at Olympia vnunet.com caught up with Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe, to discuss the organisation's plans for the future.

Having watched and nurtured an open source community based around the Sugar customer relationship management (CRM) platform for the last 14 months, SugarCRM is hosting a developer contest to mark the 100th extension on the SugarForge.org development forum, and draw more attention to the already successful company.

Before I could pen down this post, I was cautioned about the “flames” I would encounter from Mac aficionados. It is indeed preposterous to assume that there could be anything better than a Mac. However, more than the software per se, I would argue on other counts- as would be clear to you all in just a short while.

The Porting Team is proud to announce to the Ubuntu world the release of Breezy Badger for three shiny new architectures.