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You may have heard about the Kathy Sierra case, which has been spreading in the blogosphere like wildfire for the past couple of days. In case you haven’t heard about the news, here’s a quick synopsis. Sierra, a prominent female blogger, decided to withdraw from participating in a workshop at O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference and decided to stop writing on her blog because of the death threats and crude sexual comments that she has received in the course of four weeks.

Although a lot of software is free these days, unless you’re using Linux, you’re still going to have to drop some cash on an operating system upgrade.

I have been watching the trends being set forth by Linux vendors for sometime now. While keeping a close eye on public reactions, I have seen great reaction from the educational sector, while observing lukewarm results from the office space.

Now, we have to ask, based on the offered survey, who do you believe will be the distribution winner here? Ubuntu, SuSE, or Red Hat/Fedora? Without question, Red Hat/Fedora is not even on the ticket for most people. A fine option for sure, but there are not enough people to make this happen.

Lately, I have watched various companies make marketing blunders on a near everyday basis. Some in the general media, others in niche arenas, where most people will never see just how huge of a mistake was actually made. But all of them aside, Novell has had the pleasure of topping them all and solidifying fears that many Linux users share, with one single statement. The kicker is that they did not even make the mistake themselves, not directly anyway.

Our product activation servers perform a more rigorous analysis of the keys that are sent up for activation than the local key logic does. Producing keys that will ultimately activate is less likely than just hitting upon one that will pass the local logic.

I just wrapped up a productive dialog with an individual who heads a company tasked with video distribution. During the dialogue, I found myself questioning the wisdom of GPL in all things. That’s not because I don't believe that the GPL is a solid open source license mind you, but rather how it can encourage creation while inhibiting growth at the same time.

Consider this: you have document after document tied up into formats, such as Outlook, MS Publisher and so on. Now, with Outlook, I "believe" the data can be exported without too much trouble. But last time I checked, your Publisher files were stuck as is, period.

Linux has developed quite a reputation since its creation. While the world was using Windows and a select few were using the Mac OS, this new operating system comes into the picture in a sly take it or leave it fashion. It wasn’t for everyone, and the technical competence that was required to even accomplish the most basic tasks proved to be too much for anyone that had a life away from the computer.

My wife and I recently came back from a business trip from Paris, and even though we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, it was a long week of living out of a suitcase, and when we boarded the plane after twelve security checks in the airport, we were both ready to try to relax and not think about the jetlag that would result from our long flight back home.

Apple has given Windows and OS X users the joy of watching the kind of programming, with music and video, that has left many of us in the Linux world drooling with envy.

Do these numbers make sense to you - $2,500 versus $100,000? This is the price difference felt between migrating over to Linux or instead, upgrading to the next version of Windows. What's interesting is that I’m noticing that more often than not Novell is the company making this possible for schools.

If there is one thing that seems to be standard in the open source world, it would seem to be the abundance of overlapping projects that might be better suited to work together rather than completing software visions on their own. Today, we are going to look at the trend and even consider some examples.

I recently discovered that Google is taking a leap into the enterprise world with their web based applications. And to Google fans,

The time for adoption has never looked better, but unfortunately, we are still sitting on some very serious problems that will continue to make sure that Linux is seen as "unusable" as possible to those who are in the mainstream world.

By now, many of you may be wondering why Dell is passing up such a great niche market by not offering Linux as an alternative OS option to Windows. We have talked about how this would only prove to benefit a company like Dell, but we have also acknowledged the fact that it will likely never happen.

I’m sure that I have spoke of open source business models in the past - both from the user and corporate point-of-view. However, the one thing that I don't believe has been fully explored is whether there is a viable way to monetize one’s efforts, and do so in such a way that your offerings remain accessible to all.

It's a fair question, I think. Should Linspire give up Linspire 5.0+, contribute time and resources to Freespire (amongst other distribution projects) and concentrate on making Linux services the core aspect of their company? Before we try and answer this on their behalf right away, let's take a look at the current state of the market.

Windows users prefer self-executing application installers, and for the most part, they get the job done well. But those of us on the Linux side of the fence have long since been content with Deb and RPM packages, among other application packaging options.

Those of you who are outside of the Linux circle of influences must have heard about Eric Raymond's rejection of Fedora in favor of a distribution that he believes will better serve his needs.