Recent conversations with knowledgeable colleagues has recently reached a point where it is difficult to have a rational conversation about any aspect of Electronic Medical Record (EMR) software without having to invoke an entire other discipline to speak about it.

DataDyne.org's work in Zambia, switching all health care surveys from paper to pda with the help of the open source EpiSurveyor!

Take a look: Dice, the tech jobs site, reports that it had 9,631 Linux job listings in August. While this is a big number, what’s truly eye-catching is the percentage growth since January: Linux job listing are up a robust 30 percent – three times the increase of overall tech job listings. (Since January, Dice job listings have grown by 10.2 percent, to a total of 96,548 tech jobs.)

A milestone for education on Free Software and Open Standards has been reached. On September 5th 2007 the beta version of the SELF Platform goes live. The official launch is taking place during a conference on Free Software in Education in the Netherlands, accompanied by satellite launch events in Sweden, Bulgaria, Argentina, Mexico and India with workshops and conferences.

Linux use in future embedded, mobile, and real-time projects will grow 278 percent over that in past projects, suggests a recent survey by Venture Development Corp. (VDC). Meanwhile, proprietary commercial embedded operating systems are holding steady, gaining customers from do-it-yourself OS users, but losing them just as fast to Linux, the analyst firm reports.

"We were very aware that the growth in mobile for Linux was huge, but we didn't know it was so astronomic," Amanda McPherson, marketing director for the Linux Foundation, told LinuxInsider. "These are very encouraging numbers." Why Linux has drawn significant support from the community of handset manufacturers can be explained on several fronts, McPherson said.

According to a Computerworld Singapore report quoting newly published research, 2012 will be the year of the Linux mobile phone, with some 31 percent of all smart phones, or 331 million devices, running Linux. The prediction is based largely upon the fact that Linux has a much faster growth rate than either Symbian or Windows Mobile, some 75 percent year on year.

Can open source succeed where Windows and the Mac have failed? I’m talking here of K-12 education. An eSchools report (right) says open source spending is growing 70% per year, and will be up 800% in 2011 from last year’s level.