One of the reasons why we've been so successful is we've been able to have a place where people with different sets of interests can come together and work," Leung said. "For the most part, people believe it's a neutral playing field, though every year there is a different company that owns Apache, from IBM to Sun to Google, but that's mostly a joke.

Apache Software Foundation (ASF) pioneers have toasted 10 years of independence and successful code development at their annual conference in California. Speakers who spun-up the project in its early days celebrated building a community that has stayed (mostly) friendly and dedicated to the ideal of building open-source code.

Some people think that no operating system has any need for distributions, but one of the thing that impress most the users who switch is, in many cases (at least that I could look at myself) the presence of distributions and the ability to install almost any software by simply looking it up in the package manager.

The following are some of the most commonly used MS-DOS commands and its equivalent in Linux. This cheat sheet is for those of you who have just switched from Windows to Linux and are just getting acquainted with the terminal.

Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) edition has been around since Ubuntu 8.04, and has taken on some pretty stiff competition of late from Moblin. Inquiring minds want to know which version is better for my netbook? Paul Ferrill pummels UNR in hopes of finding an answer.

YaST works well but it's a bit verbose for installing a single package, and of course that's just more fodder for the apt-getters with all their apt-get install this and their apt-get install thats. And you can't argue with them, but there are other options with openSUSE: yum and apt4rpm come to mind, but the preferred solution is zypper.

Has the terminology finally evolved in the debate over "who's open source?" It would seem so. After years of haggling over the essence of open source, free software or other monikers, Simon Phipps gets right to the point in "A Remarkable Reversal" - his critique of Richard Stallman's joint letter to the EC regarding Oracle and MySQL.