Open standards and the need for interoperability on the cloud will not necessarily drive the adoption of open-source software, said a Red Hat executive.

John Dvorak, a well known PC Mag columnist and cranky geek, announced today that Ubuntu 8.10 is "a winner." Even the cranky geek likes Linux? It must be great. It is, and that's why we'll be seeing a lot more of this soon.

Governments continue to march toward open source. The Dutch government last year committed to use open standards, the French government has deployed Kubuntu desktops to over 1,000 members of parliament and staff, and a few days ago the United Kingdom government announced an Open Source action plan.

Some people want better statistics about how many GNU/Linux users there are. Some suggest a kind of phone-home function (horror!). A better approach would be to get deliberately counted. That is what counter.li.org is for.
The exact number will never be known and that is good.

Over the past decade open source software has become popular with technology users in India. The benefits of open source - affordability, availability of source code and freedom of choice - have made open source a preferred platform for many innovative Indian organizations and individuals who want to harness the power of high quality software which can be freely adapted to their own requirements.

2008 was an eventful, breakthrough year for many open source companies, and 2009 will be even more so, especially in terms of business purchasing patterns, software business model shifts, and enterprise software stack evolution.

Hooray! This is the one-year anniversary of my adoption of Ubuntu! And that’s a good as an excuse as any for me to indulge in a bit of reflection and pontification.

A few weeks ago, I installed Debian for the first time on the desktop. Once, a friend and I installed a console-only version on another desktop and we connected remotely to his hosted game server which also ran Debian, so I hoped I should be a bit familiar with it.