The absence of upfront license payments is the main driver in open source adoption, along with the lower costs of total ownership, for companies in the European market despite lingering market concerns about the level of software support and the quality of open source software.

This is where an opportunity for Free software lies. Our strength is community. We understand it, we are driven by it, we eat and breath it. We don't need to find financial justifications for trying new things out and we have an entire stack of software (that goes waaaay beyond "stuff I used to do on paper") to play with.

There are a couple of “beginner’s mistakes” when thinking about Free Software in general and its commercial application, in particular. One is to believe there was a substantial difference in the software referred to by the terms “Free Software” and “Open Source.” There isn’t.

The PatientOS Electronic Medical Record is an Open Source Healthcare Information System live or has an active implementation project in several large and small facilities.

Released under the GPL v3 license the system provides registration, scheduling, billing, clinical documentation, orders, patient portal, results, inventory and medication management functionality.

Open source writers who are also market players, like our Matt Asay and Infoworld’s Savio Rodrigues, are dumping on a European Commission (EC) proposal to make software sellers liable for the problems in their code, just as dishwasher makers are liable for problems.

With the financial meltdown eroding IT budgets, large investment banks, hedge funds and other financial institutions have been forced to rethink their attitudes toward open source technology.

When Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference went on sale in January, I created a Web site to redistribute the free edition and act as a central information source for the book. And because the book was about Ubuntu, I made ample mention of the word "Ubuntu" and also used the familiar three-part circle logo.