The Chicago Tribune suggests that increasing volumes of intellectual property are now being sold at to shore up balance sheets. So who in the open-source world is buying?

The Icelandic government has released a policy on free and open source software. In short, the policy states that when buying software free and open source software should be considered on an equal footing with proprietary software, that software based on open standards shall be chosen, that lock-ins to specific vendors should be avoided (choosing free software is one means to achieve this), that bespoke or customized software shall be reusable (and free and open source software achieves this), and finally that students of Icelandic educational institutes shall have the opportunity to learn about and use free and open source software on a par with proprietary software.

This policy applies to all state institutions and organizations operated with public funds.

Consolidation continues across the IT channel and the open source software market. The latest example involves Sparxent, a mid-market solutions provider, buying XAware, an open source data integration specialist. XAware is the second open source company to get gobbled up this week. And in both cases, venture capitalists seem to be consolidating their financial bets. Here’s the scoop.

We don't for certain that VMware, the giant proprietary virtualization company, is buying Zimbra, the open-source e-mail server company from Yahoo, but that's the news from the rumor-mill.

The big news in tech today is of course Intel buying McAfee, in a deal valued at about 7.7 billion dollars. I think this deal is all about mobile devices and mobile computing security. I think Intel has made a huge misstep here and the reason maybe they don't understand open source software.

It's good to see news about continuing adoption of open source software in schools around the world. I've written before about how doable it would be for many American schools to reduce costs, increase efficiency and arm kids with Linux notebooks through open source adoption.

“Open Source” advocate: «...I associate much more with the "Open Source" (also as Richard defines it) camp, and am open to the existence and use of proprietary software...» --

At the 6th NorthEast Asia Open Source SW Promotion Forum held in Seoul on the 12 September 2007 Christophe Forax, representing the EU Telecom and Media Commissioner Viviane Reding, stated that Europe should better monetize open source software.

To be honest, for a couple of years now I have been pretty skeptical about the future of Free and Open Source software in Finnish schools and education sector in general. In Finland we have a lot of open source expertise and know-how. We have developers. I also assume that majority of the (liberally) higher educated people in Finland, at least know what is "Open Source" and "Linux".