The open source software development model clearly represents a profound and fundamental change from traditional, proprietary development models. In the proprietary world, a software company invests massive dollars in development, sales, and marketing.

The first draft of the revised GNU General Public License has been released for comment. The project will bring together organizations, software developers, and software users from around the globe during 2006, in an effort to update the world's most popular free software license.

More than ever before, information managers are under intense pressure to standardize their environments for the sharing of information - and to do so in ways that beef-up data security. That was the consensus of top IT experts who recently gathered for an industry summit webcast, 'The Case for Linux in the Federal IT Sector,' conducted by Larstan Business Reports.

In the past few years, there has been significant interest in using open platforms for building communication devices. Linux and open source platforms are being used in various devices on the network - end systems such as mobile phones and client devices, and access and edge routers for forwarding data packets and server platforms.

Frank Wiles, President and Founder of Revolution Systems has started a new blog located at http://ww w.revsys.com/blog/ which will focus on Open Source Software packages such as Linux, Apache, Perl, mod_perl, Sendmail, and PostgreSQL. He will also discuss various on topic Open Source news, businesses, and trends when appropriate. While most articles will be very technical in nature, he aims to provide enough non-technical content in an effort to help out readers of all skill levels.

Active BPEL, LLC announced the latest milestone release of its open-source BPEL engine, which includes several feature enhancements, as well as updates on its planned WS-* support. ActiveBPEL was released into open source in July 2004 by Active Endpoints, Inc. In late October, Active Endpoints released metrics for ActiveBPEL, stating that the engine had achieved more than 20,000 'quality' downloads (attributed directly to an operating organization or a recognized ISP), and had more than 400 registered community participants.

I understand there are several different philosophies of application development. Some people prefer GTK not because it is the better tool kit, but because the approach makes more sense to them, because GTK is more granular than Qt, prefer C to C++, or another reason. I cannot address all of these factors, but I will try to take them into account wherever they matter.

In an e-mail apparently sent on Tuesday to a SUSE mailing list, Hubert Mantel SUSE Linux co-founder and a member of the Linux Kernel team wrote: 'I just decided to leave SUSE/Novell.' The news has caused concern among commentators and analysts; does this mean Novell's commitment to Linux is in any way diminished?

VA Linux Systems, a leading provider of Linux solutions for the telecommunications and enterprise systems markets, has announced the release of 'SMTPGuard', Open Source anti-spam software for MTAs, which can eliminate unsolicited e-mail flexibly. SMTPGuard is a part of 'VA FMS', VA Linux's total messaging solution.

FreeBSD 6.0 is now available. In a statement on the company's Web site, Scott Long of FreeBSD said, 'This release is the next step in delivering the high performance and enterprise features that have been under development in the FreeBSD 5.x series for that last several years.'

Registrations for Australia's second Open Source Developers' Conference are now open. OSDC is a grass roots, YAPC-style conference designed by developers for developers, covering open source languages, tools, libraries, operating systems, licenses and business models. 60 different talks are slated to be held over the course of the conference. The conference is running from Monday 5th - Wednesday 7th December 2005.

The central issue in any Open Source business model is how to convert software that is free on the Internet into revenue that can be booked under US GAAP, hence the term invented by some clever person, 'Conversion Model.' The issue boils down to how to convert the free stuff developed by volunteers into cash?

In the beginning, the 800-pound gorilla of online industry was Prodigy, Inc. This joint venture between IBM and Sears Roebuck boasted 2.5 million subscribers in 1993, the year before Netscape broke open the Internet.

Every company that develops software whether for internal use or to sell to customers is now working in a new 'mixed-IP' environment created by the spread of Open Source. This new environment's impact on software development has been dramatic.

Welcome to my first installment as a LinuxWorld Magazine writer. I'm taking over from my colleague Rob Jones and I hope to continue on the same track of providing information on certifications, as well as discussing the nuances in the Linux/Open Source recruiting landscape.

The enormous success of GNU/Linux as an operating system and as an open source project has captured the imagination of developers, IT staffers, business people, journalists, educators, and even politicians. Linux is so visible, its brand and allure so strong, that most people forget or never notice the existence of an array of other open source OSes.

The open source movement is something completely new. It doesn't fit neatly into any accepted economic or business theory. For that reason a lot of traditional thinkers, e.g., economists, business people, and investors, are struggling to figure out what it means. Is it the beginning of a new economic order or is it a flash in the pan?

A new business intelligence project, just announced, aims to provide enterprise-class reporting, analysis, information delivery, data mining and workflow capabilities geared at helping mid- to large size organizations operate more efficiently and effectively. It's called The Pentaho BI Project.

Drew Ladner, former president of advisory firm ZURI Technology, has joined JBoss as general manager of its newly-formed Government Group. Ladner was chief information officer of the U.S. Department of the Treasury until May 2004.

Last month, BitDefender (www.BitDefender.com) made a couple substantial Linux product announcements. First, it released version 1.6.2 of its BitDefender for Samba Linux File Servers product. As part of the new release, the company released parts of the updated product under an Open Source license. The specific code now covered under GPL is their antivirus (VFS) engine for Samba.

My philosophy about adopting Open Source software is to give realistic advice for IT directors faced with the prospect of sorting out this new wave of technologies and business models. It can certainly be a daunting task. It's one thing for a home enthusiast to try out the latest cutting-edge software on a machine that doesn't really have to do much more than collect e-mail, but it's another thing entirely to commit to a production system.

Cisco will be deploying Palamida's IP AMPlifier product for automatically detecting, managing and reporting on software intellectual property (IP) assets. Both the Detector and Compliance Library modules rely on CodeRank technology.

Founded in December 2002, software compliance management pioneer Black Duck Software now has a staff of 30 and offers a platform to the market in the form of an information service which it sells as a subscription and already has two dozen customers across the USA and overseas. Doug Levin, president and CEO, speaks with SYS-CON.TV.

To Open Source or not to Open Source - that is the question. Or is it? Open Source has matured into a robust development model, and many businesses that shied away from it are reconsidering it. The good news these days is that Open Source is no longer an all-or-nothing choice.

As the number of open source software (OSS) projects grows, OSS alternatives are showing up in more and more software evaluations at large organizations. However, evaluating OSS effectively requires that IT professionals use different criteria than the ones they use for commercial software. Organizations that have done so have made better open source decisions.

As the adoption of Linux and other open source software within corporations grows, enterprise IT managers should, using reasonable oversight, establish policies that allow open source to benefit the company. Open source may be free and not ordinarily expose a company to piracy claims, but open source usaage should not be ignored. For most companies it makes sense to establish policies and procedures for an employee's use of open source in order to minimize any legal and intellectual property risks.

I've been thinking about why it's so hard to communicate the benefits of open source and Linux to the general public, and have come to the conclusion that it's because the general public has been conditioned by movies and TV to only understand simplistic plots with clearly defined good guys and bad guys. Trying to explain the Cathedral versus the Bazaar is just too complex for the CSI generation.

In a passing remark about how 'there may someday be a redistributable JVM RPM at jpackage,' a mailing list last week prompted new speculation that IBM's version of open-source Java might be on its way since 'someday' - apparently - 'may even be next week.'

IT managers who are about to reach for the aspirin as they try to figure out their open source corporate position should grab this book with both hands instead. As the title suggests, it's pragmatic and deals in realism, not ideology.

As a person who is running a young company that develops open source software as a primary activity, I'm frequently asked to comment on the business models that are at play in the industry.

There is a growing trend of open source-based applications running mainstream business-critical applications. Part of this is due to the availability of new solutions software that, when added to the open source application stack, greatly expands the overall reliability and scalability of the resulting applications, allowing them to be 'enterprise class.'

The Free Software Foundation was founded when software was becoming increasingly proprietary and restricted, with software vendors asserting more and more control over what customers could do with their software.

Novell has set a fall deadline for its new corporate Linux version release that merges two Linux applications Novell recently acquired. Novell purchased SUSE Linux this year, and the previous year picked up Ximian. Up until now the two companies have not merged products or software.

Costa Mesa, CA, based Emulex Corp., announced that future version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 will support the networking company's drivers for its host bus adapter (HBA) boards.

Does the open source community provide world-class security technology? Can organizations stop dealing with commercial vendors for security software? To avoid any undue suspense, the answers are: 'Emphatically yes' and 'Maybe, but you probably need to make an investment of some kind.'

Democrats are taking full advantage of Linux and open source software (OSS) in their bid to win the White House in 2004. Leveraging the successful e-campaign strategies pioneered by Howard Dean during the primary season, all of the democratic candidates embraced Linux and OSS in some fashion.

What began as a small movement based in a Finnish student's apartment has mushroomed far beyond his or anyone else's expectations. Linux, sprung from Linus Torvalds' imagination, has alighted in countless data centers and now stands tall as the software strategy centerpiece of technology giants like Hewlett-Packard and IBM.

LWM's editor-in-chief, Kevin Bedell, recently had the opportunity to ask Ranajit Nevatia, director of Linux Strategy for VERITAS, a few questions about how Linux is impacting VERITAS and how the company is contributing to the world of open source.

LWM's editor-in-chief, Kevin Bedell, spoke with Sun's John Fowler about what's new - with Sun, with Fowler's new position, and with Sun's place in the open source world - and learned a little history as well.

During testimony yesterday in the antitrust trial challenging Oracle's proposed takeover of PeopleSoft, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison defended the company's $7.7 billion bid for PeopleSoft Inc. as a bold but necessary move to ensure Oracle's survival in a highly competitive industry.