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A senior Linux community member, speaking exclusively to LXer.com, has dismissed Windows' reputation as a secure platform as a "myth", claiming that the proprietary development process, coupled with a lack of corporate accountability creates fundamental security problems.

As a consultant to small businesses trying to get up to speed on Linux, my must-have applications are OpenOffice.org, MySQLAdmin, and Rekall. I'm going to include Knoppix as well; although it isn't an application in the sense of being a single package, I use it as a system recovery tool rather than an operating system.

Considering the capabilities of Samba 3 and what they could mean for your workplace network.

Start-Up Developing Commercial Open Source Software for Transaction Grid Computing to Join OSDL Data Center Linux Working Group

The first Linux Netwosix Virtual World Community is born! If you're a Netwosix user please join our community to interact with the other one. If you have a problem with Netwosix or you just want to talk about Linux, if you want to improve our work or if you just want to help us to grew up, join the first Linux Netwosix Virtual Community at : http://www.netwosix.org/community

In a classic illustration of the kind of junk Linux users DON'T have to suffer, Ed Foster identifies some people about to be genuinely disadvantaged by Microsoft's Genuine Advantage program.

Activists at the World Social Forum, where Microsoft is viewed as a corporate bogeyman, urged developing nations yesterday to leap into the information age with free, open-source software.

Every Open Source developer uses or has used GNU make at some point or another. Everyone who has ever compiled a piece of Open Source software has used GNU's make. So what exactly is GNU make and how does it work? Leave that to O'Reilly. The 3rd Edition of 'Managing Projects with GNU Make' tells you all about using GNU make and more. LinuxForumsDOTorg has brought you a review detailing the content and quality of said O'Reilly publication. Read it here before you buy!

The CentOS Development Team has released CentOS 4.0 (Beta) for three architectures (i386, x86_64, and ia64).

Blake Ross has written two weblog postings on Mozilla Firefox. One clarifies the developer recruitment policy and the other talks about how the project doesn't take itself too seriously.

Czech Post is the second largest employer in the Czech Republic with nearly 3,400 post offices and 40,000 employees. The company delivers nearly a billion letters and receives more than 100 million postal orders each year. Czech Post considered upgrading its existing hardware, but that would have required significant updates to its APOST software and increased training costs. As a foundation for a new and centralized system, Czech Post selected SUSE LINUX technology.

The Public Patent Foundation and others have serious questions about Sun's new open-source patent policies.

Growing support for Linux has been the single biggest technology change in financial organisations over the past twelve months, say researchers

From the Lorma College in the Philippines comes another server release. This time it is a dedicated Samba fileserver based on Slackware 10. This is a departure from their desktop releases in that the have decided to use Slackware instead of Fedora.

Open source database software maker MySQL warned its users to tighten security Thursday, after news broke about a new Internet worm that targets the popular relational database, according to a company executive. The company is looking at making bigger changes to harden its product against future attacks, the executive said.

Networking software giant Novell Inc wants to do two things this year – position itself as the preferred Linux supplier, and establish a proper “ecosystem” for its partners, be they independent software and hardware vendors (ISVs and IHVs) or resellers.

There was a partnership made this week that is probably scaring the pants off of Bill Gates and the people behind Internet Explorer - Google is shacking up with Mozilla to form Googzilla! Well, not exactly, but close enough. Just as Mozilla makes Internet news of securing almost 6% of the web browser market with FireFox - which has been downloaded an estimated 19 million times, Google starts offering positions, free lunch, and in-house dental benefits to the top Mozilla developers Ben Goodger and Darin Fisher.

Evans Data Corp.'s Winter 2005 Database Development Survey looked at the database preferences of some 406 developers in mostly medium to large enterprises. Of those surveyed, 23 percent of developers picked Firebird for use in "edge" databases—in other words, those that are embedded in systems or in devices, such as a point-of-sale system in a retail outlet or a network device. Runners-up included Microsoft Corp.'s Access, at 21 percent, and Microsoft's SQL Server, at 13 percent. RFID tagging will likely fuel interest in Firebird, said Joe McKendrick. McKendrick is an analyst for Evans.

Two software vendors announced a new partnership that pairs an embedded Linux distribution with a Java solution for next-generation mobile phones.

Commentary: There are a lot of good reasons to like the GPL: the GNU Public License. For one thing, it's a David and Goliath kind of thing. It's the little guy standing up to the corporate behemoths that run rough-shod over our daily lives by virtue of their influence, legal and otherwise, on government. For another, it's virtuous. It's a Medicare Bill which actually provides more and better health care for the elderly rather than simply pouring public funds directly into the greedy, gaping gaws of the pharmaceutical industry. It's also territorial. It's "Don't Tread on Me" applied to software. The GPL provides a legal framework for an ever improving, ever free, software infrastructure. In addition, it's what Linus chose for Linux in order that those who follow can have access to his creation. But what I love about the GPL is the same thing that Microsoft and other corporate predators hate about it: it works.