About 70,000 students and their 7,000 teachers in the Geneva school district will gradually be moving to Open Source. The decision to move to Open Source was taken by the Geneva Public School District in March 2006. Eventually all teachers will be supplied with laptops running Ubuntu GNU/Linux.

The Star Wreck Studios team, based in Tampere, Finland, has built a virtual studio for Iron Sky and an open-source platform that gives anybody the chance to make a film at no cost. They have recruited American Stephen Lee as managing director, and the chairman of the board is John Buckman, mostly known as the founder of Magnatune, a record label he created in Berkeley, Calif., in 2003.

The open source Maemo platform, which is used on Nokia's Internet Tablet devices, will soon support Trolltech's Qt development toolkit.

Linux may be a free platform for many and a reasonably inexpensive alternative to Unix and proprietary platforms for others, but make no mistake.

F1 motor racing is probably second only to the aerospace industry in the application of aerodynamic simulation and wind tunnel technology. It is a testament to the rapid advance of Linux in high performance computing that most teams in Formula 1 have been using Linux systems in their aerodynamic and engine workshops for a number of years.

Let's face it, open source software runs the Internet. Without it we wouldn't have basic services like DNS, or even the web server that's sending you this page. This isn't a new phenomenon. People have been writing and distributing OSS software since the Internet was born. I'm always amused when people characterize it as a new-fangled thing.

Linux, which has been much maligned by Symbian and Microsoft as a non-starter in the handset operating system market, is set to see strong growth as issues with framework fragmentation and silicon requirements are alleviated.