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When Linus Torvalds successfully harnessed the talent of thousands of programmers to create Linux, the operating system that arguably suffered most was Sun Microsystems' Solaris. Torvalds discussed Solaris, his improvisational programming style and other issues in an interview with CNET News.com.

Sub300 Will Install Linspire, Firefox and OpenOffice Free of Charge to Any System

Scott Wheeler and Sirtaj Singh Kang with much appreciated help from Kabir Husain represented KDE at this year's Linux Bangalore, India's largest Linux and Open Source event.

There was a time early in the dawn of computers where .edu's and .orgs co-mingled ideas and thoughts via IRC and newsgroups in a conducive and non-proprietary way. The great ideas that were born from this still thrive today in the form of RFC's, Internet Standards, Protocols, and other surges of genius that sprung from these beginnings.

Alternative platforms are still struggling to reach critical mass due, in part, to a lack of enterprise-ready applications.

Takes Active Role in Test and Performance Tools Platform Project

The KDE Accessibility team is in the process of integrating speech synthesis into KDE. Not only does this mean better support for visually-impaired and speech-impaired users, but the new features should also prove for a fun desktop experience overall. An important milestone has been reached with the recent release of the KDE Text-to-Speech System (ktts). If you wish to learn more about speech synthesis support in KDE, you can also read an extensive interview with four developers at the KDE Accessibility Website.

Looking back on technology news from 2004 reveals a very distinct pattern. Specific words -- supported, viable, migration, economical and mainstream -- crop up with increasing regularity in reference to open source -- once relocated and restricted to the fringes of computing.

Global Consultant and Solution Developer Targets Compiere Customers Switching to MySQL and Companies Seeking Affordable, Flexible ERP and CRM

Firefox is a classic overnight success, many years in the making.

New low-cost computer features complete operating system and Microsoft file-compatible office suite

Whether companies sell or provide their databases with fully available source code, through a new open source project, or with their very own open source license, there is definitely open source fever in the database business these days. Older, established database makers such as IBM, Sybase, and CA are releasing the code for what were previously proprietary products. But these players are coming late to the party thrown by MySQL, PostgreSQL, BerkelyDB maker Sleepycat, and Firebird. How much open source beer are these newcomers bringing to the database bash, or are they simply coming in and asking where the cups are?

Since the introduction of the FreeBSD-5 branch, FreeBSD enthusiasts have been eagerly awaiting the day when the new codebase would stabilize. After much development and four previous releases, FreeBSD-5 has finally gone stable with version 5.3. But don't mistake a stable codebase with stable software. while the development team will no longer accept major changes to the base system, FreeBSD 5.3 still has bugs and problems.

The latest upload of the Debian hurd package features a patch by Ognyan Kulev which has support for ext2 partitions larger than 2 GB on 32bit systems. Over the last years, this limit had become an annoying issue of the GNU/Hurd system, so this change represents an important milestone for the Debian GNU/Hurd port with respect to user expectations. Although the patch has not yet been integrated by the upstream GNU Hurd maintainers, the Debian package maintainers consider it (after thorough testing) stable enough to warrant its inclusion into the Debian hurd package.

TheKompany.com today formally launched Mindawn, a music download service that, unlike iTunes and Napster, targets Linux desktops. Mindawn is claimed to provide CD-quality song files and "virtually no" digital rights management (DRM) restrictions, offer full previews of the entire songs, and provide downloads in "lossless" Ogg Vorbis and FLAC formats, as well as in other common "lossy" formats.

Is it because Internet Explorer and Outlook are inferior? Not really. It's because Microsoft's operating systems and programs are used by more than 90 percent of computer users - especially in the largest of businesses. "It's not that Microsoft dropped the ball in some way," said David Perry, global director of education for the anti-virus company, Trend Micro. "It's just that they've been seen as the biggest targets."

Red Hat and IBM have launched a joint Linux ISV Certification Support Program in Europe to accelerate the migration of applications to Linux.

Information cannot be traded as it does not have a trade value. This article explains this argument and presents an economic model that does deal with information, but does not involve it's trade.

An extensive review using a source-code analysis tool finds that the Linux 2.6 kernel has 0.17 bugs per 1,000 lines of code, compared with the 10 to 20 bugs per 1,000 lines generally found in commercial software packages.

The discussion of FOSS in relation to copyright law has been heated. This latest blog entry from James Thompson raises a question that may need to be more thoroughly addressed. As consumers in a digital age have we not also become publishers too, and how does that new role impact how we should view copyright.