Open-source spending in schools to surge, Jan 25, 2008

Educational institutions will increase spending on open-source software and services over the next few years, but that doesn't mean proprietary software will be left in the dark, according to a new report covering 14 countries.

Microsoft may not have beaten French Linux vendor Mandriva in a large deal to supply Nigerian elementary schools with laptop computers and software after all.

Canonical Ltd., the company that supports Ubuntu Linux, is trying to work out a deal with hardware vendors such as Dell Inc. to make Ubuntu available preinstalled on servers.

Canonical, the company that supports Ubuntu Linux, is trying to work out a deal with hardware vendors such as Dell to make Ubuntu available preinstalled on servers.

Dell plans to sell computers with preinstalled Linux outside the United States as well as offer the Ubuntu Linux distribution to small business customers.

In an exclusive interview, Bill Hilf, general manager of platform strategy and director of Microsoft's work with open-source projects, spoke with IDG News Service on the effects of the declaration on the open-source community.

When Firefox 3.0 is released later this year, the open-source browser is likely to contain a host of new features, including offline support for Web applications and new bookmark and search features. Mozilla released the second alpha version of Firefox 3.0 earlier this month.

The next release of the Debian Project's Linux distribution will run on AMD's AMD64 processors for the first time, according to the organisation's Web site.