With LinuxWorld showcasing the popularity of the open source operating system, and with open source in general finding its legs in the enterprise, Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president of open source and standards, made a slate of predictions for Linux and open source during his keynote address on Wednesday at the Black Hat conference.

Despite being one of the most tightly controlled technology companies on the market, Apple has a surprisingly complicated relationship with open source. Both of Apple’s flagship operating systems, OS X and iOS are based on Darwin, which is in turn based on FreeBSD.

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.

Utilities. They’re what help make computing a lot easier and more convenient, no matter what operating system you use. Linux users are spoiled when it comes to utilities.

Every operating system is fighting to gain users and marketshare, but is becoming "mainstream" a good goal? While "mainsream" obviously means more users and, thus, usually more revenue for the maker of the OS, it also has some disadvantages. For example, it becomes much harder to break compatibility with older applications in order to move forwards or to change the interface too much.

If your business hasn't yet dipped its toe into the open-source software waters, it's as behind the times as a company five years ago that was not yet on the internet.

Linux and other open source applications are finding increasing acceptance in the global marketplace in small and large companies alike. Statistics on the growth of a few open source programs—like Apache, a web server; Linux, an operating system; FreeBSD, an operating system; and PostgreSQL, a database server—show this to be true.

We focus quite a lot on Linux stuff here at FOSSwire, which is fine, because it is a very important open source system, but it’s easy to forget that there are other platforms out there, and even if the platform itself isn’t open source, there are plenty of applications you can be using which are. In this post, I’m going to run through five top open source applications for Mac OS X.

The past year brought some exciting advancements for the Linux operating system and open source software. Open technology continues to become more pervasive and the Linux kernel is now widely used in a multitude of mainstream products ranging from set-top boxes to mobile phones.