Everyone was excited when Dell announced they would sell Ubuntu computers, but every since it has been a downhill road. For one thing, Dell keeps randomly changing their selection. Today they have four computers on their Ubuntu site, by the end of this week they might have 7. Between random website glitches and actual changes, you can't predict what machines they will be selling when you check.

The lean startup is a term used to describe many startups that, unlike in the dot-com days, are frugal with their money. Instead of racking up large bills and loans before they make even a penny, the lean startup seeks to spend as little as possible.

You've picked the perfect cloud computing platform for your needs, and you have a well-designed application to run on it. The hard part is done, right? Not so fast. You still need to consider all the things you'd typically worry about if the application was for your own servers: deployment, testing, and monitoring.

"According to NetApplications, GNU/Linux now accounts for 1.02% of computer desktops. Depending on your outlook, this figure is cause for cautious celebration, or equally cautious dismissal of the operating figure's prospects. Alternatively, you might prefer -- as I do -- to question the statistic's accuracy, and look at other ways to estimate GNU/Linux's presence..."

Companies like Red Hat and Novell base a lot of their Linux business model on providing support to their big enterprise customers.  This model has been very successful, but no one has applied this, or any other, business model to consumer desktop Linux with great success.

Plenty of people jumped on the bandwagon when Ubuntu 9.04 debuted on April 23. But independent software vendors (ISVs) were mostly absent from the launch party. Fast forward to Ubuntu 9.10's anticipated launch in October 2009, and Canonical hopes to deliver a far more impressive ISV story. Here's the scoop.

Microsoft is sponsoring research at the University of Michigan's Center for Information Technology Integration (CITI) to develop an open source Network File System client for Windows. This will enable Windows to better interoperate with this emerging Internet storage protocol for fast file sharing.

Backed by such familiar names as AMD, Cisco, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Red Hat, Sun, and VMware, the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) has joined the increasingly fragmented fight for so-called open cloud standards.