Former Novell CEO Ray Noorda used to speak about coopetition — the need to both cooperate and compete with technology companies. But the current Microsoft-Novell relationship is giving new meaning to the term coopetition, especially during this week’s BrainShare.

Has open source been positive or negative for its primary (commercial) proponents? That's the question I asked myself yesterday about Red Hat, Sun, and Novell, and found the answer interesting. I looked at these three as they, more than any others, have results that can be isolated and directly attributed to open source.

One obstacle some organizations face when trying to migrate from Microsoft Exchange to a free groupware server has been Outlook users who, for whatever reason, are not yet willing to switch to another client. Bynari, Inc. in collaboration with a number of server developers, including the Citadel project [http://www.citadel.org] has developed a new Outlook connector that uses open standard data formats and protocols to store groupware data. Users of legacy environments (i.e. Windows + Outlook) will now be fully interoperable on the same server with users of free software. This could potentially spell the permanent end of Exchange lock-in.

In many organizations, copiers get little respect. Often relegated to a break room or storage closet, they are underutilized and underappreciated, and get no attention from the IT department. Yet, multifunction copiers can play a critical role in reducing operating costs and become a hub for document processing.

My blogging colleague Dana Blankenhorn reports that ThinkgOS founder David Lui isn’t worried by the Wal-Mart snub. He should be.

A plan to reshape Yahoo's board from the inside may be a shrewder strategy than an all-out assault

A new survey of companies and individuals supplying Open Source solutions and services claims to show that Open Source IT professionals make more money than their proprietary IT counterparts because they're more highly skilled.

Linux has outpaced Windows and Unix in corporate adoption rates, according to research firm IDC’s 2007 server market numbers. The pace of Linux’s future adoption could partly depend upon whether certain people choose early retirement, another researcher says.