If you thought the sale saga of Sun Microsystems ended in April, Thursday's news from Washington may have come as a surprise. Months after the ink dried on the deal between Sun and database heavyweight Oracle, the U.S. Department of Justice has finally gotten around to giving its blessing.

You will notice that some of the 'community' versions of the distros are supported for a much shorter time frame than the paid for company backed versions. There are those who say it is partially a technique employed by the 'sponsoring' company to encourage users to go to the paid versions, particularly in business related areas.

More than 90% of all commercial Linux server subscriptions are from Novell and Red Hat, with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), respectively. A Gartner report gives Red Hat more than 60% of the paid Linux market, and Novell more than 30%. Why is Red Hat the Linux market share leader?

So you think companies sell $1bn in Linux support contracts a year worldwide? Think again. That isn't going to happen until 2012, and maybe not at all if the trends of using commercial distros without paying for support continue apace.

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, is considering a new version of its Landscape remote management tool that may appeal to solutions providers and service providers. Here’s the scoop.

Why open source may be the answer for companies going bankrupt.

IDC is out with a new report forecasting Linux revenue from 2009-2013. According to a post on the data, from Novell CMO John Dragoon, in 2008, the Linux vendor community saw a 23.4 percent growth in revenue.