Linspire and Ubuntu team up against MS, Mar 14, 2007

Both companies believe that they will benefit in this partnership by promoting the adoption of Linux in the Microsoft dominated desktop market.

While everyone knows that Linux is now pervasive in IT organizations, the slippery nature of open source software makes it difficult to gauge how deeply it has penetrated into the data centers of the world.

Whether a new day has dawned is still up for debate. There are plenty of skeptics, but under Hilf's direction Microsoft is a far cry from the days when president and CEO Steve Ballmer publicly declared Linux a "cancer" that would eat away at intellectual property rights in the industry.

Dell Inc. began polling customers about their software preferences on Tuesday as part of an effort by the struggling PC vendor to meet a popular request for desktops and notebooks that run on Linux instead of Windows.

The HP company might start the production of PCs with preinstalled Linux system. However, the vendor's global initiative is not yet relevant in Russia. HP's Russian office said there is not much demand for open source OS in this country.

The good news, according to an HP executive, is that the company sees "the Linux desktop nearing critical mass." The bad news, for would be off-the-shelf Linux desktop buyers, is that it's still not there yet.

Red Hat has announced a major expansion of its global partner programs, including new channel programs to help increase collaboration between Red Hat and its partners around the world.

Vyatta is adding VPN support to the latest release of its open source router/firewall.

HSBC, the British-based banking and financial services group that has more than 125 million customers globally, is moving to standardize on a single Linux distribution: Novell's SUSE Linux.

The HSBC move is a direct result of the technical cooperation agreement penned between Microsoft and Novell in November 2006. As part of the agreement, the two companies committed to make their products work better together, to jointly build, market and support new solutions to improve interoperability, and to deliver new virtualization capabilities.

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