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Rajesh Rege, director of sales, Sun Microsystems, said the biggest blow will be for commercial vendors of Linux. Why would anyone buy a paid version, when an operating system tested in mission critical situations is available for use free of cost, he asked.

Linux starts off the new year looking better than ever, but not without its challenges. Today, we're dusting off the crystal ball and taking a look at what users of the open-source operating system might expect this year.

Salem Hospital of Oregon switches from barebones OS projects to commercialized Linux for its security.

NetBSD is widely known as the most portable operating system in the world. It currently supports 52 system architectures, all from a single source tree, and is always being ported to more. NetBSD 2.0 continues the long tradition with major improvements in file system and memory management performance, significant security enhancements, and support for many new platforms and peripherals. To celebrate the release, we've asked several well-known NetBSD developers to comment on some of NetBSD 2.0's new features.

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange credits its migration to commodity Intel-based servers and Linux with cutting costs and shaving 100 milliseconds off the time required to complete a trade.

Paul Ferris is at it again. Someone is bashing the Linux command-line (pun intended), and the misconceptions are many. This article takes a swing at a few of the many dimensions that make Enterprise-class Linux capabilities a hard thing for Microsoft to thwart in the long run.

The Open Source Initiative's license approval committee has given a vote of support to Sun Microsystems' license. In late December, the committee recommended that Sun's Community Development and Distribution License (CDDL) be granted official status as an open-source license, Chairman Russell Nelson said in an e-mail posting. The recommendation still must be approved by OSI's board, Nelson added.

MySQL at the end of January is expected to release a beta version of its MySQL 5.0 open source database, which is to feature enterprise-level functionality such as stored procedures and triggers, according to a company representative.

Welcome to this year's 1st issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Martin Michlmayr announced that Jörg Jaspert has been appointed as an additional Debian account manager. The Debian project announced another update of their stable release. Joey Hess published a list of security problems fixed in unstable but pending in sarge.

A new way of thinking about and tagging a document's table of contents and other supporting features makes sense and is more convenient.

Voice over IP (VOIP) and open source technology hold great promise for cost savings, but also threaten traditional ways of doing business. Rather than shy away from the challenges that these disruptive technologies represent, Bell Laboratories, the renowned R&D (research and development) arm of Lucent Technologies in Murray Hill, New Jersey, is attempting to bring them into the mainstream.

The enterprise Linux space got a bit more crowded Tuesday with a pair of new releases from Mandrakesoft. The France-based Linux distribution vendor announced a new version of its Corporate Server and a new Corporate Desktop.

IT managers who think that their Microsoft certifications give them all the tenure they need are in for a rude awakening. In fact, says author Robin Miller, their pink slips are only a point-and-click away. Learn to use Linux, he said, or you'll be left behind. To help IT managers and users see how easy it is to use Linux, Miller has written Point & Click Linux: Your Guide to Trouble-Free Computing, which has just been published by Prentice Hall PTR. Miller, who is also editor-in-chief of Open Source Technology Group, offers tips on building Linux skills and easing a company and its users onto Linux desktops in this interview. In part two, he focuses on choosing tools and distributions and supporting Linux.

SpikeSource, a start-up headed by computing industry veteran Kim Polese, has revealed more details of its plan to tap into the growing popularity of open-source software at corporations.

A client recently greeted me with a barrage of complaints about Microsoft, product costs, and so forth. They wondered aloud whether they ought to assemble a strategy for moving to an open source platform to save money. Now, I'm not one to start an argument about the merits of consumer vs. open source. Rather, I took the opportunity to point out the open source route available to .NET connoisseurs.

We began this interview via email, but later had to finish by telephone after Richard Stallman fell and broke his arm. He was kind enough to speak with me at length, discussing his first contact with computers, his time in the AI lab, the current state of the GNU Hurd, his current role in the Free Software Foundation, the problems with non-free software, and much more. The following words offer much insight into how we got here, and what challenges we still face.

First Virtex-4 Device with Embedded PowerPC Delivers 3x Performance Advantage

The Open Source Laboratory at Oregon State University is planning informational outreach boot camps at businesses for staff to learn about open-source software. Open-source software is software available to anyone for free. The software is applied to applications such as word processing, spreadsheets and Web browsing.

Firestarter is a GPL-licensed graphical firewall configuration program for iptables, the powerful firewall included in Linux kernels 2.4 and 2.6. Firestarter supports network address translation for sharing an Internet connection among multiple computers, and port forwarding for redirecting traffic to an internal workstation. Firestarter's clean and easy to use graphical user interface takes the time out of setting up a custom firewall.

In this interview, Martin Michlmayr, the Debian project leader, talks about Sarge, the next release of Debian GNU/Linux. One of the most significant improvements in Sarge over Woody, the last stable Debian release, is in the new user-friendly installer. Others include the addition of Apache 2.0.52, GNOME 2.8, KDE 3.2, and XFree86 4.3.