Yesterday I took part in an interesting event organised by BT called "Accelerating Enterprise adoption of Open Source Software" (disclaimer: filthy lucre was involved.) One topic that elicited much comment was why the public sector has singularly failed to deploy open source.

I have been quiet about Linux this week because I have been busy trying several new versions. In the process, I have learned quite a bit more, and started to think about the philosophy behind Linux, operating system choices, and Free / Open Source software in general.

There are number of factors coming together that lead me to believe that open source's moment is right now, today, this year.

This week theme has been "who's going to pay for open source?" It's shown up in a number of blogs, like Matt Asay's.

There has been a lot of discussion recently on the Open Source Definition, and the use (and abuse) of the term "Open Source." One of the things that has been missing from this discussion is a higher-level overview of where the friction between "open source" and so-called "fauxpen source" comes from: intent.

As an election looms in the UK, copyright, intellectual property and Open Source, are making an appearance on the political stage, both at home and internationally.

John Edwards may be winning nothing more than Iowa and the netroots primary, but he is notable in being the first Presidential candidate to mention open source in his political campaign.

I'm a fan of many kinds of offbeat open source efforts, and the idea of community contributions can be applied to any number of pursuits, as seen previously in this post. This week I came across a few eyebrow-raising open source stories worthy of another short roundup. Here, you'll find four unusual examples of left-field open source in action.

Open-source solutions used to be adopted quietly by company boffins who snuck in an Apache Web server or an open-source development tool suite under the philosophy "It's easier to get forgiveness than permission" (not to mention "It's easier to do it with open-source tools than to get an IT budget").