Belgian developer Dries Buytaert is on the verge of putting open source CMS (content management system) Drupal officially into business.

I debated long and hard before deciding to take a stab at this article idea. Because KDE and GNOME users are so furiously loyal to their preferred desktop environment, I had to take into account that no matter how I stated my case, someone was going to come away feeling let down.

Yankee Group has said that virtual appliances will enable the delivery of better-quality software and an improved user experience. The virtual appliance is an emerging new development for the software industry.

Times of change are upon the database market. The major established database companies are being challenged by open source upstarts like MySQL and PostgreSQL. For years, Open Source Databases (OSDBs) have been quietly increasing their penetration, but until recently they have lacked the capabilities to seriously threaten proprietary databases like Oracle, IBM's DB2, and Microsoft's SQL Server.

What are Red Hat, Novell and Canonical going to have to do in 2008 to in order to dominate the desktop and server Linux market?

With IT budgets getting tighter, managers need to trim costs. Service contracts are expensive for any technology; firewalls are no exception. Netfilter, the project that provides the packet filtering program iptables, is a free firewall alternative. While it lacks the service contract of commercial solutions and a pretty interfaces to make firewall modification easy, it has solid performance, performs effectively at firewalling, and allows for add-on functionality to enhance its reporting and response functions.

Second in the Linux server business to leader Red Hat, Novell is continuing to strive for major server wins. In its latest significant victory, Novell announced that Office Depot has elected to consolidate its server infrastructure on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 Service Pack 1.

Slashdot linked this weekend to a Nokia position paper on the use of Ogg in the HTML5 proposal for the media elements. For those of us who have followed the HTML5 discussion for some time there is little new in the position paper, he is simply regurgitating the same arguments that Apple Safari people came up with.