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Program harnesses power of the open source community to identify security vulnerabilities before they are exploited

Longtime Microsoft partner Unisys has begun offering Linux from Red Hat and Novell on its multiprocessor servers, a change of heart that reflects a new seriousness about the open-source operating system.

Sun Microsystems is toying with the idea of buying Linux seller Novell, saying that springing for the $2.64 billion company would hurt rival IBM.

Open Source Risk Management, who offers litigation insurance policies, has found nearly 300 patents that could theoretically be used against Linux. How risky are these patents? How much should you be concerned?

Linux potentially infringes 283 patents, including 27 held by Microsoft but none that have been validated by court judgments, according to a group that sells insurance to protect those using or selling Linux against intellectual-property litigation.

Following are some of the notable technology-related events scheduled for the week of Aug. 1.

The proposed operating-system migration of the City of Munich's 14,000 desktops from Microsoft to Linux was placed in jeopardy Friday, when a Munich alderman petitioned the Bavarian city's mayor to examine the status of software patents in the European Community.

Linux on the desktop might mean freedom from software-licensing costs for some IT departments. But when it comes to evaluating desktop Linux’s TCO, it’s the human cost that is most important. According to industry research company IDC, the staff-related costs of system administration, support, development, and training typically amount to between 50 and 70 percent of the costs of the average enterprise application, when measured over a five-year period. By comparison, software costs for both client and server software total only 8 percent to 10 percent of TCO, IDC reports.

It’s one of the perennial questions facing the open source movement: Is Linux ready for the corporate desktop? Ready or not, Linux is coming.

The Oracle-IBM feud over Linux will ratchet a notch higher at LinuxWorld next week, what with the lethal anti-IBM weaponry Mike Rocha will be packing.

User experience, application availability, ease of maintenance, and stability are often chief concerns when deciding whether to deploy Linux on the desktop. For the Allied Irish Bank, however, the decision to move the 8,000 clients in the company’s U.K. retail banking network from Windows to Linux had more to do with the server than anything else.

OSCON, Portland, Ore -- Talk of a new type of software development community that spills into more traditional communities such as towns, churches and country clubs was matched with a new kind of pick-and-choose, componentized Linux distribution, and renewed efforts to push Gnome to desktop success at OSCON's second to last day.

Linus Torvalds has said that he thinks Linux on the desktop is at least five years, maybe 10 years, away. There are many folks who want to prove him wrong, and perhaps that was his impetus. Regardless, for desktop Linux to succeed in the corporate network, vendors must concentrate on management.

Gary McGraw is perhaps best known for his groundbreaking work on securing software, having co-authored the classic Building Secure Software (Addison-Wesley, 2002). More recently, he has co-written with Greg Hoglund a companion volume, Exploiting Software, which details software security from the vantage point of the other side, the attacker. He has graciously agreed to share some of his insights with all of us at LinuxSecurity.com.

One of the more divisive concepts in IT these days is Linux on the desktop. There are those who would prefer nothing else, pointing to myriad security and stability problems found in Microsoft operating systems, and there are those who would prefer it not at all, talking about wide disparities among Linux distributions, insufficient management tools, the lack of certain software, and esoteric hardware compatibility issues.

A major hurdle for any Linux desktop rollout is hardware compatibility, or lack thereof. Whether leveraging older hardware or rolling out new systems, ensuring that every component in the desktop works as it should is key.

Novell plans to release a new version of its flagship server Linux product on Tuesday, built around a recent update to the core of the open-source operating system, sources said.

The final day at OSCON kicked off with an encouraging and standing ovation-evoking keynote from Cartography Associates President David Rumsey, who laid out how open source principles may be applied to an emerging "digital library world." That was followed by a Novell talk about the success of switching from proprietary to open source, a discussion of some "nonsense" economic theory, and a call for open source to step up and help feed a big, bad gorilla known as King Kong. Earlier OSCON stories: Day one, day two, day three, day four.

Xandros Inc. has released a new version of its business Linux desktop with upgraded Windows integration features. The OS is an evolution of Corel Corp.'s Debian-based distribution, acquired in August 2001, and the company is one of the few Linux distributors with the desktop as their primary focus. Unlike the consumer-oriented Linspire (formerly Lindows), the Xandros Desktop OS is made to work with Windows networks, supporting Windows network file sharing, network authentication on Windows NT Primary Domain Controllers and Active Directory networks, NT log-on scripts, SAP and Citrix thin clients and IBM Terminal Emulators.

Raising its stakes in open-source software, IBM plans to create an open source project around Cloudscape, a specialized Java database, CNET News.com has learned.