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Dear Mr. Schwarzenegger, The purpose of this letter is two-fold: To congratulate you for your choice to utilize open source software in California in order to reduce operational costs. To warn you that the path you take in a different section of the cost-reducing white paper is dangerous and stands against the ideology of open source enthusiasts.

-- Novell Open Enterprise Server meets enterprise-class computing needs, incorporating the best from leading commercial and open source platforms along with integrated management, identity-based services and support ecosystem

-- Novell Virtual Directory Services is an Embeddable Identity Store That Aggregates Information From Multiple LDAP Data Sources

The head of Telstra's technology division opened up with both barrels last week over reports the Australian telco’s CIO, Jeff Smith, has been sidelined because of the failure of open source initiatives. In 2002–03 Telstra looked at replacing most of its Microsoft desktop systems with Linux and Sun's StarOffice, but according to The Australian newspaper, the open source initiatives failed to get traction and Telstra has re-signed its desktop services with Microsoft.

We took one more important change into the builds last night, moving from a blacklist to a whitelist for external protocol handlers, so today's builds are the new candidate 1.0PR builds. If all goes well with these builds, they'll become the official Firefox 1.0 Preview Release builds on Tuesday morning. Please help us test these bits and if you find any major regressions, please file bugs and nominate those as PR blockers with the bug flag "blocking-aviary1.0PR?" so that the Aviary team will see.

When IBM Workplace Client Technology was introduced, some in the marketplace and press claimed the solution would bring applications and functionality to the open source that would rival the Microsoft Office suite of products, thus making Linux a desktop competitor to Windows. However, that unbridled enthusiasm, while understandable, is a bit premature and misplaced.

Among the most exciting things to come out of aKademy, the recent KDE Community World Summit, is a Qt port of Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine. This will give Gecko the full native look and feel of KDE/Qt, and make it available as a KPart, where it can provide an alternative HTML renderer for Konqueror.

A $500 cash prize will be awarded to users who identify and report security vulnerabilities in MozillaTM software. This initiative called the Mozilla Security Bug Bounty Program was launched last month by the Mozilla Foundation and is being funded by Linux software developer Linspire, Inc., and Internet entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth.

Intel is sampling a chip for wireless broadband modems that it hopes will greatly increase the number of global households with access to high-speed Internet service. The "Rosedale" SoC supports WiMAX, an emerging broadband wireless standard recently ratified by the IEEE. Rosedale targets inexpensive customer premises equipment (CPEs).

Fabless chip house SigmaTel will support Microsoft's latest high-end audio distribution standard in its line of codec chips, it says. The C-Major audio codec family is available with Linux drivers, and will support Microsoft Windows Media Audio 9 Professional (WMA Pro) in chips targeting PC-like devices and home-entertainment systems.

Engadget has published a seat-of-the-pants review of an in-flight entertainment system it says is based on embedded Linux. The review includes informal photos and a description of Matsushita Avionics Systems (MAS) eFX, an all-digital networked multimedia/data distribution system supporting satellite TV, mp3 playback, Internet access, and more.

Learn how you can browse effectively using the keyboard, filter away advertisements, make the fonts look nicer, ensure your privacy is not violated and more.

Like a sports car that combines a big engine with a small body, the Pogo Linux PerformanceWare 3564 3U server packs a lot of processing power into a relatively small chassis. And though it performs like a hot rod, comes fully loaded with software, and handles like a dream thanks to stellar management tools, the 3564 is priced competitively.

With much feedback on the lkml, Ingo Molnar has continued to improve his voluntary kernel preemption patch . Testing the patch has revealed a number of areas in the 2.6 Linux kernel that were causing high latency. Fixes have been created and merged as these areas have been located. For example, following Ingo's release of the -R6 version of the patch, Lee Revell reported that he was still able to cause measurable latencies by driving the server to swap. Ingo acknowledged that this was do to the get_swap_page() function which he described as, "pretty stupid, it does a near linear search for a free slot in the swap bitmap - this not only is a latency issue but also an overhead thing as we do it for every other page that touches swap." He went on to add, "this is pretty much the only latency that we still having during heavy VM load".

An exciting project that made a splash in the open source community recently is an open source project known as PearPC. PearPC is a PowerPC emulator for x86 computers. The software allows its user to emulate PowerPC-based systems so that you can run operating systems such as OS X, GNU/Linux for PPC and other OSes that were designed for PPC on x86. osOpinion/osViews had the opportunity to speak with the the lead developer of the project, (Sebastian Biallas) to answer some questions about its ongoing development.

A report published this week says that Linux is now a credible alternative for the core of the data centre, and will be one at the client end within two years.

By now, most Java™ programmers have heard of Eclipse, the extensible open source development platform that is rapidly becoming the most popular IDE for Java programming. If you are considering a move to Eclipse and are currently programming with Netbeans, this article is for you.

Novell became a major Linux promoter worldwide with the acquisition of the Ximian and SuSE Linux operating systems in the second half of 2003. Alan F. Nugent, CTO of Novell, explained that the open-source operating systems have not only seen broadening acceptance in server applications, but also in a wide range of other IT applications.

After storming into the Linux software market with its acquisition of Ximian and SUSE Linux, Novell decided it's finally time to show off. The Novell Linux Day roadshow began its 11-country tour in India last month, sending a clear signal of the South Asian country's importance to big open source players like Novell.

About a year ago, Scott McNealy said something that struck me as subtly wrong. I didn't think much about it at the time, but as I've been helping SDForum put together this year's Distinguished Speaker Series, I've been thinking about it more and more.