The 22-year-old behind Everex CloudBook's Linux OS, Jan 16, 2008

A little more than a year ago, David Liu was sitting in a lecture hall at UCLA. After graduating, Liu worked as an IT contractor for several months before starting Good OS.

By announcing last week it would begin providing indirect technical support for OpenOffice.org, Sun Microsystems Inc. took another quiet step towards admitting that the 'freemium' business model it has employed for the past five years has been -- at least in regards to sibling StarOffice -- a failure.

After spending the past month with the Eee, the answer for me is still no. For sure, the Linux-based, 2-lb. Eee is an all-in-one wonder that I enjoy using as much or more than most of the notebooks I've owned in the past. It has exceeded my expectations in many areas.

Linux was in use on 0.6% of PCs worldwide, according to Net Applications. Despite its small share, Linux's slice of the market has nearly doubled since the beginning of the year.

As Microsoft's Office Open XML document format remains in ISO limbo, a trio of countries are pushing forward an adoption of the alternative Open Document Format (ODF) instead, according to an ODF advocacy group.

There's a scene in the 2004 movie Mean Girls in which the most popular girl in the film's fictional high school finds out that a friend who now is a fast-rising social rival plans to throw a party without inviting her.

Consider the similarity between Angelina Jolie and the One Laptop Per Child project. Both garner gobs of favorable publicity for their humanitarian work that overshadow, in Jolie's case, her recent dry spell at the box office, and in the OLPC's case, its lack of a proven business model.

The U.S. delegate organization to the powerful ISO standards body is now almost sure to vote against approving Microsoft Corp.'s Office Open XML document format as an open standard this year.

A young maker of Web-based project management software is jumping head first into the open-source world as a way to woo users from the dominant, but possibly vulnerable, Microsoft Project.

The head of the open-source group that will decide whether to certify Microsoft Corp.'s "shared source" software licenses as open-source licenses said that more than half of Redmond's licenses appear to automatically fail the group's rules.

Mårten Mickos is living proof that you can take 12 years to graduate from college with an esoteric degree (technical physics) and still become a CEO. Not that he was slacking:

In a resounding victory for Microsoft Corp., bills seeking to mandate the use of open document formats by government agencies have been defeated in five states, and only a much-watered-down version of such legislation was signed into law in a sixth state.

In a move against Oracle, Red Hat has started providing tech support for business software running on its Enterprise Linux.

Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday signed a broad cross-licensing agreement with close partner Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. that includes a controversial provision granting the Korean electronics conglomerate rights to patents Microsoft claims have been illegally borrowed by the Linux operating system.

The International Standards Organization (ISO) agreed Saturday to put Open XML, the document format created and championed by Microsoft Corp., on a fast-track approval process that could see Open XML ratified as an international standard by August.

Is open-source still a grassroots social movement made up of idealistic underdogs trying to revolutionize an amoral industry? Or has it become a cloak used by IT vendors large and small to disguise ruthless and self-serving behavior?

Novell on Tuesday said it plans to seek out more deals similar to its recent marketing and licensing pact with Microsoft as it embraces partnerships and moves away from selling its open-source software directly to small and medium-size companies.

Novell Inc. on Monday distanced itself from comments last week by Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer that the Linux operating system infringes on Microsoft patents, although the two companies said that their recently-unveiled alliance remains intact.

In comments confirming the open-source community's suspicions, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer Thursday declared his belief that the Linux operating system infringes on Microsoft's intellectual property.

Google is reportedly experimenting with the open source version of Sun's Solaris operating system as a possible long-term prelude to replacing its massive global network of Linux servers.