Open source is headed our way in force. That’s the message coming out of every major manufacturing company today. No longer are companies willing to pay the price by catering to Microsoft and its proprietary architectures and related policies and procedures.

"Canaima GNU/Linux is a Debian-based desktop distribution created mainly for use in Venezuela's government departments ..."

"The Spanish free software association Hispalinux is protesting plans by the Spanish government to massively introduce Microsoft's operating systems and applications on school computers..."

Fashion is fickle. One day thin clients and clusters are the fashion de jour, the next it's Web 2.0, Virtualisation or distributed computing and Grids. They who live by the sword of fashion will surely perish by it but a new model has been strutting its stuff along the catwalk of web fashion and she goes by the name of Cloud Computing.

It used to be so easy to be a proprietary-software vendor.

That is, until the open-source neighbors moved in. As noted in a Gartner analysis from late last year, proprietary software is on the wane within enterprises while open source is gaining

Several days ago, I wrote about the real reasons why I, and so many others, use Linux to an overwhelming response. One of the often-cited reasons for using Linux in my post that I dismissed is that it is open-source. Most people seemed to agree, but here is my question: If Linux was exactly as it is now, except it was proprietary and closed-source, would you still use it?

"...There is a battle underway between those who value freedom, and corporations such as Microsoft who wish to profit by taking that freedom away. DRM and absurd licenses are at the heart of that battle. Please join us on the side of freedom by saying NO not just to Windows Vista and other DRM-enabled products, but to proprietary software in general.

Recently Microsoft screwed themselves over. We have MS Money 2006 from back when I was still getting into Linux and hadn’t convinced my wife completely about how much better it was than Windows. Recently we switched to back to a credit card where we previously used to download the transactions from within MS Money.