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The Information Technology (I.T.) profession is overrun with technical certifications, many of dubious value. Questions often arise about the value of a certification. I argue that vendor-neutral certifications are better value propositions in the same way that vendor-neutral standards are. A vendor-neutral certification is likely to remain relevant longer, have a longer lifetime prior to expiration, and apply more broadly. Whether you agree or disagree, there are fewer vendor-neutral certifications from which to choose.

Campaigners say IBM is wrong to be lobbying in favour of software patents in in Europe, and claim it's just trying to win friends by opening up 500 patents.

This is the first ever episode of The Linux Box Show, so I would really appreciate your input so that I can better service the FOSS community.

Welcome to this year's 2nd issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Knowing Knoppix is a beginner-friendly book to help new users with the Knoppix live CD. Bruno Torres conducted an interview with the Debian project leader Martin Michlmayr.

There's nothing like a new set of typefaces for starting off the new year. Like snowflakes, no two are alike -- and also like snowflakes, they have to be handled just right. After you've found the fonts you want to spend the next 12 months with, here's how you can install them correctly and easily on your Linux system by getting your package management program to do it for you.

The updated version of this classic text is as well written, detailed and informative as the original.

In this month's mocking toast To Evil! Danny O'Brien laments the holiday habit of trying to hide one's evilness from Father Christmas, but finds those evil proprietary software people can't help being who they are. '...let's see whose been evil and not so evil down there in the chained world of proprietary software. That sorry place, where slipshod users cannot hide their sin, distracted as they are by demons only the unfree suffer: the draconian wiles of restrictively-licensed media companies, the constant hammer of pop-up ads and malware, and - most dread of all - closed-source software with hard-coded integer limits, running on AIX.'

Providing geographic metadata in Web sites and syndicated feeds can provide users with the ability to search easily for services and articles based on location and proximity.

OpenOffice.org Writer offers a wide range of sophisticated tools for creating complex documents such as manuals and technical documentation. However, when it comes to publishing the finished results online, your options are rather limited. You can, of course, use OOo Web to convert existing files into HTML, but you might want a more powerful and flexible tool to maintain the published documents online -- a wiki, for example, and specifically DokuWiki, which is designed for documentation.

The Mozilla e-mail client has all the stuff an experienced user needs and is more secure than Outlook, but it doesn't have the right stuff for most enterprises.

IBM has decided to let open-source developers use 500 software patents without fear of an infringement lawsuit, a new step in its encouragement of the collaborative programming philosophy.

You run GNU/Linux. You play games on it, surf the Net, write documents, and edit pictures, and all for free, thanks to the multitudes around the world who contribute to the open source movement. Now it's payback time -- time to give back to the global fraternity giving you so much. Here are 10 ways you can help right now.

Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy spoke with IDG News Service correspondent Robert McMillan about company changes, plans for 2005 and how open source relates to Solaris and Java.

Simpler survey needs may be met by open-source portal apps.

61 EU members of parliament from 13 countries lead by the Polish ex-prime minister Jerzy Buzek are demanding that the legislative process on the controversial directive on the patentability of "computer-implemented inventions" begin again from scratch.

More than 60 MEPs from 13 countries have asked the EU to go back to the drawing board on the software patent directive.

The adoption of the Mozilla Foundation's browser by millions of non-technical users could be the biggest test yet of open source development

There are cases when for evaluation, demonstration, recovery or otherwise you don't want to install a new operating system onto a hard drive. It's in those cases that a "non-invasive" CD-based operating system (look ma no hard drive!), in the Linux world usually called Live CDs (or Linux Live) really comes in handy. The "granddaddy" of all Linux Live OSes, Knoppix, recently released its latest version, 3.7.

aplawrence.com is mostly a big wiki full of original content about Linux and Unix-like operating systems and related information. Who knew it was there? Evidently quite a few people, judging by the regular activity. Tony Lawrence, the guy who owns aplawrence.com, says the site gets more than 100,000 visitors a month.

Linux has gotten progressively simple to install and setup over the past few years. Sure, it's been on a steady path for far longer than that, but only in the past 2-3 years have we seen some of the biggest advancements in the history of the popular Open Source operating system. Application packaging is one of the biggest areas that still seems to remain untouched.