The European Commission will take a more pro-active approach to its own use of Open Source and Open Standards. Xavier Heymans highlights the importance of a real and mature collaboration with communities where IT providers share their developments and adopt an "open source" philosophy.

What Linux desktop is most popular? Ubuntu, openSUSE, Fedora, Mandriva, Slackware, or another distro? Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes that he thinks it’s Xandros. Yes, that’s an unexpected result, but he has a point — Xandros is the distro shipped on the Eee PC, and by SJVN’s count, they’ve pumped out about 1.1 million Eee PCs and are still going strong.

3K Computer is shipping a $300 ultra-mini PC notebook that runs "Genuine CE" Linux distribution from a 4GB SSD (solid-state disk). 3K's RazorBook 400-Mini-Notebook uses a 32-bit RISC-based processor from Chinese processor start-up Ingenic.

I was intrigued when a colleague sent me a link to an article by Henry Newman referring to a “firestorm” touched off by some remarks he recently made in another article he wrote. The first article addressed the scalability of standalone Linux file systems vs. standalone symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) file systems such as IBM’s GPFS or Sun’s ZFS.

A common question that I get asked in emails is whether I know of any free accounting software that is any good. Some people don’t want to purchase applications like Quicken because it is way more advanced than what they are looking to do. All they want is a simple way to manage their finances, but at the same time something that offers more features than a basic spreadsheet.

Companies that use open-source source software to make money may have to reexamine their practices because of the real possibility of litigation and changes in the new version of the most popular open-source license, Edmund J. Walsh of the Boston IP law firm Wolf, Greenfield & Sacks, P.C., writes in the April issue of IP Law & Business.

Yet for operating systems there has been very little in the way of customization options.Then Linux came along and gave those who were straining at the boundaries a choice to truly express their individuality. Now we can do more with our computing experience than just change a wallpaper or theme.