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Asterisk runs on a Linux server and does the job of a costly phone system. It handles conventional phones (Digium makes connectors that fit PCI slots) and Internet Protocol phones. It can even run on Apple OS X and Windows servers, though only for voice-over-IP because Digium doesn't have drivers for its connector hardware for those OSes.

The open source Evolution mail application has been successfuly compiled and run on Windows. This is according to a Novell developer who wrote about it in his blog yesterday. Although Tor Lillqvist has managed to run the application and send email from a Windows platform he says a general-user version is still a way off.

Desktop Linux vendor Xandros has updated its Business Desktop distribution to version 3.0, claiming the new version provides seamless compatibility with Windows servers, and that Linux is now ready for enterprise deployments.

The GNU General Public License ("the GPL") has remained unmodified, at version level 2, since 1991. This is extraordinary longevity for any widely-employed legal instrument. The durability of the GPL is even more surprising when one takes into account the differences between the free software movement at the time of version 2's release and the situation prevailing in 2005.

Last week at Red Hat's Summit, we indicated our intent to create a Fedora Foundation. This was communicated to many of you but we want this message to get to everyone in the community about our goals and vision for the Foundation. We would appreciate your input and comments.

Advances in open source, Linux in the enterprise and Microsoft on the outside looking in.

Most operating system reviews and developer interviews rely on technical points to explain what a project is about and what benefits users might derive from it. We rarely hear from the people responsible for the lion's share of the work in the open source software world. So here's a less technical interview with some members of the OpenSolaris development team.

The computer company's new BSD-licensed project should help quiet complaints that it uses code from the KHTML project without giving back.

The GNU General Public Licence version 2 was released in 1991. Since then the software sector and the free software landscape has changed significantly and the Free Software Foundation is working on an updated licence to account for a reflect these changes. Yesterday Richard Stallman and FSF legal adviser Eben Moglen released an article explaining a few of the issues at stake in drafting GPL version 3.

Why do I use a small project like Frugalware as my workstation operating system? Because it gives me the tools, simplicity, and fun I want in an operating system.

Just seven per cent of companies currently without Linux servers plan to adopt Linux during the next year, compared to between 12 per cent and 17 per cent when SG Cowen began tracking in 2003. SG Cowen surveyed 500 organizations.

The open source Eclipse Foundation has released Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (Birt) 1.0, a specification that developers can use to more easily build reporting capabilities into enterprise Java applications.

"The cornerstone of most open source application serving is the ubiquitous LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP/Python/Perl) stack. Yet it's not always as easy as you'd expect to get all the elements of the stack properly installed and working together. Enter XAMPP..."

ImpiLinux 2005, the homegrown South African Linux distribution making inroads into the SA market is an attractive and usable platform for users. Walter Kruse takes it for a spin to see see what has changed since the last big release seven months ago.

Just following the "big" Release we have a small one to announce: Debian AMD64 Port is now (since Wednesday, 8th June 2005) also declared stable. From now on there will be no changes to this archive, except for point releases which will be coordinated closely with the Debian ones.

The nature of the open source community is changing. I'm not exactly sure what "open source community" means anymore. When I first got involved with open source in 1998/99, the community was distinct: It was Eric Raymond, Bruce Perens, Robin Miller, and others like them. Developers. Gear heads. Hackers. Today, it's unclear whether that community still exists in any separate, discernible form.

Many software executives break out in hives at the mere mention of the GPL. Most likely, this is due to the GPL's "restriction on downstream restrictions," a clause that sets the GPL apart from other open-source licenses that allow downstream users to license derivations restrictively.

Like Firefox, Wine is open-source software that provides an important piece of the Linux desktop puzzle. IBM's reluctance to promote Wine underscores some of the complex legal and technical issues surrounding Linux adoption.

Scott McNealy defended his company's purchase of StorageTek, and laid into some old and new targets, at a Sun event in Scotland

You can talk all you want about how Mactels aren't going to be that wonderful, but if you want to see many enterprise Linux desktops around in 2007, start making it happen.