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Without question, open source is one of the most important forces in enterprise IT. Apache is still the reigning champion of Web server software. Red Hat and MySQL are two of the most-watched software vendors today. And the success of Linux is such that even Microsoft, once considered the unstoppable juggernaut of the OS market, is being forced to play defense.

OpenAdvantage, which has received funding from a regional government body, says its remit is to bring together people who provide something in the open source area with people who have software needs

The Linux Box is preparing to create an original internet radio show, which will air biweekly and provide the FOSS community with an audio format to help raise awareness of the many pertinent issues we are facing.

"IE has vulnerabilities that cannot be ignored, but with these vulnerabilities come fixes," notes Jupiter Research senior analyst Joe Wilcox. "If you fix the browser enough, it becomes more secure. So whether one is more vulnerable or not we will only see over time."

A great gift was left under the Christmas tree for the Linux community this past weekend. Referred to by its creator Linus Torvalds as "Woozy Numbat," the present is otherwise known as the 2.6.10 Linux Kernel release.

Welcome to this year's 51st issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Piotr Roszatycki reported that he has created preliminary packages for PHP5 already. We would like to thank all contributors and translators of this online resource who have helped provide high quality information to our readers. We are seeking more contributions in order to be able to maintain DWN in 2005 as well.

The open source Derby database engine provides developers with a powerful new tool for lightweight database development. Derby databases are file system based and portable across different types of systems. Because of this, a common strategy is to create databases at development time and ship them with the binary distribution as opposed to having it created on the fly.

Astaro's unified threat management package provides complete protection for the corporate environment

Monta Vista and other companies like Timesys have gone a different route by improving the real-time performance of the Linux kernel. This is done by tracking down the various routines that limit interrupt response time and recoding them more efficiently from an interrupt standpoint.

These are files for a coming release from Service Integrity, a company based in Newton, Massachusetts, selling software that helps businesses mine their data for customer leads. Each file highlighted in a bright color represents a match with known "open-source" code covered by a license. And each match represents a potential problem that Service Integrity must resolve. . Henry calls up a pair of windows crammed with identical lines of code. He quickly picks out an open-source file that is using borrowed code that can be traced to a popular Web site devoted to macabre puzzles.

Philadelphia-area small business clients money and make their computers more reliable by installing Linux and other open source programs.

An interesting dicussion on the lkml examined the efficiency of the inode cache in the 2.4 Linux kernel, discussing several tunables primarily helpful to systems serving large NFS or Samba mounts. In particular, a slowdown was reported on such a system easily reproducible by doing a find / while cat'ing large files to /dev/null. In a discussion between 2.4 maintainer Marcelo Tosatti, 2.6 maintainer Andrew Morton and VM maintainer Andrea Arcangeli, it was decided that this was likely due to too small of an inode cache hash table resulting in a large number of collisions. For the work case in question, some tunables looked to prove helpful. Going forward, effort might be made in 2.6 or beyond to improve the inode cache.

Starting a software company used to be hard work. Some smart people had a vision for a new product, obtained financing and spent months or years developing new software. But that's all changed now. All the smart people at Octane Security in Shakopee had to do was download some free Linux network security software from the Internet, tweak the code a bit and start selling it earlier this month for $2,200 to about $10,000, depending on the size of the network being protected.

The government on Tuesday said it continues to evaluate options for using open source software, a move which would proliferate the usage of IT by bringing down its costs.

The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), a global consortium dedicated to accelerating the adoption of Linux in the enterprise, today announced the creation of a Open Source Software Licensing & Legal education track at its upcoming Enterprise Linux Summit - January 31 through February 2, 2005 in Burlingame, CA. The track will focus on OSS Licensing and the impact of OSS on enterprise computing as its use becomes more prevalent.

New features, including bandwidth monitoring, increased spam protection and improved network management integration, have been added to Astaro Corp.'s Security Linux 5.1 operating system.

All the Linux flavors I have tried have no problem dual-booting with Windows, but how do you boot multiple Linux flavors, like Fedora and Ubuntu? This is a great way to have your favorite distribution on the first drive (hda) and experiment with the hundreds of others on a second drive (hdb). I found many procedures by Googling, but most of them concentrated on booting two distros on the same hard drive. However, this is a very simple procedure.

When I first saw rumblings in the trade press about Novell's new Novell Linux Desktop (NLD) distribution, I was confused at best. Novell's own press corps, impressive in terms of sheer volume, didn't make this clear. As shown in Figure 1, the splash screen for the installer leaves no doubt that this is a new and unique Novell product. However, there's a good deal of general confusion about how NetWare, SUSE Linux, SUSE Enterprise Server, various mail products, eDirectory, ZENworks, Ximian's desktop and Evolution mail client, and now the Novell Linux Desktop all fit together.

The Gyration Media Center Remote is a radio keyboard and mouse with 100-foot range. The mouse uses an accelerometer rather than a mouse wheel, and thus has the unique feature that you can make mouse gestures in the air. The mouse should be perfect for a public speaker who wants to move around during a speech, without giving up control of his laptop. It would also make a nifty remote for a Linux PVR user, since it has VCR controls and channel and volume buttons. But does it work with Linux? Bruce Perens tried it out...

If you received a TiVo DVR or a Linksys router for Christmas, the open source people should sing praises to your name. Linux is appearing in households around the world in millions of nice devices and is so well-hidden under GUIs and web interfaces that the average user doesn't even know it is there. This quiet proliferation of dedicated Linux devices has gone unnoticed by both the open source crowd (who should be standing up and shouting about it from the rooftops) and SCO's lawyers (who could stand to collect a tidy sum if they could win a case and collect a dollar per box shipped).