Though most people think of KDE as a desktop environment for Linux, the KDE applications are actually also available on Windows, thanks to the KDE On Windows project. In addition to giving Windows users a bunch of useful applications, this would be an ideal intermediate step for large Windows to Linux migrations.

Now while I'm no self proclaimed marketing guru (Actually, I really suck at marketing), I am fairly versed in the simple science of economics. And since the two of them (marketing and economics) are more or less tied together, you have to have mastery of both if you want to succeed. And that's the way it is with Linux.

Open Source and Economics are related in a sense that they require time and effort to be quantified and measured by both - producers and consumers.

I have a degree in Economics, however, I have never actually worked as an Economist. I am still interested though, and religiously read all the reports on the Fed, the business section of the newspaper, and once a year, the winners of the Nobel Prize for Economics.

A fair price. What does that mean? If you ask most of us, abruptly, when we’re not expecting an economics exam, we’d say that a fair price is the cost of a good, plus a little on top for profit, writes Danny O'Brien.

"This month, Packt columnist and open source enthusiast Mayank Sharma explores the economics behind open source projects, what they do with their donations and how crucial they can be to their future."

The explanation of why zero pure play open source vendors have hit the one billion dollar revenue mark has never seemed, to me, particularly complicated. The economics of open source are fundamentally differentiated from the closed source models that preceded it.

In my most recent article “Five ways to ease the migration from Windows to Linux” I examined how you can help new users make the migration from Windows to Linux easier. But does the same hold true when trying to migrate from Mac OS X to Linux? Let’s find out.

In this brief series (if two articles can be considered a series) I will help ease the migration from both Windows to Linux and Mac to Linux. Hopefully, upon reading these articles, you will have a good game plan so your migration (or your users migration) will be as seamless as possible.