One of the continuing fears among Internet mavens is someone will find a choke point, control the market, and drive innovation under... One feature of open source is that it frustrates the seeker of choke points.

While the Internet may know no borders, the U.S Government does. There are a number of rules including encryption export regulations from the U.S Department of Commerce and export sanctions by the Department of Treasury that affect software vendors. But what do you do when your application is open source and freely available to anyone in the world? Do the same the rules apply?

Last year, word swirled in the air that Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) would be the next big PC vendor after Dell (Dell) to add support for Linux on desktops. So far the official word remains muted, in the realm of "we're exploring options, we'll make an announcement when the time is right", but the guesses now center around HP providing SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop as its distro of choice.

Too bad it's only for professional use the HGZ Linux based coffee machine. I'd love to have on of these. A Dream come true. The Linux coffee maker. Embedded Linux on a coffee machine, touch screen. Build on Qt framework. Have Linux brew your coffee, finally a stable cup of coffee. Demo-ed at the Embedded World in Nurmberg Germany by Qt...

What's your normal routine when you log on in the morning? It's probably something along the lines of: pour cup of coffee, fire up Thunderbird, check your email, check your other email accounts that Thunderbird can't access, pour another cup of coffee. Well, here are a few Thunderbird extensions that may make your mornings go a little more smoothly.

Remember the Seinfeld episode where Kramer had the idea to make a coffee table book about coffee tables? I always thought that was a pretty elegant idea. Well, a few months ago, some of the smart folks on Red Hat's community architecture team had a similarly elegant idea:

The Brazilian government has signed a letter of intent to work with both The Document Foundation and the Apache OpenOffice.org community to develop the Office Suite platforms maintained by both communities. The letter asserts that the ODF standard is already a guarantee of interoperability within the government.

The annual DrupalCon conference is coming up, April 19th to 21st at San Francisco's Moscone Center. Drupal, of course, is the increasingly popular open source content management system founded by Dries Buytaert, and OStatic itself runs on the platform.

I have a real open source crisis at my hands. My ’school’ IT department has been pushing for the implementation of Microsoft Office 2007 in our 60 machines. The funny thing is, since our IT head is also our supplier, he too is pushing for this because he probably gets a commission. I’m the only one who has offered an alternative, Open Office, naturally.