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The Linux operating system is beginning to loosen the proprietary software industry's hold on the Australian government software market. The NSW government said it had established Australia's the first whole-of-government panel to supply open source software and services to its departments and agencies.

It's a question that evokes strong emotions from both Microsoft and legions of open-source supporters worldwide. Yet the discourse rarely is an apples-to-apples comparison or takes into account the true role that an operating system plays within the overall IT environment.

In this week’s special report, you will read numerous reasons for agency officials to set aside their reservations and migrate to open-source software. But to play devil’s advocate for a moment, perhaps it is worth remembering why people have such reservations in the first place.

Linux is well-suited to federal projects with small teams and scarce resources. And many Linux applications, such as the Census Bureau's Fast Facts service, can support an entire enterprise.

Wiki software implements the simple idea that Web pages should be easy, even trivial, to create, and that anyone reading the page should be able to correct, improve, revise and add to the page. Wikis (the word means "quick" in Hawaiian) have become popular on the World Wide Web. With simple formatting rules to make it easy to build well-organized hyperlinked pages, a wiki becomes an efficient means of creating a Web site. One worthwhile wiki for business collaboration is Clifford Adam's UseModWiki.

Increasingly, companies are relying on Linux to host critical applications, such as enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and electronic commerce. Data protection is a key requirement for these applications; enterprises need to be sure that technical blips do not destroy important information and therefore they have been searching for products that help to protect that information.

Mozilla Foundation is making noticeable progress towards the security of their own products, unlike the main competitor, Microsoft, which has a slow response time even when the problems needed to be solved are clearly pointed out. This time, FireFox has a new and improved pop-up blocking solution. Because in the last time new ways for infiltrating pop-up and pop-under messages have appeared, Mozilla has taken measures to protect its users.

...just as Linux is being presented as a viable alternative to Windows for network-plumbing tasks such as file and print and Web serving, it is starting to rise as an application-layer option, especially with clustering, IP and virtualization improvements in the latest Linux kernel.

SpikeSource to Collaborate with Other OSDL Members to Advance Key Initiatives

IDC vice president Dan Kusnetzky understands the frustration of friends such as HP's Linux Vice President Martin Fink, who complained at the recent Jboss developer event that open source software is not adequately covered by analysts.

The up-and-coming Ubuntu Linux distro is now regarded by Redmond as a serious innovator with features worth ripping off. Microsoft just started by copying Ubuntu's human circle logo for their MSN Spaces logo - see this MS page and this Ubuntu page and this ubuntu screenshot - of course stylizing the image to a cold blue, instead of Ubuntu's warm human.

A relief to some, hardly suprising to anyone: GeNToo, the Portage spinoff for the NT kernel, was nothing but an April Fool's joke -- albeit a very well thought-out one. The various pranks played on users and fellow developers open this week's Gentoo Weekly Newsletter! Other features this week include developer portraits, news from the community, a walk through publications who picked up last week's release of 2005.0, and developers moves and additions, and the regular bugzilla statistics and security alert sections. Happy reading!

Most top-tier hardware vendors are selling AMD64 workstation and server systems these days, including Hewlett Packard, Sun Microsystems, and, more recently, IBM. Oddly enough, most of them are shipping with 32-bit operating systems installed by default. While the AMD64 architecture can comfortably handle both 64-bit and 32-bit software -- even concurrently -- it seems a waste of its potential to disregard the best features of the architecture. While the theoretical speed advantage and expanded resources of 64-bit computing are enticing to those in need of maximum performance, the road to a perfect AMD64 desktop, workstation or server machine is long and treacherous. What operating system will you use? Is there enough 64-bit software available? In this article we'll explore some of the advantages and pitfalls of going totally 64-bit in a 32-bit world.

The future is mobile. That much we know for sure. But it seems that the operating system world in this market is being rapidly taken over by --again-- Microsoft. The new smart phones are are using WinCE, Symbian or Palm. Linux has barely 1% of this new, smartphone market.

Some breaking news "leaked" into the libervis blog by Charles Schulz from OpenOffice.org LANG Confederation saying that "Sun would put its JRE (not Java!) under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL)" This well goes with another news story published by SapInfo.net, on this page saying that "Sun Microsystems intends to make Java Enterprise System available as an open source product that will define the company as truly committed to open source, according to a report."

Vendors used to bond with enterprise buyers by avoiding the words 'Linux support'. In 2005, buyers request Linux support. Database vendors are returning that interest with the double wallop of the Linux kernel matched with POWER processor-based servers.

rebron wrote in to tell us that Forbes.com has selected Mozilla Firefox as favorite in its Best of the Web series. Four of the Five Browsers selected as 'Best of the Web pick' are Gecko based. [LXer editor's note: one of our own sites is also listed in this directory, and we are aware that it is a big honour.]

An update of "Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS)? Look at the Numbers!" is now available; among other things, it adds lots of Firefox market share information.

For many a GNU/Linux user, the command line is supreme. But can you manipulate images without switching to the GUI and using the resource-hungry GIMP? You can, using the fantastic ImageMagick suite.

Let there be no doubt that Red Hat the company has become a monster success story. We'll get to Red Hat the investment in a bit, but all the folks who doubted that an essentially free product could be repackaged with services and sold at a premium must feel a bit silly now. I never publicly said so, but you can count me among one of the former doubters. I always thought Linux the product would do well, but I had my doubts about Red Hat making much on it.