IBM's WebSphere RFID Information Center was certified as fully compliant with its EPCIS standard. The company also introduced support for a newly ratified reader interface open standard and reported that eight device manufacturers have implemented the Eclipse open source device model to interface their devices with the IBM Premises Server 6.0.

"After giving a thought about possibility of converting my Fedora box to Debian,yesterday morning, with DVD I got from LFY, I gave it a try. Why?

"Someone asked me recently what I thought about about Django. I really like it, but I didn’t have an answer ready and completely bombed at answering that question. I ended up muttering a very profound, “Django is cool”. I truthfully stumbled upon Django, played with it a while, and spent the next 10 months writing a web app.

My take from the cheap seats: Keep an eye on the Windows fight if you like, but the Office game is where you'll be seeing the most action. Players are already trash-talking about office document formats. IBM is rolling out a free Office competitor called Symphony and it's lining up a formal match.

Software maker Red Hat could be within a decade of catching up with Microsoft in the business of selling server software. That's according to CEO Matthew Szulik, who said that by 2015, his Raleigh, N.C., company could gain half or more of the market for the server operating systems that businesses use. Microsoft is far and away the leader in that market

Last month, just one week after IBM announced it would help with OpenOffice.org's development, the company released Lotus Symphony, an office suite based on OpenOffice.org code. I found a lot of slick features in Lotus Symphony, but I worry that Symphony could affect the OpenOffice.org community adversely.

Microsoft is claiming that releasing the .NET Framework reference source code under the Microsoft Reference License will give developers the opportunity to understand more about .NET.