Cuba Embraces Open-Source Software, Feb 19, 2007

Cuba's communist government is trying to shake off the yoke of at least one capitalist empire - Microsoft Corp. - by joining with socialist Venezuela in converting its computers to open-source software.

Sun Microsystems wants Internet developers to deploy their Web infrastructures on Sun's Solaris 10 operating system. Its three latest releases aim to help.

When the name of your product is Free Beer, the jokes are inevitable. And for the group of Danish students and artists who came up with Free Beer, that's part of the point, but only part. Because while the name of their beer is meant to be playful, the point they are trying to make with it is a rather sophisticated one.

Let’s be clear, Linux really isn’t the most lucrative platform on the market. It goes on the least expensive hardware, and much of what goes into it appears subsidized by other revenue streams. The marketing, such that it is, appears largely voluntary. The organizations that sit at the center, like the Linux Foundation, seem constantly underfunded or in the process of downsizing or changing leadership in preparation for downsizing.

The same week that Microsoft issued a press release providing further details about some of the technological advances that will result from the November 2006 technology agreement between Novell and Microsoft, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told Wall Street what he really thinks the deal means to Microsoft.

A spat between Linux creator Linus Torvalds and the GNOME desktop developers has been reignited and, if anything, it shows the different mindset that exists between the pure geek and the crowd who want to see commercial success.

In October, Oracle sent Red Hat’s stock plummeting on the announcement that it would offer cut-rate support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, under the “Unbreakable Linux” brand. Could Larry Ellison now be planning a repeat with “Unbreakable MySQL”?

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