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Here we are, December of 2004. Roughly 6 years after the government brought suit against Microsoft for blatant anti-trust violation. They had gotten into trouble for bolting Internet Explorer into Windows 98, remember?

Last week I was talking with a small business IT consultant who switches clients' servers to Linux (and Samba) all day long without any problems, but finds few clients interested in moving their desktops to Linux. The reason? "QuickBooks," he said. While there are many small business accounting packages that happily run on Linux, including GnuCash, Quasar, SQL-Ledger, and AccPac, QuickBooks dominates this market. And its loyal users don't want to switch to another package even if it's just as good as -- or possibly better than -- QuickBooks.

Red Hat would make an attractive acquisition target for Sun Microsystems, an analyst wrote Wednesday, as the computer hardware maker tries to catch up with rivals. Sun missed the Linux movement, which Raleigh-based Red Hat led, as competitors such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard embraced it. Now the company, known for its powerful computer servers, must take bold steps to recover, Merrill Lynch analyst Steven Milunovich wrote in a report to investors.

This well-written book by one of the leaders of the phpMyAdmin community covers a lot of ground--and might get you interested in working on the project.

Individuals who donated money to The Mozilla Foundation will see their names in print today

Vincenzo Ciaglia of Linux Netwosix talks about this year of Linux Security. A full immersion in the world of Linux Security from many sides and points of view.

Digital People, Inc is a software consultancy that specializes in assisting companies to exploit opportunities presented by open source software.

IDC on Wednesday painted an optimistic outlook for Linux over the next few years, predicting that overall revenue for desktops, servers, and Linux-compatible packaged software will reach $35 billion by 2008.

Michael Singer writes an interesting article today, "Linux to Grow Steady for Next Four Years," for Jupitermedia's Internetnews.com. He cooly states, "Linux is much more popular in the enterprise than previously thought, according to a new report out today." Given how grossly this understates the truth about GNU/Linux and its prospects, such tempered optimism deserves a cascading laugh track.

The Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving choice and promoting innovation on the Internet, today announced that it has placed a two-page ad in the December 16th edition of the New York Times. The ad, coordinated by Spread Firefox, features the names of the thousands of people worldwide who contributed to the Mozilla Foundation's fundraising campaign to support last month's highly successful launch of the open source Mozilla Firefox 1.0 web browser.

Authentication is easily one of the most critical services provided by your network infrastructure. It is the gatekeeper for every resource on your network. Workstations, applications, printers, and files would all be open to the world without a system of ensuring that only those people who need any given resource can gain access to it. Once you have accepted the fact that you need authentication, you must decide whether to stay with one network operating system in the interest of a completely homogenous network, or accept a "best of breed" system that will better fulfill your needs, even though it will complicate your environment. If you choose the second option, often times you are left with a management nightmare, where you have two, three, or even more authentication engines to maintain across your network operating systems.

A public meeting held to discuss the European directive on software patents has disappointed some anti-patent campaigners, who say their concerns weren't addressed.

Open source stacks such as XAMPP from Apache Friends are simplifying open source development by making it easier to write and distribute applications in a stable and standardized environment. Traditionally, AMPP -- Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Perl -- have all been installed and configured as separate products. The trend of combining them into integrated middleware stacks promises to make open source development more competitive with J2EE application development, at least for low-end applications.

PHP Development Team would like to announce the immediate release of PHP 4.3.10 and 5.0.3. These are maintenance releases that in addition to non-critical bug fixes address several very serious security issues.

Did he or didn't he? A cracker identifying himself as "ChineseSpyBoy" has been contacting news organizations -- including NewsForge -- the past day or so claiming to have broken into McAfee Inc. corporate servers and providing screen shots as evidence. McAfee says he did not break into their boxes but that he did compromise a partner's machine.

Once the hallmark of a laid-off dot-commer, the job title "consultant" is now legitimately paired with "Linux." Linux consultants, often called in to supplement the in-house staff of large corporations, are also finding fertile ground in the growing number of small businesses seeking powerful and cost-effective IT solutions that let them compete with bigger firms.

Open Sense Solutions LLC has launched a Linux-friendly multi-user PC unit that will support up to three users simultaneously, using any one of three distinct mice, keyboards, or monitors to access the same desktop software.

Phillip Lougher announced the release of SquashFS 2.1, a compressed read only filesystem. Significant speedups were achieved in this new version by indexing directories and sorting them alphabetically. To highlight this improved performance, Phillip offered some benchmark comparisons between SquashFS 2.0, SquashFS 2.1, zisofs, and Cloop. Other improvements include an increase in the maximum directory size from 512 KB to 128 MB, and up to a 25% performance increase in the mksquashfs utility.

Worldwide Market for Packaged Software on Linux Projected to Reach $14 Billion by 2008

During the past week at OSDir.com we kept our hands full, doing screenshot tours of Caos CentOS 3.3, OpenOffice.org 1.1 Draw, BeatrIX Linux November 04, Mandrakelinux 10.1 Official, and UHU-Linux Live 2.2. Be sure to head over and have a look.

A complete listing of our Linux and Open Source screenshot tours is here: shots.osdir.com.