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.

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.

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).

OpenLogic provides the kind of support for open source software that many companies have come to expect with commercial software, as summed up by one of OpenLogic's bloggers:

"What we consistently hear is that companies need and want the same services for open source software that they get from proprietary software. Hence the rise of open source companies…."

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.

It’s a big question: how trustworthy is the software I use on my computer? When it comes to open source, can you trust the quality of programmers who work for free? You can, according to a new report out this week – which also proves major open source offerings to be especially well written. It equally shows up the projects which are slow to respond to vulnerabilities.

As open-source coding begins to appear with increasing regularity in commercial software products, government users need to be aware of the potential security vulnerabilities in open-source code, industry experts say.