Ian Tree has written an open letter to IBM asking them to release Domino under an open source license. While I agree with him that open sourcing Domino could have lots of positive effects, he's ignoring the cost and time involved. All those good things might not happen given how hard it is to open source a large existing code base.

In case you missed some of the Linux and Open Source content in the 10 Things blog in 2009, I thought I would do a round-up of some of the best posts that appeared, many authored by our own Jack Wallen. If you’re new to Linux yourself (or want to introduce others to the world of open source), these concise lists provide a good jumping-off point on a number of topics.

Open source means different things to different people. Calling something open source doesn't always mean the same thing to everyone. What does it mean to you?

On the face of it, open-source software has been gaining ground of late. But behind the scenes, things are not quite as rosy. Some good ideas are too good for this world. Is this one of them?

My recent visit to Brazil was a wonderful validation of the belief that I've held for more than 20 years: if you give people a better way to do things, they'll do better things. The Brazilian government continues to expand its adoption of open source, both across more and more ministries and deeper within each ministry.

The good thing about open-source software is that it harnesses the talents of techies around the world. The bad thing about open-source software is that it's too often geared toward such techies, not average folks.

We rightly celebrate how open source opens markets. But it can also close them...This is one of the ironies of open source. Quick access to code lets you close things down just as quickly as you open things up.

Things are looking good for the proponents of Open Source software on all fronts—even the desktop though I’ll come to that in a bit.

An open source project that wants greater visibility may well benefit from a mention in the technical or business media. But because open source communities are primarily technical communities, they don't necessarily know how to talk to the press. Here's a few useful things to know.