Using open source software offers schools a unique opportunity to advance the information society that is fair and free, says Cenatic, Spain's resource centre on open source and open standards.

I saw this article yesterday titled, "Study: Federal Gov't. Can Save Billions in IT Spending," and feel compelled to comment. The gist of the article is that by switching to open source software, like Linux and OpenOffice.org, the federal government would save billions of dollars in IT costs.

The merits of the open source distribution model in generating sales leads have been well documented but it’s always good to see statistics that back up the theory. I recently talked with a new open source software vendor (who will remain nameless, although in the interests of avoiding confusion I should state it was not LoopFuse) that shared with me some statistics about its first year distributing open source code and the comparative cost of lead generation using the proprietary model.

AMD continues to abide by their commitment to provide open-source support for their graphics cards and as proof of that this afternoon they have released their initial hardware acceleration code that supports the ATI Radeon HD 5000 "Evergreen" family of graphics processors.

Open-source software is an increasingly popular software development and distribution model that may spread further in the face of financial constraints in our current economy. With publicly available source code generally offered without charge, it is tempting to look to open source for potentially significant cost savings in this time of need. But not so fast.

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.

The desktop is uncharted territory. Over the past year, I’ve been on a quest to find an operating system that balances ease of use, stability, low cost and high functionality...I think I can say when the open-source desktop will become a more widely deployed end-user operating system: when it becomes a product and not a project.

"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."

Months after the ATI Radeon HD 5000 series (known by the "Evergreen" family codename) was introduced, AMD has finally pushed out the first bits of open-source code. This morning if you are to checkout the xf86-video-ati DDX driver branch there is initial user-space mode-setting support for the Radeon HD 5000 series GPUs.