In three years, Krugle, the company behind the code search engine of the same name, has gone from an idea to a company that's starting to produce revenue. CEO Steve Larsen, a veteran of half a dozen startups, attributes this brief time to market as being due largely to free and open source software (FOSS). According to Larsen, FOSS has shaped most aspects of the company, including its hiring practices and relations with business partners and users.

There are a total of 21,652 packages installed on my home workstation, an AMD64 single core processor box which has been in use since March 2006. It runs the testing stream of Debian. That's a lot of code, all of it free as in beer.

Open source and closed source software are different in the shape, because in the first case, users have access to the code, which means control, and this is not the case for proprietary software.

Canonical has announced the release of Storm, a open source object-relational mapping (ORM) tool for Python that can support simultaneous communication with multiple databases.