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Eric Raymond's recent attack on a Microsoft recruiter has sharply divided the Linux community, with some applauding his bluntness and honesty, while others accused him of exaggerating his own achievements -- not to mention exhibiting immature behavior. Yes, Raymond could have been a little more subtle in his reply, but when a company such as Microsoft attempts to recruit one of its most scathing critics, and an ardent supporter of competing products at that, one cannot help but feel such an answer was appropriate, given the absurdity of the circumstances.

SAN FRANCISCO - Admission to the Web 2.0 Conference costs $2,800. That's a big chunk of change, but the place is sold out, and the small conference rooms and the one large presentation hall are beyond full most of the time. I've asked several dozen attendees (out of about 800) if they felt they were getting good value for their money, and all of them have said "Yes." But given some of the ideas floating through the halls, one might suspect their judgment.

Move could speed resolution of SCO Group's hot-button Linux-related suit against Big Blue.

One of the features some users overlook in OpenOffice.org is its built-in programming language, OpenOffice.org Basic. Why would you want a programming language built into your word processor? It's there to help you to automate tasks. It won't make the tea for you, but it will help you to carry out many repetitive jobs with a minimum of effort.

Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) is warning of the interoperability disadvantages and long-term higher costs of open standards and open source software again, this time calling the Massachusetts directive adopting the OpenDocument format as standard for the state "bad procurement policy."

This week, advisories were released for gtkdiskfree, util-linux, ClamAV, loop-aes, helix-player, backupninja, squid, mysql, ntlmaps, mysql-dfsg, gopher, prozilla, cfengine, mozilla-firefox, apachetop, drupal, mailutils, egroupware, arc, mod-auth-shadow, mason, slocate, vixie-cron, net-snmp, kernel, openssh, binutils, perl, and gdb. The distributors include Debian, Gentoo, and Red Hat.

SAN FRANCISCO - Last night I was derelict in my duty. Instead of going to a supper billed as a "Conversation with Microsoft" I left the Web 2.0 Conference for a few hours and went to the Web 1.0 Summit at a bar a few blocks away, where we all pretended it was 1998 and presented can't-miss dot-com business plans to each other. But I have some serious observations about Web 2.0, too.

Nessus -- once billed as "the open-source vulnerability scanner" -- is changing its ways as of the 3.0 release, which is expected shortly. According to a recent post on the Nessus Announcements mailing list "Nessus 3 will be available free of charge, including on the Windows platform, but will not be released under the GPL." On its web site, Nessus now just bills itself as "the network vulnerability scanner."

If you want to make use of open source software on a Macintosh running OS X, you have plenty of options. The Fink project modifies Unix/Linux open source packages to run on Mac OS X, and gives users the ability to build from source or download precompiled binaries. Many open source packages have native OS X versions -- Firefox, Thunderbird, Abiword, Nvu, and the GIMP among them. But if you dig deeper, you will find quite a few Mac-only open source software gems. Here are a few of the best open source programs written specifically for Mac OS X.

When I first heard of MitraX, I thought it was just a Linux distribution with an assortment of network tools, and that working with MitraX would come down to typing endless commands at the console. Perhaps such a distribution would be interesting to a few experienced administrators or skillful hackers, but most users would simply run away from it. However, once I tried MitraX, I was pleasantly surprised to find it a nice, little, stable, and practical live CD distribution.

SAN FRANCISCO - Every time I go to a conference that doesn't specifically revolve around free and open source software I turn on my "Open Source Software Radar" (OSSdar) to see if I detect any signs of non-proprietary life in the area. This year's sold-out Web 2.0 Conference had so much open source going on that my OSSdar receptors went into overload mode. Even the Microsoft guys talking up MSN Search had Firefox and OpenOffice.org icons on their laptops.

Once quiet on computing grids, the software giant is upping its commitment to high-performance computing and grid industry standards.

A handful of open source and free software projects tend to get most of the attention. The GNU Bayonne project, a telephony server that is used for a wide range of voice and telco applications, is one of the stealthy ones. We caught up with David Sugar, maintainer of the Bayonne project, to learn about the status of Bayonne, its history, where it's going, and where the project got its intriguing name.

U.S. Patent Office rejects claims on popular FAT storage format, used in the open-source OS. But software giant can pursue issue further.

Won't do the same for the open-source OS that it did for Apple's software--at least for now, an exec says.

Having allowed hype to build following Sun President and Chief Operating Officer Jonathan Schwartz's blog entry on October 1, the announcement of a "strategic partnership" between Google and Sun Microsystems may have meant something big, but neither company revealed much of what they plan to do.

Software issues push back the launch of device geared for Web surfing and e-mail use.

A major update to the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), widely regarded as the leading free software raster image editing program, is scheduled for this month. The 2.4 release is expected to include a number of new features and enhancements to existing features.

OpenAdvantage is an IT consultancy based in the West Midlands region of the United Kingdom. As the name suggests, OpenAdvantage deals strictly in open source software solutions, providing its clients with everything from a basic introduction to open source, to custom development services. The best part? It's all free -- free as in beer.

The companies team up to enhance software applications for law enforcement and other emergency service providers.