We have had some recent request for ways to purchase Bordeaux other then through PayPal. So as of today we have Bordeaux listed at Payloadz.com and can be purchased without the need of a PayPal account. Payloadz will let you use your credit or debit card to make a direct payment and access to five downloads through their servers.

I write free software. My free software has a "donate" link that goes to the PayPal donation page. The idiots at PayPal froze my account since I couldn't prove 501(c) exemption (which I don't have - and more to the point, never claimed to!) and insist that it's "illegal" to receive donations unless you're a registered non-profit with 501(c) IRS clearance.

An odd bit of news from the xorg foundation. During some discussion on their mailing list about missing funds it became apparent that PayPal had simply taken $5k of their money because PayPal thought xorg foundation were some sort of scam.

But Paypal refused to pay. Why? At 17 years of age, Robert Kugler, according to Paypal, does not meet the age-related eligibility requirement for participating in the program. Curiously, that specific requirement is not stated in the publicly available description of the program, which is available here.

When Scott Thompson left Visa to take the CTO role at PayPal in 2005, the Web company's data centre surprised him. "Wait a minute," he recalls saying, "they run a payment system on Linux?"

The Free Software Foundation thanks PayPal for responding to its concerns and making its terms more free software friendly.

"Talk about eating your own dog food. IBM today will announce it is consolidating nearly 4,000 small computer servers in six locations onto about 30 refrigerator-sized mainframes running Linux saving $250 million in the process."

IBM is embarking on a huge energy-conservation project to consolidate about 3,900 of its own servers reducing power use by about 80 percent and saving US$250 million on electricity, support and software over five years. Under the project, IBM will replace 3,900 smaller servers with 30 IBM System z9 mainframes running Linux and virtualization software.

EnterpriseDB plans to announce Tuesday that it is open-sourcing GridSQL, its grid product for data warehousing and business intelligence applications, under the GPLv2 license. GridSQL, and products like it, allow users to scale up database performance by adding more servers to a grid configuration, and then running queries in parallel across the pool.