Linux Journal recently caught up with Mandriva CEO, François Bancilhon, to find out more about a recently announced partnership between Mandriva of France and Turbolinux of Japan.

"The open source model gives us a way to reach thousands of customers we couldn't have afforded to reach any other way," XAware CEO Tim Harvey said. "We want to get as many people as possible using the software so they can come back and buy service and support from us." XAware moved in November to the open source model for its data integration software.

Think about the differences between stories and facts. Between generating interest and pursuing knowledge. Between grabbing attention and building out what we know. Then think about the connections between the freedom to build code and the freedom to inform one's self and others. Because the former is a model for the latter.

Linspire, Inc., developer of the commercial Linspire and Freespire community desktop Linux operating systems and CNR.com, a free Linux software delivery service, today officially announced an initiative to offer a custom desktop Linux OS Build Service to partners. Designed to provide custom desktop Linux OS configurations, the Custom OS Build Service will also significantly help partners cut time to market and greatly reduce the overall expense required when building a desktop Linux operating system.

Another mobile Linux platform, this time from Azingo, hit the market on Wednesday, joining an increasingly crowded market of Linux phone software.

Gmount-iso is a small tool written using PyGTK and Glade. It allows you to easily mount your cd images. This is a frontend to the ‘mount -o loop -t iso9660 foo.iso /mountpoint‘ command…Convert your CDs and unprotected DVDs into “virtual CDs"

This may be of interest to people who are upgrading from an old laptop etc and think that because it struggles with windows it's destined to lay dusty in the loft. My dad gave me his old Toshiba A80. A fairly humble machine by todays standards and was struggling to run XP with the additional virus checkers and the myriad of background tasks and system tray applications which seem necessary to do the simplest of tasks these days in M$ operating systems.

I believe open-source licensing is so critical for Microsoft and other companies who sell software. It protects us from our own worst intentions. Consider what ultimately broke Dr. Jekyll's determination to protect the world from his Mr. Hyde nature...