HP: Linux adoption a long-term process, Mar 30, 2006

Businesses deploying Linux should be driven by long-term planning rather than doing it "because they can", Hewlett Packard vice-president Martin Fink said, during his presentation at the Sydney Linux World Conference and Expo yesterday.

Enterprise Linux software vendor Red Hat Inc yesterday said quarterly profit had more than doubled thanks to strong subscription sales from its business customers.

But forget this hype from Microsoft or any other software provider. As in everything else, let your business needs decide what is best for you, for the history of software development is a game of leapfrog.

I received an email from a close friend asking me to help educate the city manager in Tuttle, OK about Linux. I told him I prefer finishing a "hack" on securing SSH. Here's why I'm through orchestrating efforts for Linux in Government.

Software patent campaigner Florian Mueller revealed this week that the City of Munich's decision to stall its Linux migration was the result of a PR stunt by anti-patent campaigners.

A renewed bid to register the word "Linux" as an Australian trademark must meet an early April deadline or face defeat.

We developed the GNU operating system so that we could control our own computers, and use them in freedom. To seek popularity for our software by ceding this freedom would defeat that purpose. Therefore we have designed Version 3 of the GNU GPL to uphold the user's freedom to modify the source code and put modified versions to real use.

Sun Microsystems' open-source strategy, or what some see as a lack of it, and its refusal to open-source Java have come under question again, this time by a former staffer who left Sun to start his own company.

Peter Yared, founder and CEO of San Francisco-based ActiveGrid, has posted an open letter to Sun President and Chief Operating Officer Jonathan Schwartz on his Weblog, asking for some clarity on the Santa Clara, Calif., company's open-source software strategy and questioning why it was fine for Sun to open-source Solaris and StarOffice but not Java.

"GPL 3 is like GPL 2," Moglen says. "It wants you to be able to use free software in combination with non-free software, providing you do so in ways that don't obscure the user's rights in the free software parts."

The former CIO of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Peter Quinn, says calculations his team did for upgrading office software for 50,000 desktops showed that Microsoft Office 2007 would cost four times the price of an Open Office solution.

This time it's patents that will ensure the downfall of GNU/Linux and with it, the entire world of open source. But before hanging up your certified geek propeller-hat and retraining as a dental hygienist, you might want to consider the following brief history of Microsoft's use of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) as a weapon against GNU/Linux.

The KDE Project Tuesday announced immediate availability of KDE 3.5.2, the second maintenance release for the latest generation of the popular free Linux/Unix desktop.

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