We all know there are plenty of reasons to be in favor of open source software. It increases personal freedom, it helps people become better developers by sharing in the advances made by others, it provides many eyes to find bugs, it can respond more quickly to changing market demands, and so on. But what about reasons for corporations to get involved?

I am still very much a creature of the desktop revolution. I still feel much more comfortable creating, storing, locally than from the cloud. My obsession with mobile has left me with the realization that devices are still very limited, and can increasingly lean on the cloud to add functionality.

Over the past few months, several potential clients have asked me to configure and install open-source programs. That's not unusual in and of itself. I have been consulting for 15 years, and always enjoy receiving calls from people with problems that I may be able to solve.

Openbravo, maker of open source ERP (enterprise resource planning) and POS (point of sale) platforms, has landed $12 million in new funding. Openbravo’s new funding reinforces growing interest in open, easily customized alternatives to entrenched giants like Oracle and SAP. The VAR Guy traded email with Manel Sarasa, CEO of Openbravo, for his thoughts on the funding.

Faster and easier e-mail search with Ontrack PowerControls™ version 5.0, complete Exchange administration tool - search, audit, manage Exchange servers.

Option investors bet heavily on Monday that Yahoo might strike a deal of some sort with Microsoft Corp, spurred on in part by pressure from activist shareholder Carl Icahn.

Microsoft has proposed an alternative deal for Yahoo, a complex transaction that would include just buying Yahoo's search business, rather than a full buyout, a person familiar with the discussions said on Monday.

Linux-based business-critical servers have found a stable home in the data center and in infrastructure computing applications in organizations of all types. The low-hanging fruit has been harvested; most Linux servers have been installed to handle workloads that traditionally would have run Unix-based operating systems.