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Debisys, a prepaid phone transaction service processor, thought it would be a Windows shop forever. Debisys runs Windows 2000 servers, a SQL Server database, and Windows desktops. "There was a perception that we'd always buy Microsoft software," says MIS Manager Mike Figeuroa. But that is all about to change. "We are doing a complete migration to open source."

Sun President Jonathan Schwartz explains in detail why Red Hat Linux is proprietary, but others disagree and wonder what Sun is accomplishing with its confusing open source views.

NEXT time you chat to a colleague about open source, take a moment to check you are both talking about the same thing: there's a good chance you are not.

Imagine for a moment that Windows XP came with Office XP Professional and Visual Studio .NET preinstalled with it. Imagine it was significantly more secure and easier to use. Imagine that it cost only $50 for all of that software. Sun's new Java Desktop System Release 2 is like the bizarro world equivalent of that kind of Microsoft software package. It's in the same league, except it doesn't use Microsoft technologies. If only it actually worked.

This week's little computer-based irritations have reached the overload state for me. I need to vent a little to folks who'll understand the frustrations.

By Cynthia Peterson. Confidence in Linux as a platform to run mission- critical applications is expected to rise in the enterprise market.

Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux operating system, on Monday announced the launch of the Linux Developer's Certificate of Origin (DCO), a new system

Scripting in the GNU environment and parsing HTML in bash.

Linus Torvalds trusts that when any of the 25 or so Linux kernel subsystem maintainers collaborating on the operating system send him code, it hasn't been stolen from anyone. Starting today, the approval process will be formalized to document a "chain of trust" to deter intellectual property claims like those leveled by SCO, according to a proposal from Torvalds and the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL).

A FORMER Red Hat employee now in the service of the Titan of Redmond has been openly slagging off open source to anyone that will listen.

Thanks largely to a preferred stock dividend payment, Novell reported a loss in its last fiscal quarter.

Anyone heading to the Cebit-America show in New York next week may want to check out the on-site Linux certification offerings being put on by the Linux Professional Institute.

ORLANDO, Fla -- The GigaWorld 2004 open source session I planned to attend yesterday at 3 p.m. was canceled at the last minute because the presenter got into a bicycle accident, so I decided to check out a "Vendor satisfaction survey" session instead. The one I happened to jump into focused on Sun, and it could have been subtitled, "I don't want to beat up on Sun, but..."

Opinion: David Coursey talks to MySQL and Red Hat executives, and finds Open Source isn't just for communists after all—there's a real business rationale for letting people have your source code.

IBM tightened its grip on the RDBMS (relational database management system) market just a little more in 2003, largely on the strength of versions of DB2 that run on its iSeries midrange servers and zSeries mainframes, according to a report released by Gartner's Dataquest division on Wednesday.

Ken Brown's forthcoming book, published by the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute, is embarrassingly mistitled Samizdat: And Other Issues Regarding the 'Source' Of Open Source Code. No doubt you've heard of it by now, although more than likely you've only heard Andy Tanenbaum and others respond to it more than anything else. It's basically the world's largest troll, seasoned with more than a hint of flamebait. In the history of publishing there has never been a less scrupulous work than this book. It's a stinging insult to real books and genuine authors everywhere, harming the credibility of all of us who write for a living.

chief executive John Thompson said Wednesday his company is considering whether to use Linux operating system software to run its desktop computers instead of

SCO Group, a Utah company, sued IBM in March 2003, claiming that IBM illegally contributed Unix code to Linux and seeking $1 billion in damages.

Security is a perennial concern for IT administrators. Managers need a framework to evaluate operating system security that includes an assessment of base security, network security and protocols, application security, deployment and operations, assurance, trusted computing, and open standards. In this study, we compare Microsoft Windows and Linux security across these seven categories. The overall findings of this qualitative assessment are that Linux provides superior to comparable security capabilities in comparison to Windows, except in the category of assurance -- for now.