The old adage, you get what you pay for, doesn’t have to apply. In fact, for a small business the high price tag of “threat management” software can often mean a company will just go without to its detriment. Here’s some high quality free and open source software to help, at a price any CFO will love.

When I say crash, it simply means that the whole system freezes and does not respond to any keyboard or mouse input. There are many reasons that can cause Ubuntu to crash. It could be due to hardware incompatibility (especially ATI/Nvidia graphics cards), a software conflict or when you run too many memory intensive applications at the same time.

When Bassim Hamadeh was a student at the University of California, San Diego, he experienced firsthand the challenge of procuring the right textbooks for his classes. "They were high-priced, poor quality custom textbooks," Hamadeh says.

The open source discount, the lower price one would pay to acquire an open source company because its code is not proprietary, seems to be going away...

Tim believes that open source, at least as defined by open-source licensing, has a short shelf life that will be consumed by Web 2.0 (i.e., Web companies hijacking open-source software to deliver proprietary Web services) or by traditional proprietary software vendors.

The latest Microsoft move to upset open source advocates is word the giant of Redmond is helping sponsor the open source census.

Open-source software can save an organization money and open the door to customization, but it pays to know where to start and where to get help.

When the city of Madera, Calif., needed a new voice system, it turned to open source technology -- not just for the IP telephony but for an entire network-infrastructure overhaul and loads of other functions. All the renovations cost less than half the estimated price of deploying a commercial VoIP system alone.

Based on the various perspectives studied in this report, we believe that the recent consolidation activities and consequent price war in the Linux market are surely expected to boost the market. We expect other IT majors, such as Sun Microsystems, to eventually enter this market with more advanced technology.