Sun has been getting serious about opening up its software for a few years now. OpenSolaris, an open source Unix operating system like Linux and BSD, released in May, is its latest foray into the open source arena. I found OpenSolaris to be a production-ready OS that works equally well on desktops and servers.

I've been writing about the ReactOS for at least five years (the project itself is more than 10 years old). It's an effort to try and replicate a Windows operating system in open source.

For years, my friend Stephen J. Vaughan-Nichols has been trying to turn Linux into something it is not: A successful and popular desktop operating system... His latest foray into "Linux is the next big thing" is a discussion of Google's Android operating system running on future netbooks... This is simply wrong.

In the previous newsletter we looked at the breakdown of Linux Distributions. Many people have since asked us how open source software compares across different operating systems like Linux, Windows, and Mac, so we decided to take a look at the average number of open source packages found by operating system.

It's been only a handful of months since the OEM began fielding Web-borne requests to add the open-source operating system to its preloaded platform mix, and Dell is already a few weeks into filling orders for the penguin-loving public. It's too early to judge the success or failure of Dell's mainstream Linux foray.

Occasionally I have written about how Linux has become a viable alternative operating system for the desktop. Linux is a “free” operating system, and is the flagship offering of the open source software movement. Open source is software developed by a community of developers and offered at no charge to the public.

Almost two years after its initial announcement, the Linux Solution Group (LiSoG) has now presented specificationsPDF for its OSDtBench (Open Source based Desktop Benchmark) desktop benchmark suite and demonstrated a prototype at LinuxTag 2009 in Berlin.

The question I get asked the most on a regular basis is why in the heck I choose to run Linux over something a bit more mainstream such as OS X. My reasoning for this is based on a track record of watching Microsoft make one mistake with their users after another.

At the Utah Open Source Conference yesterday I presented a dilemma. Briefly, the idea is that as open-source buyers grow comfortable with open source they will stop spending money on open source. This leads to tragedy of the commons-type problems and a difficulty in encouraging the creation of more open source.