Allianz Australia Insurance chief information officer (CIO) Steve Cole said yesterday he had done the equivalent of losing hair while undertaking an upgrade that saw the company move from multiple Wintel servers to a Linux mainframe.

Well, this is fascinating. Here's an order from Judge Ted Stewart in a dispute between Novell and its insurer, Vigilant Insurance Company. Novell tried to get them to pay for the SCO v. Novell litigation back in 2004 and they refused, so Novell sued last May.

A tiny but strategic Silicon Valley company is helping Microsoft to certify open source applications for Windows Server 2008. It’s a super-smart move by Microsoft, The VAR Guy believes, as the software giant strives to compete effectively with Linux and ensure Windows Server remains popular in the age of open source.

A UK company says its switch from Linux to Windows will save it £1 million (almost $A2.3 million). How does that work?

VirtualBox may be free, but you still have to own a copy of Windows. If you’re not willing to shell out a few hundred dollars to Microsoft but still want to run Windows on your Intel-based Mac, there is one more alternative: CrossOver from CodeWeavers costs $40 and runs Windows applications on Mac OS X — without Windows.

So you're switching from Windows to Linux? Great. Like other users and organisations who've taken the plunge, it's likely you're making the move to take advantage of Linux's stability and reliance on open standards. Now all you have to do is prepare carefully for your move.

"While governments considering supporting OSS are primarily concerned with significant switching costs and incompatibility problems, OSS is actually superior to proprietary software because it increases compatibility and consequently decreases switching costs in the long term."

An online retailer has saved more than £56,000 in software licensing costs after moving its IT platform from Microsoft Windows to Linux.

Moving from Windows 2003 Server to a SuSE Linux Enterprise Server has also enabled the company to extend the life of the four-year-old servers that were unable to run newer versions of Windows.

According to Lieutenant-Colonel Xavier Guimard's calculations, the French police plans to save $50 million in switching from Windows to Ubuntu.