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Having spent the last six years overseeing the acquisition of, integration of, and partnership creation with open source software companies—and managing open source litigation, I am still surprised by how little CIOs truly understand about open source software's potential benefit and impact on their companies' fiscal and legal health. With 80% to 90% of Fortune 1000 companies using open source, it's here to stay—as are the licenses and obligations that come with using it.

If you are an old school Linux or Unix user, you probably remember the System Administrator's Tool for Scanning Networks (SATAN). In 1995, SATAN brought browser-based network auditing to the world. Despite its initial splash, SATAN fell to the wayside due to lack of updates. Thanks to the kind folks at the Advanced Research Corp., SATAN is back, in the form of the Security Auditor's Research Assistant (SARA), a kinder, gentler, easier to use, and more updated auditing tool.

In November, Real Networks opened its Rhapsody.com online music service to non-Windows clients, a venture widely touted as the first "legal" online music service available to Linux users. How does it measure up?

The Persistence of Vision Raytracer (POV-Ray) graphics software has existed for 15 years under a license designed to keep it free and open. But with continued confusion as to what that license allows, the POV-Ray developers are looking for something new.

Gentium is something new in fonts. Its design is a mixture of the practical and aesthetically pleasing. It support the diacritical marks needed to render a wide range of Latin characters, yet it is also designed for readability, compactness, and visual appeal. What is really unusual is that its designer, Victor Gaultney, has released it under a free licence and is developing it as a free and open source project.

Desktop Linux specialist Xandros Inc is targeting the education sector with Education Edition of its Xandros Desktop OS Linux operating system with prices starting at $10 per seat for student use.

Although Microsoft is becoming an increasingly formidable rival in the same space, IBM, Sun, Oracle, and many other vendors are now responding to renewed opportunities for Linux in department store environments, as retail chains like Circuit City, Pep Boys, and Urban Outfitters start to step to 100-percent Linux deployments on their store-level IT systems. Jacqueline Emigh reports from this year's National Retail Federation show.

Alcatel, Ericsson, Motorola, NEC, Nokia and Siemens launch industry alliance to boost the use of free software in the telecommunications arena. Better interoperability between providers is high on the new alliance's agenda.

The company has been integrating large amounts of PC real estate into the processor, or the associated chipset, for some time. The graphics controller is one obvious example. But now it is looking at what constitutes a 'server' and starting to identify that functionality as targets it can integrate into its own architectures.

Linus Torvalds has weighed in on the debate over the draft of version 3 of the GPL in a post on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) this afternoon. Torvalds says that the Linux kernel "in general" has always been covered under version 2 of the GPL, and that that isn't going to change.

At the ceremony for the 2005 Free Software Awards, Richard Stallman presented Andrew Tridgell with the award for the advancement of free software. Andrew "Tridge" Tridgell was recognized for his work as originator and developer of the Samba project. Samba reverse-engineered Microsoft's version of the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol, which is used for file-sharing and print services.

David Madie is on an unusual mission: He is filming a documentary about the African free and open source software movement and the inspiration for the film is well-know African free sofware advocate James Wire from Uganda.

Clearly, March of the Penguins is coming to a living room near you; and I'm not talking about the DVD release of the acclaimed penguin documentary. Last week's news of Motorola purchasing Swedish set-top box maker Kreatel Communications is another step towards the "Linux-ification" of the digital home.

SOCORRO, N.M., Jan. 25 /PRNewswire/ -- FSMLabs, (http://www.fsmlabs.com) today announced ARINC 653 scheduling is now available in RTLinuxPro(R). Designed for avionics control and advanced hardware-in-loop simulation, ARINC 653 provides a fully protected and partitioned scheduling environment configured using a standard XML format. The ARINC scheduler has been added to FSMLabs' industry leading Process Space Development Domain (PSDD) product which executes real-time threads in the address space of Linux or BSD processes. Richard Bond, in his work as Principal Real-Time Specialist for Lockheed-Martin developed an RTLinuxPro based simulator, contributes:

Pay per use tech slots into Tivoli

As VoIP moves into the mainstream, certain trends are strengthening, such as the availability of open-source software; while others are changing, such as how international service providers are deploying VoIP.

The Internet Telephony Conference and Expo in Ft. Lauderdale this week is spotlighting these trends for more than 8,000 attendees at the Broward County Convention Center.

Open-source guru Mark Spencer, president of Digium Inc., says the company is not planning a major follow-on to the popular Asterisk open-source platform, but is still adding new features to the platform. “I think Asterisk as a platform has a lot of life in it,” he says. However, Asterisk users can look forward to new features such as integrating video. Digium has done a technology demo with Grandstream Networks Inc. showing video voice mail, and is working on tighter integration with video conferencing. The company also plans to boost the performance of its server to handle more calls

After several years' work, a team of young Linux experts from Serbia has released Atomix Linux 3.2 to the public. Considering the long development period -- more than three years -- my expectations were fairly high, but Atomix met my expectations.

Novell Inc. and Concurrent Computer Corp. said yesterday that they will jointly sell and support a real-time version of Novell's SUSE Linux operating system aimed at banks and telecommunications providers.

As part of the CIO Network's ongoing series of discussions focusing on the challenges that chief information officers face, Forbes.com technology reporter Rachel Rosmarin spoke with Tony Redmond, vice president and chief technology officer of Hewlett-Packard's Services division and Security Program Office. What follows is a transcript of their conversation.

You can't simply cp a CD image onto a new disk. For this task, you need the cdrecord program.