Harsh economic conditions tend to accelerate technology shifts, so the top brass at Red Hat were a pretty chipper bunch as they explained to Wall Street how they intend to make money in the coming years.

"The Green Penguin" is a new blog devoted to ‘green’ IT related to Linux (though at times loosely). This week´s topic is about Google and General Electric´s recently announced plan to promote a ‘smart’ electric power grid and thus encourage greater use of renewable energy.

What's remarkable about this story, of course, is not that the ODF Alliance is giving awards to those that deserve them it (why not? It's a great way to advance the Alliances cause as well), but that there are so many people in so many countries around the world that are eligible by reason of their service in support of what was once an obscure software standard.

Open source mobile messaging vendor Funambol plans to add micro-banner ads to its online portal myFUNAMBOL. Calling the ads "prominent yet non-intrusive," Funambol representatives say the new advertisements will display in several areas of the email client, including the inbox and message viewing screens.

KOffice has been trailing the office application leaders for a long time. Despite years of development, it has yet to match OpenOffice.org feature for feature, although its features are complete enough that they have attracted a loyal community.

Sun Microsystems has lost a key individual responsible for getting its aspiring open-source software included in leading Linux distributions.

As important as security is, remaining current with every development is hard, and evaluating possible vulnerabilities across a network can be quite a chore.