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Martin Taylor has worn many hats in his 11-year Microsoft career, from building channel programs in Latin America and the Washington, D.C., beltway to serving as Steve Ballmer's chief of staff. He has been a go-to guy at the Redmond, Wash., software giant, so it makes sense that he's tasked today, as general manager of platform strategy, to run the counteroffensive against Linux, the open-source phenomenon that poses perhaps the single biggest threat to the company since the U.S. Department of Justice . Taylor says he is taking a "facts-only" approach to beating back the Linux onslaught, devoting an entire Web site (dubbed http://www.getthefacts.com) to studies and surveys comparing Windows favorably to Linux. Can he stem the tide of developers who are flocking toward open source? Given Microsoft's might and resources behind its development community, he probably has some sway and influence here. He talked recently with VARBusiness senior writer Carolyn A. April about the Windows/Linux competition.

Hot on the heels of the release of Trustix Secure Enterprise Linux, we are proud to announce a range of pricing models engineered to suit the rapidly expanding requirement for the Trustix Secure Enterprise Linux platform.

I'm proud to announce that Custom Debian Distributions reached a new state and I want to attract the attention of the Debian community to this technique.

Most of what arrives at my mail servers is unwanted: viruses, spam, and executable garbage. Even if you're running something other than Windows on the desktop, the sudden appearance of a new virus can overwhelm your inbox. If you're an administrator, your users likely aren't as reliable about not clicking on attachments as we'd all like. Combined with the flood of spam and random garbage, putting a mail server on the Internet without filtering is like covering yourself with barbecue sauce and breaking into the Charity Home for Badgers with Rabies. Decent spam and virus protection measures can save you a lot of time and effort.

As there is so much controversy associated with the GPL - the Open Source General Public License, it makes a little sense to review the simple basic legal points involved - if for no other reason than to address the confusion caused by the SCO v IBM case.

This article by Movial Technical Manager Veli Mankinen introduces a GPL-licensed toolset for integrating, cross-compiling, and testing Linux software. Scratchbox provides a sandbox build environment that assures that the intended versions of libraries, headers, and other such files are used during the build.

Recognized as a high-performance, reliable, and serviceable enterprise platform, the 64-bit POWER architecture offers new choices to UNIX and Linux application developers. This artcle reviews the different POWER Linux distributions, the kernal optimization for POWER, GNU Compiler Collection and the tools needed to get started with enterprise Linux on POWER-based systems.

Matthew Szulik makes a very attractive target. The 6-foot-5 chief executive of Red Hat stands in the pit of a small auditorium at Stanford University's Gates (as in Bill) Computer Science Building. He has just wrapped up his presentation to 75 computer scientists on the future of software, and the grilling begins.

Open source vendor, Cybersource, has launched a small business Linux server and is offering dealers a 20 per cent margin – about $400 per unit. The Cybersource SBLS is designed to offer the features required by most small business at a more affordable price.

Red Flag Software Co Ltd and Miracle Linux Corp have announced the beta version of Asianux 1.0, a standardised Linux operating environment developed specially for businesses in Asia.

CNet reports that Corel has revealed a plan to test the market for a Linux version of Wordperfect. A Corel representative says that the software will be available via the company's website on April 15th and is expected to gauge interest in the product.

We are approaching the published end of life date for errata support for our final Red Hat Linux distribution. We'd like to remind you of this date and the options available to you for migrating your Red Hat Linux implementations: Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the Fedora Project.

A project to catalogue and describe security vulnerabilities, derived from the ideals of the open source movement, opened to the public yesterday (31 March). The Open Source Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) aims to plug what it sees a gap in information security market.

While acknowledging obstacles remain, a Sun Microsystems official on Tuesday left open the possibility that Sun might offer its Java programming language under an open source format.

JSR 133, which has been active for nearly three years, has recently issued its public recommendation on what to do about the Java Memory Model (JMM). In part 1 of this series, the author focused on some of the serious flaws that were found in the original JMM, which resulted in some surprisingly difficult semantics for concepts that were supposed to be simple. This month, he reveals how the semantics of volatile and final will change under the new JMM, changes that will bring their semantics in line with most developers' intuition. Some of these changes are already present in JDK 1.4; others will have to wait until JDK 1.5.

In this issue we cover the release of Fedora Core 2 test2, talk a bit about the X.org replacement of XFree86, have some Yum tips, look into SELinux again, and much more.

According to a security advisory [0] from the vendor, a vulnerability exists in the URL unescaping logic of the Squid Web Proxy Cache [1]. This bug could allow an attacker to bypass certain access controls by inserting a NUL character into decoded URLs. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) project assigned the id CAN-2004-0189 [2] to the problem.

The Mozilla Foundation's new Firefox 0.8 Web browser, once known as Firebird, is a great alternative for those who long for a change of pace from Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Several local root exploits have been discovered recently in the Linux kernel. This security advisory updates the mips kernel 2.4.19 for Debian GNU/Linux.

The Training Camp, education centers that offer IT certifications, has been designated an LPI-US approved training partner by the Linux Professional Institute. LPI offers vendor-neutral Linux certifications for IT professionals and enthusiasts.