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Should KDE should port its applications to Windows? A debate has flared up in parts of the KDE community, filling inboxes and blogs with arguments long and short. The question is really whether the KDE community should encourage this, since it is already happening. In the tradition of dialectic, I present the key arguments for and against this venture in style of a Platonic dialogue.

Mandrakesoft, the popular French Linux distributor, is making its most serious effort yet to become a business Linux distributor.

A newly discovered flaw in Firefox could allow cybercriminals to take advantage of Web surfers.

George Tang Industrial Corporation introduces the GDV-08, its latest 8-channel DVR with built-in LAN and CD-RW. The Linux-embedded unit is bundled with Software Watchdog and realtime MPEG-4 compression.

A long-time Gnome user takes a week to try out SimplyMepis to see what all the hubub is about. The result is not only a favorable look at a capable Linux distro, but an examination of the state of the Desktop Environment landscape, and the areas in which KDE can tempt even a dyed-in-the-wool Gnome fan.

O'Reilly's OpenOffice.org Writer, by Australian technical writer and active OpenOffice.org community contributer Jean H. Weber, is an enhanced and updated version of her earlier book, Taming OpenOffice.org Writer, which was the first book ever published about OOo. This book skips basic OpenOffice.org functionality and focuses on one OOo component: Writer. It includes a copy of OpenOffice.org, and has many useful tips for technical writers and advanced OOo users.

PROIV has launched new, free, Linux and Windows versions of its PROIV Rapid Application Development tools – and in return for downloading the software, is sending out free penguins.

At the end, I must say that Thunderbird is perfectly capable of being used as your only email client. It did not crash on me once in weeks of testing, on either OS. It's not perfect, but it's very very good. Go ahead and try it.

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.