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The open-source operating system Linux is at the heart of the unlikely recent partnership between Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, who have lost significant market share for their server OS products to Linux.

IBM has subpoenaed Oracle, whose name has yet to come up in the controversy, to appear in its defense at the SCO trial, if it should come to that. IBM has put a bid in for summary judgment.

"Mozilla and Gnome folks are talking about throwing in their lot together," writes Maureen O'Gara, "so as not to fall under Microsoft's hooves - especially when Longhorn hits town. It's pretty much a survival issue."

In a company-wide memo sent this week, Steve Ballmer called on Microsoft's 50,000-plus employees around the world to keep a very close eye on Linux and open source as a growing threat to the company.

Organizations around the world are discovering the excellent economics of Linux operating system compared to many other proprietary operating systems including Microsoft Windows.

I have to admit that I'd been reluctant to give Fedora a try. I was unconvinced that an active and loyal community would grow up around it, and also feared that Red Hat's enterprise focus would color the Fedora Project's work, distracting it from improvements that matter to nonenterprise users. Boy, was I wrong--on both accounts.

Donald Becker started the Beowulf Parallel Workstation Project in 1993 at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The project's goal was to cheaply mimic the computing power of expensive mainframes and supercomputers with clusters of commodity hardware and free operating systems. The effort at NASA was named after the eighth-century Danish poem Beowulf, who slew mighty beasts - in the case at NASA, those beasts were supercomputers and mainframes.

[Con Zymaris] has hit back at suggestions that open source software is more likely to contain back-doors than proprietary software

You can easily surf the Web and run a spreadsheet on a Linux-powered PC, but good luck if you want to balance your checkbook.

Controversy may be giving way to simple heads-down hard work when it comes to BPEL4WS, the proposed orchestration standard for Web services supported by both Java and .NET vendors. The leading J2EE app server vendors, BEA Systems and IBM, have jointly proposed extensions to BPEL (Business Processing Execution Language) to make it more easily implementable within Java/J2EE environments.

Microsoft's No. 1 job for Longhorn is to make money, but killing off the Linux desktop isn't far behind.

Leaders from two open source desktop and internet initiatives are formulating a browser and desktop challenger against Microsoft Corp's Longhorn operating system.

IBM on Tuesday dropped the price of Red Hat Linux on its Power processor-based servers by more than 30 percent, Big Blue has confirmed.