A free education, May 24, 2006

My sister Erika's second grade primary school class had a problem: it had four old computers running Microsoft Windows 98, and no educational software for the computers. The computers were used mainly for viewing children's educational Web sites, and playing simple Macromedia Flash games. I decided to introduce free software into her classroom. The results were heart-warming.

My current favorite desktop Linux is OpenSUSE 10.1. I can say all kinds of good things about it, except when it comes to the package manager. Unfortunately, the package manager, which the administration tool YaST uses for adding new programs and updating old ones, currently has serious problems.

Desktop sales played a big role in Hewlett-Packard's recent news-making profit gains. In the future, Linux will figure prominently in HP desktops, says Christine Martino, vice president of HP's Open Source and Linux Organization. She's not predicting an overthrow of Windows desktops anytime soon, though.

Linux isn't just for servers and desktops. It is also for embedded devices such as cash registers and kiosks. Perhaps more than any other commercial Linux distributor, Novell Inc has been active in fomenting the use of Linux in point-of-sale devices. NCR Corp is the latest vendor to sign up to use SUSE Linux on its own brand of point-of-sale gear.

Open Invention Network (OIN), the company formed by IBM, Novell, Philips, Red Hat and Sony, unveiled today some of the new patents it has acquired in order to protect the Linux environment. The new e-commerce and Internet-related software patents will be offered royalty-free, along with OIN's existing intellectual property portfolio, to its licensees.

The business models associated with open source software -- code that is open to developers and freely distributed -- are rapidly evolving, but still nascent. Recent events show one thing clearly: there is money to be made in open source. Not content to rest on their laurels while smaller open source players garner market share and revenue, both Oracle and Red Hat recently struck deals that have thus far proven to be wise.

The Java platform will be directly available on open source systems such as Linux, according to an announcement made at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco last week.

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