Canonical remains committed to Landscape - the remote systems management platform for Ubuntu. But one of the Landscape team members has joined Dell, according to sources close to the hardware giant. Here's the update.

Gluster is an open source startup that most people in storage have never heard of. Yet its value proposition could spell trouble for the big boys and potentially send the prices of proprietary hardware crashing down.

Should open source look to the organic food business for a model of how to integrate principles and business?

Market research company Forrester has compared a number of open source Business Intelligence products and found some big differences

If you wanted to write your own software, you’d have already done it yourself or paid someone to do it. But if you find problems with a FOSS app, you can, and should, communicate with the open source project’s developers to ensure that the application performance issues are addressed. Here's the way to get what you want.

OpenStack and Apache Deltacloud do have similar goals. They're both building out lightweight REST APIs so companies can tap into the services of a cloud provider over an HTTP network. But they're likely to be used for different purposes.

Despite the wealth of free applications out there, many small business owners continue to spend an inordinate amount of their all-too-scarce resources on software. Microsoft Office 2010? That'll be $499.99 -- or $279.99 if you can do without the Professional version. QuickBooks 2010? $159.95 or more. Adobe PhotoShop CS5? A whopping $699.

A good BI tool or suite makes the difference between acting on facts and assumptions, which can drastically influence sales and profitability, said George Mehok, CIO of Revol Wireless, which uses the open source Jaspersoft BI suite from Jaspersoft.