Only time will tell whether Microsoft's move turns out to be a genuine effort to open up; in the meantime, discussion abounds. "You can't just overlook decades of market abuse just because Microsoft promises a few things," wrote pak9rabid on Slashdot. "Only an idiot would take their word on issues like this w/out a huge grain of salt given their past documented history."

Wired publishes a lengthy excerpt from Chris Anderson's upcoming book Free! explaining the economy of free (mostly as in beer).

If there's one thing to be said for Microsoft, it's a shrewd player. They've done in just a few years what takes some companies decades to do. They've cornered the desktop OS market. All of this success has caused some of their detractors to call them dishonest, unethical, and in some cases just downright evil. All of this has come from their efforts to make a few bucks. Well, a few billion in their case. But as of late, Microsoft has gone an extra step further in expanding and maintaining, or in some cases grabbing dominance in every market they can get into, if they aren't there already.

Over the last week we’ve been covering how the Linux multitasking scheduler works. Today it’s time to see what Linux has in common with popular horror flicks: this story has it all – zombies and zombie children, and a reaper.

With Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" now in feature-freeze in preparation for its April release, the Ubuntu developers have started planning for Ubuntu 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex", which is due this October. Ubuntu is my distribution of choice, but it's definitely not perfect, so I've come up with a list of improvements I'd like to see by the time 8.10 ships.

Jim Zemlin: This is Jim Zemlin. I’m here with Mark Shuttleworth today as part of our ongoing conversations at the Linux Foundation with leaders in the Linux community and technology industry where we hope to get insight into the trends that are shaping the future of open source and Linux.

In this article I will describe how you can monitor your Mandriva 2008.0 server with munin and monit. munin produces nifty little graphics about nearly every aspect of your server (load average, memory usage, CPU usage, MySQL throughput, eth0 traffic, etc.) without much configuration, whereas monit checks the availability of services like Apache, MySQL, Postfix and takes the appropriate action such as a restart if it finds a service is not behaving as expected.

The Ubuntu development community has announced that the fifth Ubuntu 8.04 prerelease is now available for testing. Ubuntu 8.04 alpha 5 adds additional polish and reliability as well as a few intriguing new features. The official release of Ubuntu 8.04, codenamed Hardy Heron, is scheduled for late April and feature freeze is already in effect.