IT salaries appear to be on the rise, but don't get too excited. According to the just-released Computer Economics 2010 IT Salary Report, IT organizations are budgeting to give the typical IT worker a 1.8 percent pay boost.

There are a few desktop applications out there that can help you to keep track of your personal finances, but if you are a freelancer or a small business owner, you might need something more powerful like Tonido Money.

An open source app store from a Linux vendor is a good idea, right? As it turns out, Linux vendors selling their open source partners solutions directly isn't always a recipe for success. Just ask Red Hat, or its rival Novell. In 2007, Red Hat launched an effort called the Red Hat Exchange (RHX), a marketplace for selling open source solutions from Red Hat's partners.

Innovation is at the heart of our enterprise search strategy, and a commitment to innovation is what brought FAST and Microsoft together.

Oracle's open source strategy was looking a little fenced in this morning, after the database giant lost one of its most prominent voices and OpenOffice was snubbed by Ubuntu developers. Ken Jacobs resigned from Oracle late last week, according to reports.

Sun used to boast that it was one of the largest contributors to open source. That's being demonstrated now that Oracle has acquired the company. Oracle's acquisition of Sun, and subsequent layoffs, are having ripple effects on the open source community. The cuts are also hitting the GNOME accessibility (a11y) team and leading the project to think about the future of a11y efforts in GNOME.

I received quite a few comments this past week following the publishing of California IT Policy Letter 10-01 which formally establishes "the use of Open Source Software (OSS) in California state government as an acceptable practice." While many of my security colleagues offered words of caution following the announcement (and even a couple of "are you crazy" comments), most were pretty enthusiasti