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Unlike the glittering spectacle of JavaOne and Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, the O’Reilly Open Source Convention hums so quietly in the catacombs of a Portland, Ore., waterfront hotel that even the hotel’s guests aren’t aware of it. Attendees drive long distances, bunk many to a room, and put their lives on hold to get here. It’s remarkable considering that, on paper, many in attendance can’t afford to be here. But they show up anyway.

The CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) is the backbone of the Perl community. It includes hundreds of modules that extend Perl in every imaginable direction: networking, directory services, XML processing, statistics, you name it. Before writing a substantial piece of new code, a seasoned Perl programmer will check CPAN to see whether an existing module can meet the need. The same holds true for users of PHP, Python, Ruby, and other dynamic languages.

Sun Microsystems President and COO Jonathan Schwartz made a dramatic debut in the blogosphere this summer. Anyone who has met Schwartz knows that he speaks passionately and persuasively about Sun technologies, and I’m looking forward to hearing more of his unmediated voice in his Weblog. One of his early posts (“Competing against a social movement”) got me thinking about how I ended up placing my IT bets on Linux (the “social movement” referred to in Schwartz’s blog) these past few years and, more importantly, where my platform commitments should lie in the future.

SAN FRANCISCO--Novell plans to release its new corporate version of Linux for desktop computers this fall, the first product to merge technology from the Waltham, Mass., company and two Linux specialists it acquired.

SAN FRANCISCO -- In 2003, much of the talk at LinuxWorld Expo& Conference was of the increasing worry about IP litigation involving Linux and Unix, especially emanating from Lindon, Utah, via The SCO Group. SCO had filed a $5 billion lawsuit the previous March against IBM, contending that Big Blue had knowingly misused and distributed SCO's Unix System V code within its AIX operating system. A lot of not-very-nice words were used last year to describe the litigation that SCO was initiating. This year, things were different; the name "SCO" was seldom heard.

Lindows, the Linux desktop software company changing its name to Linspire, lowered on Friday the expected value of its initial public offering.

Linare Corporation announced a professional version of the Linux desktop this week for corporate and government users.The company is offering a free evaluation copy throughout August.

Linux® and IBM POWER™-based processors combine to offer a solid platform for a huge range of applications and services, limited only by the needs of business and the imagination of developers. As one of the most widely ported operating systems in existence, Linux is equally comfortable on the desktop and in the data center, running on everything from game consoles to mainframes. POWER-based processors -- PowerPC®, POWER4™, and POWER5™ -- provide the heartbeat for an equally wide range of devices, delivering reliable, scalable performance.

As Google prepares for its initial public offering, the company seems to be more popular on the Net's back streets than on Wall Street.

The LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco this week put the spotlight on a growing opportunity for enterprise customers: the ability to integrate open source software into existing IT architectures from the data center to the desktop.

Debian is one of the fastest growing distributions of GNU/Linux, thanks in part to its Advanced Packaging Tool (APT). However, Debian is difficult to install for many new users. While many commercial projects such as Red Hat and Mandrake offer advanced hardware autoconfiguration, Debian relies on a user's knowledge of the underlying hardware. Enter Kanotix -- a bootable GNU/Linux distribution based on Klaus Knopper's Knoppix that uses mostly fresh Debian sid packages.

Google hacks are for real, regardless of what some uber-hackers may think or say. They can produce passwords, user IDs, credit card numbers, Social Security numbers, bank account numbers and routing codes, and more. They can also be used to troll for vulnerabilities. One quick example: using one of the simplest Google advanced operators in combination with another operator, I quickly found a number of Microsoft IIS 6.0 Authentication Manager pages exposed to the Internet on Army, Navy, state, and federal agency sites. In fact, finding the sites proved to be much easier than alerting them to the vulnerability.

A prediction that both IBM DB2 and Oracle databases would head toward open source in some way by the end of the year got a little more interesting as Big Blue announced a partnership with the Apache Software Foundation to release its Cloudscape Java-based database to the community, which is turning the database into an open source project called Derby.

the Wintel trade press is waiting to get their slice of the desktop Linux vendors' marketing dollars before they'll connect the dots and recognize the value of thin clients.

A look at the movement to convert Indian's voter lists to Unicode.

A new issue of the series "Application of the Month" has been released. It covers Konversation and interviews its maintainer Dario Abatianni. Konversation is a user friendly IRC client for KDE. You can read it in Dutch, English and German.

SAN FRANCISCO--A test version of UserLinux, a product intended to give corporate customers the utility of Red Hat Linux but not its price tag, is set for release at the start of September.