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Setting up an electronic greeting card site for your own purposes is easier than you think. There are at least two respectable well-maintained open-source-licensed applications that can help you get your holiday e-cards to friends, family, co-workers, or customers this season. Sendcard and Penguin Greetings can give you the bragging rights to say you run your own e-card service.

Perhaps I was over-zealous in my praise of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in Part One of this article, “Free as in Freedom: GNU/Linux.” That would be unfair to many major corporations and the state of the world they’ve created. Lots of people, especially “successful” Americans, like the world just the way it is. Oh well. It was a history of “GNU beginnings,” the start of a movement that, unlike anything we’ve thus far seen, said “No!” to the corporate-defined order and created an alternative to corporate rule by “copyright,” and an operating system that challenged the way certain corporate monopolies have defined our desktops and how we use them (or go directly to jail).

Three versions of open source Solaris 10 are in the works, as Sun Microsystems Inc prepares to convert its entire middleware portfolio to a pay-per-use, open source stack.

For the past couple of weeks in the "NetWare Tips" newsletter, I've been talking about the soon-to-be-available (or maybe not) NetWare client for Linux. This is something that fans of NetWare and Linux have been kvetching about for at least the past half-dozen years.

MySQL announced the general availability of a set of graphical query and administration tools for its popular MySQL open source database. MySQL Query Browser, a toolset for creating and debugging MySQL database queries in a graphical environment, gives users an easy way to access and analyze information stored within MySQL database servers.

Sun Microsystems says there is growing interest among governments around the world in deploying open source software, particularly in Europe where the European Union has legislated that file formats must be open and interoperable.

If you ask Scot Melland, it's a good time to be a Linux professional. IT jobs across the board are picking up, but Melland, the CEO of Internet career site Dice, says Linux knowledge is a particularly hot commodity. Job postings on Dice for Linux professionals are multiplying at a much faster rate than any other skill set.

An updated Linux vs Windows TCO study has found that a 250-seat company can end up saving 36 percent if it were to equip its users with the open source operating system and applications that run on it.

The latest major release of Mandrakelinux, 10.1 Official, is now available for public download! Empower yourself with all the new and stable 10.1 features.

Mandrakelinux 10.1 comes with a great selection of software which we have covered at OSDir in our wide selection of screenshots of this distribution. Our screeshots include Installation, Desktop, Taskbars, Menus, and Configuration on the default KDE. We've also grabbed some shots of the GNOME, WindowMaker, and IceWM desktops for your viewing pleasure.

Sun's open-source license proposal for Open Solaris will surely be unpopular.

What if you need to run your legacy Windows application on a Linux box, a Mac, or a Solaris-based workstation? To make the equation even more interesting throw in a few requirements -- add transferring old legacy accounting data over the network, or using the backed-up data from a CD-ROM. And yes, you want to keep the costs to a minimum. An open source project called Bochs may be your best option.

Open Source advocates have kicked up a fuss over a contract given to Microsoft in the Netherlands this week. The Dutch government had been negotiating with Microsoft for desktop software, valued at €120 per PC. The contract is for five years, and covers over a 1/4 million government PCs. The deal could be worth as much as $200m to Microsoft. The Register notes that the Dutch government negotiated in private with Microsoft on a massive contract that is required by law to go up for public tender. The article also highlights the fact that in 2002 the Dutch government voted "to guarantee that by 2006 all IT systems in the public sector would operate on open standards".

IBM and Integrated Technology Group (ITG), a leading Jordanian software house, have announced today the completion of a major project where they have ported an open standards version of ITG's EduWave e-learning platform to run on the Linux operating system.

A local educational software company, Integrated Technology Group (ITG), has completed a project with IBM enabling its EduWave e-learning platform to run on the Linux operating system. As a result of this joint effort, IBM will support EduWave as part of its open source e-learning solution platform for Middle East markets.

Linux For the Rest Of Us 2nd Edition, a concise, inexpensive computer guide that helps "the rest of us" learn and use Linux productively, is out from Eagle Nest Press LLC. The author, Mark Rais, painstakingly clarifies distinctions between today's various flavors and the most popular desktops. Each chapter strikes a balance between presenting essential tips to a completely new user, while also giving concise answers for those with plenty of training but little time.

Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the creation of debugfs, an in-kernel filesystem designed to help kernel developers easily export debug data to userspace. (Greg's debugfs has nothing to do with the ext2 file system debugger of the same name.) He offered a little background information on the idea, "a while ago a comment from another kernel developer about why they put a huge file in sysfs (one that was bigger than a single page and contained more than just 1 type of information), was something like, 'well, it was just so easy, and there was no other place to put debugging stuff like that,' got me to thinking." He went on to summarize, "debugfs is meant for putting stuff that kernel developers need to see exported to userspace, yet don't always want hanging around."

James Thompson introduces you to the tough state in which the church is today, in regard to software usage, and takes a peak to FOSS as a solution.

JBoss on Monday plans to flesh out details of its open source middleware stack consisting largely of existing software technologies, with the company intending to fill out the stack over time.

Is spyware slowing down your surfing? If so, you may want to join millions of others who are hopping off the Microsoft Internet Explorer merry-go-round and jumping on the Firefox browser bandwagon.

Worldwide Linux server customer revenue is expected to reach €6.8bn in 2008, driven by a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.8 per cent, compared to the broad market CAGR of 3.8 per cent for the worldwide server market, according to a report from market advisory firm IDC.