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One of the most critical parts of Java development is understanding the complete state of a development effort as quickly as possible. That's the goal of Apache's Maven project, which released its milestone 1.0 release this week. "Maven has a long history of pushing out beta after beta, so this is definitely an important release," Jason Van Zyl, Maven architect release manager, told internetnews.com. "For users it means that they will have something reliable now for their production builds."

Patch management vendor Shavlik Technologies took its first step away from Windows Friday as it shipped an agentless patch management solution for Linux. HFNetChkPro for Linux 2.0, which uses the same technology as Shavlik's for-Windows HFNetChkPro, supports Red Hat Linux clients, and doesn't require any software to be installed on the end user machines.

In a laudable effort that has resulted in systematic migration of over 500 desktops as well as servers from Microsoft Windows to the Linux platform, Delhi based Om Logistics has immediately realized a cost saving to the tune of more than Rs 2 crore per year. What’s more, the company has forgotten what dealing with the menace of viruses and worms is all about.

It powers more than 70 percent of all Web servers and routes much of the world's e-mail traffic. It makes surfing the Internet simple and provides the muscle behind Google Inc.'s search engine and countless e-commerce sites. It's open-source software, a wide spectrum of programs developed not under the lock and key of a single company but by the communal efforts of volunteers who often start with little more than common interests and e-mail discussion groups.

In the GNU General Public License (GPL), Richard Stallman was working toward a noble purpose. Software should be free-as-in-freedom, and every user should be able to obtain the source code for the software they use. Unfortunately, that isn't the way things have turned out. The GPL has come to resemble digital rights management (DRM) more than it resembles freedom. Does that sound a little extreme? I'll explain.

Whether you're just sick to death of Windows problems or you're looking for a better return on investment, lightweight approaches to the Linux desktop deserve your attention. OK, so you're ready to at least start thinking about switching to a Linux desktop. What should you be looking for?

All Government technology procurement will now have a preference for open source software (OSS), under the Malaysian Public Sector Open Source Software Masterplan made available to the public this morning.

Sometimes calling something free might not make for the best publicity. Such was the case with FreeCraft. This open source project began with much promise — an engine that game developers or hobbyists could use to create real-time strategy (RTS) games for Linux, Windows, and other platforms. It also annoyed game developer and publisher Blizzard Entertainment (renowned for its RTS franchises Diablo, StarCraft, and WarCraft) for two reasons.

But when will we see real gains in information technology mindshare?

This series explores the sort of technologies we could use if we were to build a new platform today. In the first part I described a system with a multi-core multi-threaded CPU, FPGA and Cell processors. In this second part we start looking at the Operating System.

PHP 5, which was released earlier this week, is the first major release of PHP in years to focus on new features.

Another open source collaborative group was created recently, as part of an effort to share code and spread software development efforts among governmental and non-profit organizations. The Government Open Code Collaborative (GOCC) is designed to let agencies and entities in the public sector more easily share software code and homegrown applications. The project was created because many state and local CIO offices oversee similar projects - electronic voting and car registration, online tax payment systems and public document sharing.

Sun Microsystems said it is hatching a plan to release parts of its Java Enterprise System (JES) to the open source community. The network computer maker confirmed the strategy Thursday but provided very little in the way of details.

Our finest exports are software and IT-related. Yet we in India use very little of our own products and services. There are a number of fairly obvious reasons for it. We cannot mass-produce IT services. Hence the cost of development is the same whether it is for a foreign client or an Indian. In fact, the development costs may even be lower for foreign clients if we factor in some risks. Indian clients are new to IT and hence their requirements may be prone to greater change (and even confusion) especially at the late stages. Contract re-negotiation may be very difficult because Indian clients normally feel they are paying far too much as it is. That is why IT services are not affordable for many Indian organisations.

To the uninitiated, the basic idea behind the open-source Mono project--to bring .Net to Linux--is kind of hard to grasp. How can Microsoft's .Net development platform, which is all about making life easier for Windows programmers, be used to write applications for Linux, Microsoft's bete noire?

"The tide is finally beginning to turn: after years of increasing monopolization of the Web browser market, Mozilla-based browsers (browsers based on the Gecko rendering engine, that is) are now gaining modest but noticeable market share," the Mozilla.org Web site stated Thursday.

Silicon Graphics Inc. is building an Altix supercomputer for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) that will run a single Linux operating system image across 1,024 Intel Corp. Itanium 2 processors and 3TB of shared memory.