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On-line resources for learning more about OpenLDAP, Samba, Squirrelmail and more.

My thoughts in prep for panel at the Open Source Business Conference on Open Source Innovation are in the extended entry of this post, mostly on the role of collaborative methodologies in innovation...

We talk to German insurance company LVM about its 8,500-machine decision.

The Web site hosting business has become more competitive in recent years. If you can find a better hosting deal, you may be able to save money by switching hosting providers. But what's the best way to move your Web site? What if you have a virtual private server (VPS) hosting several domains? What about PHP and your SQL data? The thought of moving may be daunting, but moving servers is not difficult if you plan properly. Here's how.

Bacula is a mature client-server backup solution that runs on several platforms and flexibly meets many needs. It's also a good model for open source development. Nathan Valentine recently interviewed lead developer Kern Sibbald on the design, implementation, and future plans of the product.

"The day of the open-source license as tribal flag or corporate monument will have to come to a close," the Open Source Initiative's board says about its new guidelines on granting new licenses and classifying existing ones.

roseman sent us a link to an InformationWeek article that says Mozilla Thunderbird is finding it hard to emulate the success of Mozilla Firefox. The report cites research from the Radicati Group, which says that Thunderbird is unlikely to make significant gains against rival software like Microsoft Outlook. Radicati rates the security of Thunderbird highly and believes its overall feature set compares well with competitors. However, the lack of integrated calendar functionality is named as a major weakness (the Lightning project intends to address this). The Radicati report also notes that Outlook has a wide range of third party add-ons available, which may discourage some users from switching.

Wants replacement for BitKeeper system that houses and manages global programming effort. Development could slow as result.

Car company Volvo, which has been using supercomputers for vehicle crash test simulations for years, has selected IBM to build a powerful, new Linux supercomputer for its safety tests.

The OSI has issued a statement on license proliferation. "OSI's approach on the development and distribution problems involved building as many different bridges as possible between developers and the corporate world. In doing this, we accepted a proliferation of new licenses. This is a problem in that although physical bridges between communities don't interfere with each other, licenses do. Interference between different open-source licenses is now perceived as a sufficiently serious problem that OSI has become as a victim of its own earlier success."

Next Tuesday, non-profit organizations and Open Source experts and advocates in the San Francisco Bay Area will gather together in honor of "Penguin Day" 2005. The event aims to "demystify open source, frankly address the challenges of developing open source tools, and learn about specific promising open source applications," say event supporters.

NetBSD and Yellow Dog Linux have both begun to support the Mac Mini. Seebach looks at open source operating system options on this new contender in the embedded PowerPC platform space.

Move along, nothing to see here. Some Firefox preferences are just too technical for end users. Oh, you're a Linux Journal reader? Come on in.

The government shouldn't regulate software development through patent enforcement, Lawrence Lessig says.

Who says open source can't measure up to commercial software for mission-critical applications? Far from being a mere quick fix or low-cost alternative, open source software is helping real-world companies solve their most pressing IT problems. Perhaps no more dramatic example exists than pioneering social networking site Friendster. When Friendster launched in March 2003, no one imagined that within two years the site would reach 60 million page views per day. Unfortunately, as the site's traffic increased, so did its performance issues. The problem, in essence, was that Friendster had unexpectedly become a phenomenon.

Computer Associates is talking to fellow software vendors including Sun Microsystems and IBM about creating a common commercial open source licence for future projects.

The software vendor will add to the 20 products it now offers for source-code inspection under its Shared Source Initiative.

"One country . . . one ideology, one system is not sufficient. It is helpful to have a variety of different approaches . . . We can then make a joint effort to solve the problems of the whole of humankind." Dalai Lama Open source and Linux is currently at the forefront of the new OSI Licensing Process and the GPL version 3. This usually would boil down to nothing for me and most likely boils down to nothing for most end users. However, in the cases of both of these 'improvements,' there are alternative motives. Don't fool yourself into believing that all intentions of the OSI is to make Joe Common and his laptop full of Linux happy. While they may have Joe's best interests in mind...they have his pot on the backburner while the new Teflon coated enterprise pot is heating up nicely on the front one.

You may be familiar with Blender 3D, the open source modeling, animation, rendering, and post-production package from the Blender Foundation. If you have used Blender for longer than a few weeks and miss some aspects of the old pre-2.3 user interface, or if you are looking for some interesting features to improve your 3D experience, you should get to know instinctive-blender, a fork created by the small German company instinctive mediaworks.

"The Linux desktop has come a long way," says O'Reilly publishing in its promotional announcement of Linux Desktop Hacks, a new book by Nicholas Petreley and Jono Bacon. "Flocks of would-be users who were put off by its early lack of polish or aesthetic flaws are now revisiting Linux and finding an operating system and applications that give Windows a run for its money," adds O'Reilly.