I saw that Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat's new CEO, is gunning for $1 billion in revenue within the next three years. Given that Red Hat did $400 million in 2007, up from $278 million in 2006, this is perhaps not all that surprising of a goal.

In its latest cost-cutting move, Sun Microsystems announced it will eliminate an undisclosed number of jobs. The company has cut about 4,000 jobs through layoffs and attrition since June 2006. It reported its third profitable quarter in a row last month, earning $329 million on revenue of $3.84 billion.

I couldn't help think that question this morning when the news came through from the US that Microsoft will increase its R&D spend by $US1 billion bringing its total to $US9.1 billion every year.

Darl McBride says his company has strong products and a growing number of customers, so it will survive regardless of the outcome of legal battles.

You may have noticed the odd bit of celebration around the magic billion downloads milestone for Firefox. Of course, as Mozillans themselves point out, that figure doesn't tell us very much. How do we get the *next* billion downloads – and why do we want them?

"Talk about eating your own dog food. IBM today will announce it is consolidating nearly 4,000 small computer servers in six locations onto about 30 refrigerator-sized mainframes running Linux saving $250 million in the process."

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Saturday ordered 1 million low-cost laptops from Portugal — one of several bilateral deals that Portuguese officials valued at more than US$3 billion.

Can Marten Mickos capture open source lightning in a bottle — twice? He previously built MySQL into an estimated $100 million open source database company that Sun ultimately acquired for $1 billion. Now, Mickos is stepping into the CEO role at Eucalyptus Systems, the open-source cloud platform provider.

"As much as i try to avoid it, i always end up with lots of usernames and passwords to remember, not to mention a couple of bank accounts and a credit card number for on-line shopping. There’s no way i’m going to remember any of them—why, i even need to keep track of my telephone number.