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More than 20 Linux vendors will use the new specs for their products

Businesses don't have to dump Windows to test drive free or low-price applications whose use may improve the bottom line.

Open source may have many benefits over closed systems, but don't count security among them--yet. This article looks at why open source software may currently be less secure than its commercial counterparts.

US Linux firm Gupta Technologies has released an embedded Linux database that it claims will allow easy transition of applications from a Microsoft Windows environment to the Linux platform.

2004 is set to be a breakthrough year for Linux on the desktop, with vendor strategies coming together to make it a potential alternative to Windows. Matthew Aslett assesses its prospects.

Lots of press on one of the biggest Firefox releases to date...

The Gentoo User Survey has been released. This survey is meant to get some feedback from Gentoo Linux users and give us a feel on how Gentoo is being used and what we can do to improve. The survey should take around 10 minutes to complete and will be available through the rest of September. You can register for the survey at our new Survey site at:

A company has written an open letter to the open source community, warning that the use of Mambo OS in any release after the 3rd October 2003 could result in civil litigation and possibly criminal prosecution.

Larry Rosen -- the attorney who has been negotiating with Microsoft on behalf of the OSI for changes to the restrictive patent licensing attached to Sender ID -- was asked recently to explain in a concise manner exactly what it is about the Microsoft licensing for its proposed standard that makes it unacceptable to the open source/free software worlds. Rosen's reply makes interesting reading for all of us.

Motorola is moving Linux and open source into the smart phone space with its new A780 handheld, featuring MontaVista Software's Linux operating system and now the open source Berkeley DB data manager, but analysts say Linux remains on hold in mobile phones because Microsoft, Palm, and Symbian operating systems still dominate the space.

Have you ever thought about turning your kid into a computer geek? While we might not want to go quite that far, as savvy future professionals, they'll no doubt need wide ranging computer skills. Linux offers youngsters a richly featured, comprehensive, hands-on environment that they can use to learn about applications, networks, servers, and how to make it all work together. If you work with them, you can even start to instill some of your hard-earned business acumen, as well.

A win in the nuclear submarine cluster market suggests that IBM's POWER architecture is joining the Linux HPC big leagues.

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), one of the world's largest public service networks, will shortly launch what it hails as a pioneering new approach to public access rights, and it is turning to the open source community to contribute to its successful rollout.

A six-month project involving 34 developers worldwide -- including six in Australia -- culminated last night in the release at a pub in Sydney of a preview of a new Linux distribution.

Stronghold 4 is a collection of open-source components grouped together to create a world-class secure Web server. With version 4, Red Hat has updated the Apache engine to version 1.3.22 and bundled Perl 5.6, PHP 4.1.0, and Tomcat 4.0.1 (JSP 1.2 and Java Servlet 2.3), as well as the newly introduced AxKit XML application server and WebDAV Web-based authoring protocol.

LinuxQuestions.org is proud to announce that it will now host the official forum for Amigo Linux, increasing its total number of participating distributions to eighteen.

The company will launch an OpenSolaris site on Friday, but an open-source version of Sun's operating system is still a long way off.

Opinion:To keep Linux on the right path to the enterpise, the new standard base is essential.

Gentoo Linux is the BSD of GNU/Linux distributions; it's elegant and customizable and you know exactly what you're getting when you install it. No mystery programs, no packages that you have to deinstall because you'll never use, no clutter, and everything is customized to your needs. If you do it right, Gentoo is also faster than your average GNU/Linux distro because everything can be compiled with higher compiler optimizations. The 2004.2 edition of Gentoo Linux lacks the improvements I had hoped to see, but this is still the best community GNU/Linux distribution for desktop tinkerers. Some even say that it makes a good server, too.

Microsoft has appointed a new executive to persuade business customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa to choose its software over open-source alternatives.