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Non-profit organisations are always looking for ways to better serve the public. But, with ever-shrinking budgets, it can sometimes be hard for them to even stay alive, much less expand services. This article discusses how one agency, ROCMND Group Home in Miami, Oklahoma, met that challenge through the use of open technology.

A scheme being proposed to cut the deluge of spam has the support of some big players but it is doubtful whether it will be acceptable to those from the free and open source communities.

With the promises of Longhorn revealed as market-freezing trickery, Linux has its best chance ever to seize control of the desktop. Market-research firm Venture Development Corp. says a survey of retail IT execs shows that just 2% of point-of-sale systems use Linux, far less than expected.

Businesses should delay switching to Linux until IT managers can give a better business case for adoption, says research.

Novell, a new entrant into the Linux market, has promoted two executives in a management change that consolidates four business units into two.

"Linux is not a boy. Linux is not a child. Linux is ready." With these words, Martin Fink, VP of Linux for Hewlett-Packard, rephrased a popular sentiment at LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco this August (while simultaneously knocking competitor IBM's ad campaign). He, along with many others, took the message another step: Not only is open source enterprise ready, but the enterprise had better be ready for open source.

The first article for this new monthly column looks at eric3, a GUI-based IDE for Python.

For small businesses that don't have the tech savvy or the time to tinker with configurations and want to keep their tech really basic, Linspire will pay for itself in the amount of time it saves you. Fast downloads and easy to find-and-install applications — what more could you ask for?

About a third of businesses plan to migrate at least some Windows machines to Linux, according to a recent survey, but adoption will continue to slow and cautious, as companies evaluate a maze of economic factors.

The AbiWord project has announced a new "stable" version of its popular open source word processing suite. The project describes AbiWord as a "no-frills word processor without all the extras that make its competitors such space and memory hogs." Abiword is cross-platform, open source software, and is available under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

The open source community today received a contribution from Germany's Netline Internet Service. The software -- Open-xchange -- competes with Microsoft's Exchange email and collaboration server software. Today's release follows word at the recent LinuxWorld conference that the project would be released as open source software by month end.

The latest release of Java aims to make you a more productive programmer.

Currently, metadata is expressed in separate text, Java properties, and XML files, but that poses a serious problem: code is disconnected from configuration, making development, deployment, and maintenance that much more difficult. JDK 1.5 addresses this disparity, capturing critical information where it belongs: right in your code.

With JBoss AOP, provided in JBoss 4, developers can write plain old Java objects (POJOS) and request complex services like transactions, security, and caching with just a few simple annotations.

Riffing on "free as in speech, not free as in beer," critics often quip that Open Source is "free, as in puppy." Yeah, they say, Open Source has floppy ears, a wagging tail, and a price that can't be beat, but beware, they warn, the costs of adopting and keeping it -- expenses such as training, support, and maintenance -- can't be overlooked.

In the old days, disk space cost a pretty penny, so saving space was essential. But now that disk space costs about $0.50 per gigabyte, a lot of folks never worry about deleting files, let alone compressing them. However, if you're administering a large, shared server (such as for email), it seems that you can never have too much space.

If recent events are any indication, open source advocates may be the best informed people in the country about software copyright law (outside of the legal profession). But as a foundation for future discussions, let's take some time this month to review the basics of United States copyright law, discuss the GNU General Public License (GPL), explore how various legal attacks on the GPL might play out, and see how those attacks might be thwarted.

Forbes magazine founder Bertie Charles Forbes once famously said, "If you don't drive your business, you'll be driven out of business." Indeed, many small and medium-sized businesses have floundered not because they offer a poor product or service, but because they're eventually unable to manage their business processes well enough to flourish in often highly competitive industries.

While the title of this month's "Power Tools" is "Execution and Redirection," it's not about about dying and going to heaven. Instead, controlling execution and redirecting input and output is an important part of managing Linux processes.

Suffering eyestrain from looking at a flickering monitor? Can't quite fit everything you want in your display? Ordinarily, problems like these call for a new monitor, or at least switching to a different standard resolution -- say, going down in resolution if the problem is flicker, or going up from 1024x768 to 1280x1024 to get more screen real estate.