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Experts believe this latest customer relationship management product could force down the cost of CRM and make rival vendors such as Salesforce.com raise their game. Open source CRM vendor SugarCRM is about to launch an on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) product that it says will set busineses back just a fraction of the cost of Salesforce.com's offering.

Microsoft is having difficulty convincing the Open Source people that its Sender ID is now kosher. Microsoft has re-submitted its SenderID standard to the Internet Engineering Task Force after it was rejected because of difficulty over licensing arrangements.

In the past couple of years, technologies such as intrusion detection and protection systems have become mainstream tools in the corporate security arsenal. But many feel less than satisfied with the performance of some of these technologies. In particular, the number of false positives - when a legitimate piece of communication is flagged as being a possible security threat - is proving to be expensive for organisations in terms of the amount of time IT staff must spend dealing with what is actually legitimate traffic.

Although Sun is planning to show off Solaris 10 next week, there are signs that it will take a while for the open source version to hit the shops. Glenn Weinberg, vice president of the Operating Platforms Group at Sun, told internetnews.com, here, that it could be months before an open source Solaris 10 is available.

Tarantella has announced a key reseller partnership with IBM, as part of the company's effort to recast itself as a viable alternative to Citrix in enterprise data centers that are embracing Linux.

Patents pose equal danger to all classes of software and in some cases the free and open source genre may have less to fear, the senior counsel of the Free Software Foundation says. The FSF is the principal organisational sponsor of the GNU Project which was launched by Richard M. Stallman in 1984 to develop a complete UNIX style operating system which is free software.

Gated communities are popping up all over the country, in every echelon of society. Security at such communities really does seem to be more urgent when you've got people like Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston living in your neighborhood; not only do you have to keep pesky fans out, but you have to be able to get those cops in quickly to answer domestic dispute calls. Plus, the residents of Country Club of the South in Alpharetta, Ga., where the Houston-Browns and several other big-name celebrities and sports stars make their home, have lots of parties for all their famous friends, and famous friends don't like to be left out in the cold because the guard can't find them on the guest list.

Sun Microsystems demonstrated what it calls the third generation of desktop computer accessibility technology, which it hopes to start shipping for the Linux operating system next year.

There have been a lot of articles written recently about the Firefox web browser as it nears 1.0. I've used Mozilla or other Gecko-based browsers as my main browser for quite a long time, first with Mozilla and then a few years ago Galeon. I particularly loved Galeon's tabbed browsing features and configurability (something Mozilla didn't have at the time) and other nice features such as vi-style navigation (using h,j,k, and l to move left, down, up, and right respectively, just like in vi).

News from the Mozilla project.

New features include Saved Search Folders (aka Virtual Folders) which allow you to display messages based on previously set search criteria across multiple folders. Message Grouping allows you to organize e-mail in a folder by grouping them based on various attributes like Date, Sender, Label, etc. Thunderbird 0.9 also includes numerous bug fixes and other improvements.

The Firefox developers please ask that you look at the following areas: site authentication (especially over SSL), extension installation via update.mozilla.org and other sites, MacOS X builds, and software update - "we're making another attempt at this. We think we've got the bugs from RC1, so please test by following these instructions."

Top Open Source Innovators Gather for Three-Day Show; Open Source Applications Foundation Chair Mitchell Kapor to Speak

In my previous article, I introduced some of the exciting new tools people are using to manage information on the Web. One of these is del.icio.us, which is best described as a social bookmark manager. The concept of del.icio.us is simple: every time you come across an interesting site, use a bookmarklet to type in a few keywords about the page, and save it to del.icio.us Web site. All saved bookmarks are public and everything is available through RSS feeds. Like any useful tool, del.icio.us has attracted a number of extensions and improvements as people figure out new ways to use it. Here are a few of those tips, tricks, and tools for del.icio.us that I have found particularly useful.

Much of the attention that Linux has received has been focused on its growing use in servers. However, Linux scales down as well as it scales up, and as a result, Linux has become an ideal operating system for a wide variety of systems. Nowhere has this been more evident than the world of embedded computing. Here's why.

The 2.6 kernel includes many new features and improvements over previous releases. Kernel developer Andrew Morton provides a personal tour, describes what lay ahead for 2.7 and beyond, and explains how others can contribute to the Linux core.

With the recent acquisitions of Ximian and SuSE, Novell Chief Executive Officer Jack Messman has transformed a marginalized company into a mover-and-shaker. Look out, Red Hat - and Microsoft - Novell has big plans for Linux.

Back in 1985, in my last year of graduate school, I was lucky enough to get a "real" office, including a door, a lock and key, a telephone, and a shiny, new Sun 3/110 workstation. After timesharing with the general population on VAX 11s for three years, the Sun machine was a godsend: a bitmapped screen, shell windows, and all the processing power of a 16 MHz 68020. (Man, those were the days!)

In case you don't have your map of Linux-related litigation handy, the docket for the SCO Group looks something like this.

To paraphrase a famous maxim, "Oh, what a difference a decade makes." The emergence of the Internet over the last ten years has brought extraordinary changes to software development. Because of the Internet, large amounts of useful, well-engineered code are now widely available, and much of that code is available for free or under generous licensing terms. Moreover, there's little distinction these days between developers and end-users: end-users have capitalized on the newly-networked world to take an active role in the development and enhancement of products that many of us use every day.