"Hear what Microsoft's chairman Bill Gates had to say during his last official visit to the UK before he 'retires' later this year. IT PRO attended the special event hosted by the Institute of Directors (IoD) and, after Gates had done his thing there was a Q&A session with the billionaire and industry figurehead." And also note how some of his answers match up rather nicely with F/OSS.

Contrary to what you may have heard, free and open source software (FOSS) is not anti-business. But neither is it pro-business. More accurately, FOSS is focused on concerns outside of traditional business, such as user freedom and code quality. For this reason, making the two work together successfully requires special efforts and resources, as well as careful study of the various options.

This may not be "the year of Linux on the desktop" -- and who knows, maybe it is -- but there's little to no question that this is a pivotal year for open source as a mainstream economic phenomenon in the tech world, as my colleague Charles Babcock has indicated. My big question is: what next?

I just got this data from Alfresco's chief marketing officer, Ian Howells, and it shows Ubuntu exceeding Red Hat Enterprise Linux for the first time in Alfresco's community

Have you ever thought about all of the places Linux has been popping up lately? It's not just in your computer anymore. Linux is powering mobile phones, handheld gaming consoles, GPS systems, e-book readers, and more. Personally, I'm waiting for the Linux refrigerator, the Ubuntu frigidaire, which will be fast, cold, and powerful enough to churn out ice cubes like there's no tomorrow. Unfortunately, this article isn't about the next generation of refrigerators, but it is about another common household electronic device that we use everyday: our television set.

Do is an application to find things on your system and quickly perform actions, similar to Quicksilver for OSX and GNOME Launch Box. It works on a variety of different desktop environments, including GNOME and KDE. Basically, all you need to do is to press Super + Space on your keyboard, and the Do dialog will open. Super is the Windows key on a PC, or the Command key on a Mac. Type in the name of an application, and Do will launch it for you.

Gnome Launch Box, an application which is very similar to Quicksilver for Mac OSX, has recieved support for the X server Composite extension. This results in eye-candy in the form of rounded edges and real translucency, making it closer to its OSX “brother”. I definitely suggest that you try it for your self, the screenshots do not fully express how amazing this application looks, and in my opinion it now feels closer to Quicksilver..