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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.

Kernel 2.6 is finally here, and it touts several enhancements over the 2.4 series. The press has highlighted changes relevant to systems architects and managers, but there's plenty in 2.6 for application developers, too. This month's column provides an overview of some updates and new features in 2.6, including filesystem support, threading library changes, and the new kernel-level profiler.

In some of my past columns, I've mentioned that my template system of choice is the aptly named Template Toolkit, a marvelous work by Andy Wardley. Although I've demonstrated how I've used the Template Toolkit (TT), I haven't really talked enough about what makes it so wonderfully useful. So, this month, let's take a more in-depth look at the wonders of TT.

April's "API Spy" introduced Python's C API and showed how a Python interpreter can be embedded in a C program. For many tasks where you need to run a Python script from within C code, last month's technique is sufficient. However, as your C programs and Python scripts evolve, you may want or need more advanced interaction between the two languages.

Whether you're an independent web site operator or the manager of a large web serving farm, you must constantly look for ways to optimize your environment to keep costs low and boost overall performance. Indeed, optimization has recently become something of a crusade for businesses, as many search for ways to yield even the slightest improvements in profit.

Much to my surprise, IBM and Sun are at least talking about an open source Java. However, I doubt it'll happen. I mean, Sun won't even agree to play with Eclipse, and, let's face it, Java is a far bigger deal than standards for integrated development environments.

It is unclear whether international workers wearing blue helmets will soon be distributing bootable Linux CDs to the world's population of computer users, but the United Nations has launched a new free and open source software promotion effort dubbed the International Open Source Network (IOSN).

My good friend and colleague Brian runs a small, family-oriented, seasonal greenhouse business. This year, Linux is in season, since it solved a nasty stability problem that was plaguing his Windows server.

IBM on Monday will unveil free developer resources for Cloudscape, a small-footprint, Java-based database that the company recently contributed to the Apache Software Foundation as an open source project.

Sensing increased opportunity in India, Red Hat India, the leading Linux applications and open source provider, is doubling its headcount in the country to 100 in the next 12-18 months.

Free version of Open-Xchange Server now available for download across all major Linux platforms

os-cillation, a german IT company, just released Xfld 0.1, a GNU/Linux distribution derived from the popular Knoppix distribution. It features a recent snapshot of the upcoming Xfce 4.2 as desktop environment. Xfld - Xfce Live Demo - boots from CD-ROM and provides a complete GNU/Linux operating environment without the need to install anything, but it can also be installed to hard disk for daily usage if one decides that one likes Xfld.

Novell engineer and manager Allison Singh recently predicted in an Africa-based tectonic magazine article that Windows will become a niche operating system, replaced by Linux as the new standard. A gestalt of recent trends, events, and stories should tell you that this prediction is right on the money. A gestalt, by the way, is a perception or conclusion that goes beyond the sum of its parts. Here are three of the many parts that comprise the gestalt.