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It wasn’t a bird, nor was it a plane. It was a 3,000-gram white weather balloon satellite, soaring over the trees in the MU Quad Saturday, the Mozilla Firefox logo affixed to its transparent frame.

A team, comprised of the Oregon State Linux Users Group, the OSU Open Source Lab and the NASA Space Grant Consortium launched the satellite balloon to commemorate the 100 millionth download of Firefox, the Mozilla Web browser that has computer enthusiasts, students and companies alike talking.

Linux is proving increasingly popular with governments across the world, with New Zealand's Inland Revenue becoming the latest government department to test the open source operating system.

When Laurence Millar, Deputy Commissioner for information and communication technologies at the State Services Commission, last week celebrated the negotiation of an all-of-government license agreement between the Department of Inland Revenue and Novell, hardly an eyebrow was raised -- except in the Green camp, which exploded in a fit of irrational exuberance.

NEW YORK - For the past two years, as its simple database program has grown more and more popular, MySQL AB has been careful to insist that its software did not pose a threat to database giants like IBM, Microsoft and Oracle.

Those days are over. Today, the Uppsala, Sweden-based company rolls out an upgraded version of its program with high-end features that will let MySQL go toe-to-toe with its bigger rivals.

Editor's note: Daniel Steinberg reports on some of the sessions and keynotes that spanned the first two days of O'Reilly's first-ever European Open Source Convention, taking place in Amsterdam. In one way or another, these sessions--by Jeff Waugh, Alan Cox, and Simon Phipps--focused on the user. For more news items, press releases, blogs, and photos about the convention, check out our EuroOSCON Conference Coverage page.

A deal has been struck to allow agencies throughout government access to open-source software and support from Novell at preferential rates.

The arrangement is a syndicated procurement contract, according to which a lead agency does the main deal and others are allowed access to the same products and services on the same terms.

Beginning with a review of the growth and size of the global and Chinese Linux software markets in 2004, the report analyzes competition situation in China’s Linux software market in the respects of product structure, market structure and brand competition structure. It takes a look at the characteristics of supply and demand in the market in 2004, and presents comprehensive evaluation of leading vendors’ competitiveness. Research findings show that in 2004,

If you’ve ever had to write a portable application in C, you’ve likely run into the same problem faced by countless other programmers: no matter how much you try to stick to a well-defined application programming interface (API), the program just doesn’t work the same on every platform.

While POSIX does a passable job of providing a portable API for most Unix and Unix-like platforms, POSIX either doesn’t exist on other operating systems or is so full of bugs as to be unusable. Moreover, POSIX isn’t always the best choice. Non-Unix platforms, such as Microsoft Windows, have their own APIs that are better mantained and perform better on that platform.

Partnership Brings HPC Capability and 10GbE Interoperability to Embedded Cluster Computing

Since the last Bug Squashing Party (BSP) we managed to keep the number of release critical bugs from growing which is better than we did after the one before but certainly not good enough.

NEW YORK - A quiet revolution is transforming life on the Internet: New, agile software now lets people quickly check flight options, see stock prices fluctuate and better manage their online photos and e-mail. Such tools make computing less of a chore because they sit on distant Web servers and run over standard browsers. Users thus don't have to worry about installing software or moving data when they switch computers.

Three recent moves by eBay, Google and Oracle are aimed at building global online communities that thrive on open standards.

When you install an application package in a Debian-based system, sometimes prerequisite application packages are unavailable. These missing packages are known as broken dependencies. Left unresolved, they can cripple your system's ability to install new packages. They're a disaster that isn't supposed to happen in Debian, thanks to the Advanced Packaging Tool (APT) and the scripts contained in Debian packages. That makes broken dependencies all the more devastating when they happen. Some users have even been known to reinstall the whole operating system, despairing of otherwise having a functioning package management system. However, depending on how the broken dependencies arose, you have several options to try before you consider reinstalling.

Free open source software took a further step toward meeting the needs of business users today with the release of Sequoia Open Source ERP. This suite of business applications brings a low cost, flexible, and scalable solution to businesses worldwide.

Why would you want to use a beta of Firefox when you an have a more stable release? The version that comes with Breezy Badger has a bad memory leak - and 1.5 runs faster.

The department has signed an umbrella contract with Novell that sets out the terms and conditions on which it can buy the SuSE distribution of Linux as well as a range of proprietary Novell software products. These include NetWare and ZenWorks, which it uses to handle email and project management.

If buzzwords such as tagging, blogging and feeds make as much sense to you as Uzbekistani politics, Flock isn't the browser for you.

On the other hand, anyone who writes daily blog posts, subscribes to Stuff's RSS news feed and shares their photos on Flickr will have cause to celebrate at Friday's preview release of the new software.

The universe of products is large and code quality varies from impressive to unreliable. But if IT managers choose the open source community's top products, they will find many solid programs that meet or exceed the capabilities of more expensive commercial alternatives, experts say.

[David Wheeler wrote this editorial in September. We link to it as it provides an unique perspective of issues. -ED]

A small UK graphics software house is desperately trying to fight its corner against Microsoft by giving away its software to any Linux user prepared to help the company.

Xara received some good news and some bad news in September. First Adobe acquired Macromedia, eliminating one of Xara's rivals and elevating the firm to number three in the UK vector graphics software league table.