Linux HPC clusters now dominate the market. We often hear about the “big ones”, but many small individual or group clusters still exist. I believe, the rapid and disruptive growth was due to the low barriers to entry. You could play with “it” before you committed big resources to a larger system. A simple and effective “try before you buy” proposition.

At first glance, Microsoft’s software portfolio — Windows, Office, Small Business Server and Exchange — still dominates the small business market. But Red Hat CEO Jim Whiteshurst says his company has found a back door into the small business market. Perhaps surprisingly, it doesn’t really involve desktop Linux.

Opinion -- Sometimes, several unrelated changes come to a head at the same time, with a result no one could have predicted. The PC market is at such a tipping point right now and the result will be millions of Linux-powered PCs in users' hands.

The first change was the continued maturation of desktop Linux. Today, no one can argue...

Pressure from Google Chrome and, increasingly, from other main players in the web-browser market is forcing Mozilla to change its ways. Most notably, it's starting to rethink its update schedule and system for Firefox and favoring small incremental updates, a la Chrome, instead of major releases months or years apart.

Linux-based mobile phone platforms are really just specialized distributions. Like other distributions, phone platforms will live or die based on how well they meet the needs of their users. The Android platform has a high profile at the moment as the result of the entry of more handsets into the market, but also as a result of Google's actions toward derived distributions.

There was a time when I thought the Linux desktop was going to take a market share at least equal to Apple’s. Maybe even 5% or 10% of the total desktop market. I had high hopes that the One Laptop Per Child Initiative would put Linux laptops in the hands of impressionable young minds who would never have the chance to become dependent on Windows. Though that plan has fallen through the cracks.

Finding bugs in your code can be quite nasty—especially if you don’t know where to look. However, finding bugs automatically does not require astronaut training. I think it’s time to leave that “pleasure” to free (as in freedom) automatic static code review tools like the ones reviewed in this series of articles.

DragonFly, like the other BSDs, imports code from other members of the family when it makes sense, such as the malloc() security features from OpenBSD, parts of the WiFi subsystem from FreeBSD, and USB code from NetBSD. In spite of this, development has been pushed in some unique directions.

"Microsoft Windows is emerging as an acceptable operating system for high-performance computing (HPC) clusters in place of Linux, lowering the bar for entry into that space, according to some analysts and major vendors."