In what is a big mistake, in my opinion, Microsoft has chosen to only support Suse Linux in Hyper-V. If they want to truly compete with VMware and other virtualization companies they are going to have to open this up. This does not mean you can not run other distros, however it will not be supported by Microsoft. In today's corporate world that is a death nail for most companies.

Within minutes of my blog entry, I received the strangest email notification, alerting me to another blog written by Alan Zeichick, 'co-founder and editorial director of BZ Media, which publishes SD Times and Software Test & Performance, and which also produces the Software Security Summit, Software Test & Performance Conference, and EclipseWorld. Also president and principal analyst of Camden Associates.' That's what his bio says.

In order to describe itself as an 'open source' company, need a company merely be 'a company that will help you make the switch to open source in your company' - or does it have to be one that lets users feely download, compile, and use the software in question? Where is the dividing line? How open is 'open'? At Enterprise Open Source Magazine we contacted a range of FOSS luminaries for their take on the issue.

When building the right project team to complete a custom solution there are many forces at work. These include business drivers, technical drivers, and organizational and political motivations. Regardless of the business or organization there are three basic rules to follow in building a team to deliver a technical solution. The first is to involve the business before the team is even assembled. Each organization has certain technology standards that govern specific tools and products that can be used on a given project.

I work in Building 2 on the 4th floor of BEA's Corporate offices. I had moved into a new office, when I noticed a box of CDs on the filing cabinet near my office...

Red Hat's announcement last month that it was buying JBoss has been the hot topic for almost anyone involved with Open Source. It's too early to tell exactly what the ultimate outcome will be.

'Spending good money to get into other rapidly commoditizing businesses... seems a waste,' comments Stephen Walli in this commentary on Oracle's reported desire to deliver an entire stack of technology to customers by buying/creating a Linux distro.

'Linux is good at doing what other things already have done, but more cheaply - but can it do anything new?' That's the question asked by Steven Weber, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, in an article in The Economist this week - one of the least useful articles purportedly about Open Source that I can remember reading in the past three years.

Ubuntu Linux is a new experience for me. Having used only Red Hat's Fedora Core, I was anxious to try out the recently released Ubuntu 5.10 (available from Ubuntu's Website at www.ubuntu.com). I was not disappointed. After waiting approximately 45 minutes to download the 617 MB ISO file, I quickly burned it to a CD and rebooted my computer. Within a mere half an hour, Ubuntu was successfully installed on my system.

Recent studies show Linux taking a large and growing share of the global data center market, as well as making incipient gains on the desktop. Traditional IT deployment, however, doesn't tell the whole Linux story - this open source OS is also making impressive inroads in less-visible embedded applications. On this front Linux has come to dominate design-wins in communications, consumer electronics, and other ubiquitous applications, going from upstart to leader in less than four years.

Human memory and Random Access Memory (RAM) share one thing in common: they are both very volatile. This basically means that once the power sources feeding the memories are terminated, the memories disappear forever (at least in the case of human short-term memory; more on that in a bit).

Forgive me for being a Scott McNealy fan, but I really can't help it. Scott and the crew at Sun have done a great job over the years producing what I consider to be really good products. Scott has also provided much-needed entertainment in the form of some very quotable quotes (who was there for his presentation that started with a single cloth-covered box that could run all of the OSes that Microsoft sold? When he uncovered the box it was an overhead projector - classic McNealy).

AJAX, LAMP, Virtualization, SaaS, Open Source, SANs, Web 2.0, Blog consolidation, InfoSec, BitTorrent, Googlecrash, Adobe, IE7, SOA, REST, Single Sign-On, SemWeb, iComm, Structured Blogging, VPMNs, VoIP Phones, Semantic Technologies, Ruby on Rails, spam/phishing, VoIP, and WiFi: welcome to SYS-CON Media's roundup of i-Technology predictions.

Don Rosenberg's review of Larry Rosen's book, Open Source Licensing, did double-duty as a platform for FUD about the GNU GPL. The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL for short) was not the first free software license, but was the first to embody the concept of 'copyleft': the requirement that all modified and extended versions of the program be free under the same license.

The defeat of the EU software patenting directive, writes Richard Stallman, only provides a breathing space, in which programmers and consumers should gather forces. This battle has implications far beyond the software field. Our years-long fight has shown how undemocratic the EU is. It is a system in which bureaucrats can make decisions that, practically speaking, the public can never reverse.

The weather's still good and the housing prices continue to climb. But the dot-com crash was far more severe than any previous dip in Silicon Valley's fortunes. Will a region that often takes itself too seriously ever be able to have fun again?

The Apache Software Foundation is one of many open source software organizations shaking the business world all the way down to its proprietary software toes. Along with Linux, the Apache HTTP Server has long been the consummate example of the power and quality of open source software. Its runaway success against Microsoft IIS illustrates that the better product can triumph over both monopoly and marketing dollars.

When you consider the way LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl, or Python) has evolved, you could draw comparisons to a very low tech but effective method of collaboration: the farmers' cooperative. Individual farmers on their own lacked the means to collect, negotiate, store, and ship their produce to market. However, by pooling their resources they formed a successful venture that allowed them to produce their crops, collectively negotiate prices, share expensive farm machinery, and provide a marketplace for buyers to receive their goods.

It's probably not likely that Itanium has much of a future unless Linux makes massive gains in market share over the next 5 years. 'If Intel truly believes in Itanium,' writes Paul Nowak, 'then they have to do away with Windows. Windows is not coming to Itanium. While killing off Windows is probably a pipe dream, even for a company with the resources of Intel, that's what would need to happen to bring the industry to the point where Itanium is running the most widely used code base.'

Bill Gates probably did not want to speak in front of politicians, and even warned his audience that he needed to be careful. So let's not be terribly hard on him. But...

We're all familiar with the disruption and cost of moving. When I'm asked what it takes to motivate an organization to move to desktop Linux, my answer is simple, 'Migrating desktops is like moving to a new house. What would it take to get you to move your house or office tomorrow?' Their response always starts with 'It depends...'.

The Birkenstocks and beards where mothballed this year as the new guard entered LinuxWorld Expo in button-down shirts and ties and the occasional Brooks Brothers suit. This year's LinuxWorld was all about business or at least that's the message IDG, the conference producer, tried to convey when it promoted the event held for the first time in Boston's Hynes Convention Center. The main hall was filled, with booths from Red Hat and Novell butting up against a pavilion staffed by IBMers in their familiar blue.

Organizations spend a lot of money on equipment, on personnel to manage the equipment and on infrastructure to insure that the tools to do a job are available and can be run by their employees error-free.

Please forgive me as I dust off a cliché from the 1990s business press - the Business Ecosystem - which, despite its overuse, really is a good concept that can be effective when appropriately applied. Dictionary.com defines an ecosystem as 'An ecological community, together with its environment, functioning as a unit.' Porting this concept to business, you get something like: 'A community of businesses functioning together in a common operating environment to solve customers' problems.'

It's hard to believe that we have passed the 13th anniversary of Linus Torvald's humble introduction of 'just a hobby' Linux, first posted to the Web in October 1991. Torvald previewed the OS as a 'Minix-lookalike' and designed for the days when 'men were men and wrote their own device drivers.'

To start off the new year, several LWM editors have compiled a list of what they consider to be the best solutions of 2004 in their particular field of expertise.

Linux has changed the economics of how companies do business by shifting the OS and infrastructure models they use from more expensive, proprietary Unix-based systems to lower-cost, standards-based Linux platforms. This has dramatically reduced IT costs and enabled companies to acquire more computing power to drive their business productivity and research. Linux is also altering the corporate mindset by applying the benefits from traditional research areas to business initiatives.