After my post two weeks ago about Xen, I got a call from the XenSource people. I had a long chat with their CTO Simon Crosby, who had some very interesting things to say.

Firefox 2.0 is a very popular browser, but there's more to it than what meets the eye. This article shows you what you can find behind the scenes by giving a brief look at Firefox's about: pages.

In a February report from Web site tracking and analysis firm Netcraft, the Apache Web server dipped below 60% market share for the first time since September 2002. Subsequent monthly reports indicated that the downward trend had continued unabated.

Well-known Linux luminary Jon "maddog" Hall is CTO and "ambassador" of a startup selling Linux-based thin clients and network appliances. Koolu currently has two hardware offerings that run Ubuntu Linux, and work with Google Apps in energy- and pollution-sparing installations for business, government, and education.

I received Gartner e-mail this week marketing their up-coming open-source summit. The message contains gems that illuminate Gartner's perspective on open source and the larger IT world.

In a mildly childish attempt at putting the popularity of Ubuntu into real context, I've enlisted the help of Google trends to benchmark searches for "Ubuntu" against other words. Mindless spam or important sociological experiment? You decide.

"Dave Richards is an IT administrator for a city government. The city has been using OpenOffice.org for about six years. Dave's a Linux guru, and helps run an elegant, efficient Linux network with a nice big server and lots of fairly old dumb terminals running OpenOffice.org at a very acceptable speed."

Microsoft has suffered a setback in the quest to have its Open XML document format approved as an ISO standard. A vote on July 13 by the committee established to formulate the United States' position on whether or not to support the application for ISO approval failed to achieve the two-thirds majority necessary to approve the move.