BeyondTrust Software Inc. today announced a formal partnership with Red Hat. BeyondTrust will join Red Hat’s ISV Partner Program and create joint solutions aimed at offering Red Hat users a tightly aligned package of the Privileged Identity Management (PIM) tools needed for mission-critical servers.

The Global 2000 is nice. The Fortune 500 is very nice. But selling into the Fortune 50 — especially for a small open source company like Pentaho — is extra sweet.

FAA seems to be stumbling due to utterly poor choice of technology.

Proprietary code powers the world banks, networks, voting machines and other critical applications that we regularly interact with. But the real question is where mission critical applications like this can be done with open source code, as many open source advocates would like to see happen.

OpenLogic just announced that it had a good 2007. The company tripled its number of customers, and now counts three of the Fortune 10 as companies, with many more in the Fortune 500. Good for them. What is perhaps less appealing about the company's success is that it may be achieving its success at the expense of the projects that make it possible in the first place.

I've been writing about the use of open source software in business for nearly a decade and during that time I discovered the level of interest in free software to be somewhere between non-existent to various point solutions for routine or mission-critical tasks.

Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the Italian Ministry of Economics and Finance has selected Red Hat solutions to power the organization's mission-critical applications.

"It seems Microsoft has contributed some money to the Apache Foundation. Unbelievable? [...] And, finally? Of course, they transform into a Free Software company. Which they will have to do, in any case. And with the money and user base they have, they can easily drive the others, such as Red Hat and SuSE out of business or at least become the dominant FS company. Not likely? Who can say?

Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu Linux, and analyst firm RedMonk have released findings of a survey of thousands of Ubuntu users that show usage patterns for the Ubuntu server product.