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To say one could see a train wreck coming from hundreds of miles away when the Linux kernel development process switched to using BitKeeper to manage development is to make an understatement of the largest kind. The idea that the best known Free Software kernel would be developed with the aid of a non-Free development tool just seemed peculiar at best and dangerous at worst. OfB's Timothy R. Butler asserts that the moral of this story is one that every business ought to pay attention to.

As my colleague John Fontana wrote in a recent story in Network World (link below), Linux-based messaging systems are catching on. Many users are starting to migrate to Linux-based servers for hosting applications such as e-mail, calendar and collaboration. But another aspect of messaging that is also heating up in Linux land is voicemail and unified messaging.

Towards the end of last year, when I was speculating about what might happen in the area of e-government this year, I said that open source software would start to make a greater impact. I know there are many people who consider open source to be the only way to go forward and that any government not fully committed to it is in some way remiss.

Round Two, a start-up company based in California, launched its website this week and announced that it is working on products and services for use with the Firefox browser. The company was started by former Mozilla marketing head Bart Decrem, who was on board for the Firefox 1.0 release. Round Two is currently developing extensions and enhancements for Firefox, including integrated anti-virus software.

Yesterday we look at three useful Firefox extensions -- small applications that add functionality to Mozilla's Web browser. Here are a few more favorites.

Penguins climb the steps to the Capitol on the cover of last week's Federal Computer Week magazine. Inside, Tom Adelstein, co-author of Exploring the JDS Linux Desktop and regular contributor to Linux Journal magazine, writes about the various open source success stories in the US federal government.

the first Mandriva Linux release is now available! Mandriva Linux Limited Edition 2005 is a transitional release which provides all the best and up to date open source applications to power-users, 32-bit/64-bit trouble-free coexistence, capability to boot from a USB key and many other features, with an excellent stability.

Stanford law professor and free software advocate, Lawrence Lessig, has called on the open source community to stand up and fight or risk being buried by patent-wielding legacy businesses with arsenals of powerful lawyers.

Microsoft continues to add more material to its 'Get the Facts' Web site to bolster the case for Windows against Linux. The latest addition, which was posted last week, describes a series of tests that were structured to determine which production X86-server environment was easier to set up and run--the one running Windows Server 2003, or the one running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3. We'll give you one try to guess who came out on top. (Here's a hint: It wasn't the Linux.)

As many as 98,000 people die each year as a result of preventable medical errors which Free and Open Source electronic medical records software could reduce, according to an article at LinuxMedNews.com. "A contender in this area is the Veterans Administration (VA) public domain VistA codebase and large community," the author writes.

Startup Round Two announces plans to build software and services that make the Firefox browser consumers' control panel for all web activity.

It takes a while to get the hang of mail merges, but OOo 2.0's new Mail Merge Wizard helps make them easier to use.

Earlier this year, free software and Samba developer Andrew Tridgell was named as the second Open Source Development Labs fellow, sharing the title only with Linux creator Linus Torvalds. Downplaying the moniker and claiming to be more of a "bloke" from Down Under, where he continues to work, Tridgell -- known by many as "Tridge" -- explained that his move from IBM to OSDL was really meant to give him more time to focus on the newest version of Samba4, a FOSS file, and print server for Windows. He talked about the latest version of the software that "opens Windows to a wider world," along with a few other subjects, in a recent email interview with NewsForge.

Businesses of all sizes are moving to Linux and other open source software because the up-front investment is low, even though the learning curve for installation, support, and validation might be steep. New companies are springing up to help the enterprise deal with complexities that come into play after open source adoption.

With new features in the latest version of MySQL, like subqueries and a new binary format, the company has become a stronger competitor against much larger companies, and seems poised to bite into their revenues. Even more importantly, MySQL might actually spark some fundamental changes in the market.

Welcome to this year's 15th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. After an unscheduled downtime of one major host in the Debian network the machine is available again, but suffered from gross filesystem corruption.

Being the kind of technical person you are, you most likely identify with the old-time hacker ethic and disdain the popular use of the word "hacker" when "cracker" would be more apropos. Well, Eric Steven Raymond, co-founder and president of the Open Source Initiative and ex-board member of VA Linux Systems, is of a similar mind.

Begins testing support for forthcoming dual-core processors in its first update to its Red Hat Enterprise Linux software.

New version features enhanced security features and improved interoperability.

Novell is targeting the Linux operating system at the retail industry via a new point-of-sale/service package based on its SSE Linux Enterprise Server and Novell Linux Desktop products.