If you'd like to read some background into our use of Ubuntu you can click for the case study that's also included with every Ubuntu desktop CD image that's downloaded:

http://www.ubuntulinux.org/products/casestudies/oxford-archaeology

The main thing I'd like to write about, however, is our Open Archaeology project; our commitment to Open Source, Open Standards and Open Data.

"The nonprofit sector is a huge and vastly underserved market when it comes to CRM," says MPower CEO Randy McCabe. MPower provides open source CRM software to nonprofit organizations, allowing them to download and use it without licensing fees. McCabe sees inherent shortcomings in the proprietary software model -- issues which MPower has targeted with its open source offerings.

The One Laptop Per Child project suffered a blow this week, with Chief Technology Officer Mary Lou Jepsen quitting the nonprofit to start a for-profit company to commercialize technology she invented with OLPC.

The now-official recession has hit many corporations hard in the wallets, and that's being reflected in IT budgets. With fewer dollars to work with, IT managers are increasingly turning to open source software to get the job done.

Amanda is the most popular open source backup and recovery software in the world, protecting more than half a million servers and desktops running various versions of Linux, UNIX, BSD, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems. Amanda allows system administrators to set up a centralized backup server to back up multiple hosts to a tape- or disk-based storage system.

...occasionally I run into press articles that "round up" a half dozen such marketing misdirections from various marketing departments in one place. The December 1 BusinessWeek article called "Cost-Conscious Companies Turn to Open-Source Software" is such an article. And it's the second such multi-marketing-oriented misdirection article I've seen this week.

MiserWare MicroMiser is an intelligent software power management solution for x86 servers, laptops, and PCs running Linux. MicroMiser automatically optimizes a system to use energy more efficiently without compromising performance or availability.

Forget the thousands of school and university students running Linux on their desktops. Forget the nonprofit and charitable institutions worldwide using Linux to power their systems.

As Microsoft gears up to launch Windows 7, Canonical and IBM have a message for channel partners and CIOs (chief information officers): Virtualized Ubuntu desktops, running on centralized Linux servers, provide lower TCO (total cost of ownership) and lower acquisition costs vs. traditional Windows desktops. Here's the scoop.