One by one, free and open source software providers are signing agreements with “the dark side”, the poster child for proprietary software, and (many say) the antithesis of open source: Microsoft.

Following recent reports of a South African bank eyeing out Linux, Novell South Africa today issued a statement in which it said it had reached an agreement with First National Bank of South Africa to standardise the bank's 12 000 desktops in its 680 retail branches on Novell's Linux product.

Issue 18 is here and with it another bunch of great articles all about free software. We have Andrew Min showing us how to dual-boot Windows and Kubuntu. There's Mitch Meyran's in depth article on 3D desktops and Xavier Calbet's one on Fractal generation.

"While governments considering supporting OSS are primarily concerned with significant switching costs and incompatibility problems, OSS is actually superior to proprietary software because it increases compatibility and consequently decreases switching costs in the long term."

Sales of open source software will grow from $1.8bn last year to $5.8bn in 2011, analyst firm IDC predicts.

A U.S. government- and industry-led coalition aiming to equip every car and roadside in America with wirelessly connected computers has tapped GNU/Linux for a prototype design. The Vehicle Infrastructure Integration Consortium (VII-C) hopes to lower driver death rates, reduce traffic jams, and media-enable cars before 2017.

Good on you, Harald Wolf! This Senator of Economics of Berlin has decreed his department is migrating to free software in 2008.