Linux Professional Institute President and CEO Jim Lacey told SearchEnterpriseLinux.com that he believes vendor-neutral Linux certifications are becoming more popular and signal a larger trend within IT of area specialization versus proficiency with a single product. Lacey also tells us where he thinks Linux managers face challenges in the enterprise.

Another Asian country decides to become vendor neutral when it comes to documents which government agencies handle

In 2004, health care software vendor McKesson Provider Technologies began focusing on ways to cut IT costs for customers, including hospitals and medical offices. The cure for IT cost bloat: moving many of McKesson's medical software applications to Linux, which could then be used on less expensive commodity hardware instead of expensive mainframes.

Last year, when I was socializing the idea of creating the OASIS ODF Interoperability and Conformance TC, I gave a presentation I called "ODF Interoperability: The Price of Success". The observation was that standards that fail never need to deal with interoperability.

In developed countries, healthcare workers represent a significant proportion of the working population. For example, in the United Kingdom, more than 1 million people work for the National Health Service, a publicly funded healthcare system. Medical software therefore has a huge market to tap.

The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit vendor-neutral organization that coordinates development of the Linux kernel, has responded to the recent news that Microsoft and TomTom have settled their patent dispute. Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin wrote a blog entry on Tuesday commenting on the outcome of the conflict.

Open source software benefits professionals in all industries: government, Internet, business, education, and even health care. Expensive software and subscriptions for anti virus systems, supporting electronic medical records and even phone or e-mail communications can put on a strain on small clinics as well as larger hospitals.

Power.Org will sponsor the first Power Architecture Developer Conference in the Austin Convention Center September 24-25. The vendor-neutral convention will gather Power.org's corporate members with developers, hardware and software solution providers, academics and designers to show how open collaboration can break down barriers to innovation.

Hans-Holger Schmuhl has launched a new online medical portal that lists a number of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FOSS) projects aimed at the health care and medical professions. So far, more than 120 projects, in a number of categories, have been listed