For Navicron, a wireless technology company launched in Oulu, Finland, in 2004, open source development means it can move products to market quicker and cheaper. Navicron is just beginning to reach out to the United States in search of a larger market. The company, which creates hardware and software for cell phones, recently opened an office in Texas so company representatives could be closer to potential vendor partners and venture capital in the States.

Red Hat Inc has postponed until January the launch of a new Linux software product for personal computers that would directly compete with Microsoft Corp's (MSFT.O) Windows operating system.

Arena Solutions produces and sells a hosted, subscription-based product lifecycle management (PLM) tool for manufacturing companies. Arena founder and CTO Eric Larkin uses open source tools to develop, secure, and maintain the software-as-a-service product. He believes that open source is the path to success for subscription software. "It's a more cost-effective way to build and scale a SAAS business," he says.

As open-source coding begins to appear with increasing regularity in commercial software products, government users need to be aware of the potential security vulnerabilities in open-source code, industry experts say.

Dell's efforts to reinvent itself this year through a dramatic break from its direct-sales model, expanded services and new enterprise offerings have shown positive early results, but some users have lingering concerns about the company's supply-chain management and support.

There are two things that I know with absolute certainty to be true; that Elvis is dead and that Linux poses no immediate threat to Microsoft’s business model.

I've just recieved my Dell Inspiron 6400 with Ubuntu preinstalled. Almost everything worked flawlessly out of the box, but there were two oddities:

The end of the year is obviously the time for the “look back,” and although we weren’t planning any grand pronouncements that 2007 was the year of social computing or anything like that (more in a moment), perhaps it’s fitting that we stumbled across an announcement from Red Hat of a changing of the guard.