"So I was a little surprised to receive email a couple of days ago from Microsoft saying they wanted to contract someone independent but friendly (me) for a couple of days to provide more balance on Wikipedia concerning ODF/OOXML. I am hardly the poster boy of Microsoft partisanship! Apparently they are frustrated at the amount of spin from some ODF stakeholders on Wikipedia and blogs. I think I’ll accept it: FUD enrages me and MS certainly are not hiring me to add any pro-MS FUD, just to correct any errors I see." So basically, it seems as if Microsoft is trying to 'hire' people to edit Wikipedia.

"So, you're tired of Windows and thinking of trying Linux. There are lots of good distros, RedHat or Novell have all the enterprise cred you might need. And there's a support community too, it's a no brainer... Well, that's all true enough – but why not try Solaris - in its OpenSolaris form - too? It's just as available, at Open Solaris.org, where there's a pretty active community going."

"Oracle's Linux initiative has so far failed to make a serious dent in Red Hat's business or even in its stock price. Red Hat is actually worth slightly more today than it was when Larry Ellison launched his apparently not-so-scary RHEL clone the week before Halloween. But it is a little early to conclude that we are living in the best of all possible worlds for Red Hat. True, the company's financial results for the November quarter reassured easily-stampeded Wall Street investors who panicked in the first days after Oracle's announcement. But the fact remains that Red Hat's stock is worth 25% less today than it was a year ago. This decline reflects fundamental concerns not about the immediate threat from Oracle but about the long term value of Red Hat's business model."

"Novell signed a business agreement with Microsoft last year, and many in the open source community started taking shots at Novell. Others in the community are now jabbing at each other, with the rhetoric level rising. The latest rumble began with words from Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu Linux project, lobbing some criticism at some of his for-profit competitors in the Linux distribution arena."

Linux, the free operating system, has gone from an intriguing experiment to a mainstream technology in corporate data centers, helped by the backing of major technology companies like IBM, Intel, and HP, which sponsored industry consortiums to promote its adoption. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, with the system's penguin symbol, will assist the Linux Foundation. Those same companies have decided that the time has come to consolidate their collaborative support into a new group, the Linux Foundation, which is being announced today. And the mission of the new organization is help Linux, the leading example of the open-source model of software development, to compete more effectively against Microsoft, the world's largest software company.

After more than two years of development, Xfce 4.4.0 has just been released. Xfce 4.4 features new tools such as the much awaited Thunar file manager as well as several improvements in its core components. Benedikt Meurer had also prepared a tour for the newcomers.