Articles about Microsoft's bid have probably tired you to death by now, but this article discusses one particular aspect of the potential takeover, namely its effect on GNU/Linux and BSD users. Here's a point-by-point analysis of the impact, covering several of the key issues:

An article published last week quotes Microsoft officials who claim that IBM is solely responsible for ISO's recent decision to deny OOXML fast-track approval. IBM hasn't taken the accusations lightly.
Bob Sutor, vice president of standards and open source for IBM, has told Ars Technica "If 'business as usual' means trying to foist a rushed, technically inferior and product-specific piece of work like OOXML on the IT industry, we're proud to stand with the tens of countries and thousands of individuals who are willing to fight against such bad behavior."

IT professionals working with free software can expect to earn far more than their country's average salary, following news that in Australia open source salaries are particularly high.

My wife and I started a web development company back in June of this past year 2007. In doing so we sought out using open source applications to help us run our business from the beginning to help us save money. I will share with you what open source applications we have been able to use instead saving us an estimated about of $100,000 and counting.

More good news for the open source community just in: an analysis of its enterprise customers by OpenLogic found that for 2007 as a whole, the use of open source among enterprise customers is up 26% year-on-year. Enterprises on average used a whopping 94 different open source packages last year, compared to 75 in 2006…

It's not every day that the entire technical press goes bonkers over news in the open source world, but that's what happened last week, when Sun announced that it was buying MySQL. Doubtless, the pleasant roundness of the sum involved - $1 billion – helped, as did the fact that most of that was cash. But leaving aside the sense of satisfaction that events in the free software world should be suddenly thrust centre-stage, Sun's move does raise a larger question about the fate of all open source start-ups.

I recently learned the news that Lenovo is entering the server market outside China. As the editor of Free Software Magazine, the first question that came to mind was: “Will they run Linux?”. To my surprise, the answer was nowhere to be found.