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The two years leading up to today's U.S. presidential election have not been good for electronic voting, which is estimated to tally, or at least attempt to tally, about 30 percent of all U.S. votes, or an estimated 50 million ballots. The failures of voting machines and the software they run has been rivaled only by inadequate federal and state election certification procedures that allowed questionable technology to be carrying, or possibly corrupting, American votes. However, after all of the frozen voting terminals, lost software loads, mysteriously found machines, and vendors' efforts to keep it all hushed, there is some good news on e-voting.

The SCO Group Inc. is reconsidering its plans to launch an alternative to the Groklaw.net Web site that had been scheduled to go live this week, a company spokeswoman said Monday.

According to Gartner, the two distributors have different strategies, skill sets, target markets and foundation technologies, and may design their support contracts in very different ways, advised an analyst from Gartner. By evaluating both distributors and by including Dell as a server option, enterprises may also realize higher cost savings from Linux subscription support and competitive pricing on hardware.

Novell has hit back strongly against Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer's letter, in which the CEO of the largest proprietary software firm in the world trashed Linux completely.

Last Saturday The Mozilla Foundation announced that it was 300% over its target of garnering $75,000 in donations so that it could place a full page ad in the New York Times. Kelly McNeill's osRadio broadcast shows that this strategy has the potential to exceed most paid software company's advertising budgets if extended to more projects and be allowed to go beyond the 10 day time limit that The Mozilla Foundation set.

Last time we talked about Unicode and its benefits. If you've decided you want to reap those benefits yourself, here's how to convert a Linux system from another encoding system to Unicode.

Microsoft says its IP indemnification provides better protection than that offered by rivals Red Hat and Novell - but not all lawyers agree. In a email, sent to Microsoft customers and partners on Wednesday, Steve Ballmer claimed that Windows was a better choice than Linux. His reasons included Microsoft's old favourites of total cost of ownership and security, but also included a relatively new weapon, IP indemnification.

Contending that it’s just too difficult to build applications that respond to events in the real world using current programming languages, iSpheres Corp. is offering an open-source, copyright-free SQL-like language for processing these kinds of requests.

Hardware Acceleration Delivers Wire Speed Performance to Award-Winning Security Software Provided to Systems Integrators and Network Equipment Vendors

NSW Commerce Minister John Della Bosca has ruled out umpiring government contracts in an effort to promote open source, saying individual agencies would choose their own software.

And this comes straight from the horse’s mouth! Software giant Microsoft has finally acknowledged Linux as its strongest competitor, much to the delight of Australia’s open source industry association (OSIA).

Computer Associates International on Monday plans to widen the field for open source alternatives to commercial databases with the general release of the Ingres r3 database on the Linux and Windows platforms.

Deciding to switch to Linux is one of the daunting questions every CIO must continually evaluate. Fortunately, the answer is getting simplier as Linux evolves into the enterprise-ready versions making their way onto the market today.

Last month Michal Zalewski posted to the Bugtraq security mailing list the results of a small experiment he carried out involving feeding randomly generated HTML pages into some of the Web's most widely used browsers. The results were somewhat alarming. All of the open source browsers Michal tested crashed when faced with this kind of input. Only one browser stood up well against this type of stress test. Which one? A round of applause please for, er, Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

The Office of Government Commerce has made recommendations that public procurement of software should consider open source solutions, citing, amongst other case studies, the experience of a Dublin-based hospital that made significant savings in transferring all its software to open source.

Microsoft chief executive officer, Steve Ballmer, has acknowledged Linux as the "only game in town" when it comes to competing with the proprietary software heavyweight's offerings, Australia's peak open source body claims.

Delivers High-Performance, Enterprise-Class Relational Database Management Solution to the Open Source Community

Lulu, founded by open source pioneer Bob Young, has opened a new software marketplace geared at allowing individual developers and projects to publish boxed sets, CD/DVD media kits, and printed docs and e-books themselves, and drive proceeds and donations back to the projects.

MontaVista has agreed to provide Linux "platforms" to NEC for its hardware reference designs for mobile phones, digital consumer devices, and car navigation systems. NEC, meanwhile, will join MontaVista's hardware vendor self-certification program, and will resell and support MontaVista Linux.

Security-software vendor F-Secure Corp. last week introduced two open-source products that let administrators route Windows security reporting through a single Linux-management interface.