Microsoft’s proposed $45 billion buy of Yahoo would give the Redmond, Wash company control over a top open source e-mail company, open source projects and an open source infrastructure. On September 17 of 2007, Yahoo bought Zimbra for $350 million. Yahoo’s infrastructure is built on BSD. Yahoo has released a myriad of software to the open source community and even sponsors some open source projects. So this deal would put Microsoft directly into the open source software business.

The virtual learning environment could be where university libraries first encounter open source. An increasing number of content management and portal systems are also open source and many university libraries are involved in setting up open source repositories. As acceptance of open source grows, the next step will be to consider open source solutions for the core integrated library system.

When I first found out about open source software, I felt the sky was the limit — with the source code, I could do anything now! But after working on open source ERP for the last seven years, I’ve come to realize that customizing software, even open source software, should not be taken lightly.

Microsoft, the company least-likely to be associated with open source software, has made good on earlier promises to contribute to open source projects. The company first started its slow move to acceptance of open source in March and April of 2008 when the company announced a series of interoperability plans.

Your company's IT department probably depends on at least one open source application. The software does the job, is budget-friendly, and it has an active open source community which is constantly upgrading the application. But few applications are perfect, whether proprietary or open source.

Linux and other open source applications are finding increasing acceptance in the global marketplace in small and large companies alike. Statistics on the growth of a few open source programs—like Apache, a web server; Linux, an operating system; FreeBSD, an operating system; and PostgreSQL, a database server—show this to be true.

The department at the French Ministry of Education that is handling purchasing of software and software licenses is increasing its Open Source offerings to some 1.5 million teachers and education workers in 250 institutes France.

Just as Microsoft has being accused of playing dirty over sales tactics and patents, the software company has launched its first open source organization. The CodePlex Foundation aims to act as a liason between commercial enterprises and open source developers and communities while increasing open source participation, says the foundation.

It occurred to me today that open-source infrastructure providers (e.g., commercial providers of open-source operating systems, databases, application servers, etc.) may have much in common with telecommunications infrastructure providers (like cable, wireless, etc. providers).