News just in is that Sun is buying innotek, the open source virtualization player whose VirtualBox enables desktop or laptop PCs running the Windows, Linux, Mac or Solaris operating systems to run multiple, different operating systems side-by-side...

CIOs love Linux, but what does your Linux-using reputation say about you as an employee? IT execs say it shows a kind of problem-solving skill they're looking for.

Call it the ultimate double play: Open source coupled with software as a service (SaaS). Using that formula, SugarCRM is striving to double its size this year, asserts CEO John Roberts.

Some say that paid services belittle the efforts to facilitate free and open sharing of source code. Can profitable businesses and open source really coexist?

Could the open-source community use a library packaging technology that enables languages to share class libraries regardless of the language an application was written in? Probably, especially since the code to accomplish that goal was written (and shelved) more than ten years ago. All it takes to make that code available is to ask IBM to release SOM and DSOM as open-source.

The use of open source environments for enterprise software projects is growing at an unprecedented rate, with notable peaks of interest among financial services and public sector organizations. Indeed, the adoption of open source software is growing at a great clip, with worldwide revenue from standalone open source software having reached $1.8 billion in 2006, according to recent calculations from IDC. That figure is expected to reach $5.8 billion by 2011, representing a compound annual growth rate of 26 percent. As a result, IDC is calling open source "the most significant, all-encompassing, and long-term trend that the software industry has seen since the early 1980s."

The commoditization of equity trades is giving Web 2.0 open-source investment platforms a chance to win converts.

Although KOffice has its admirers, in many people's minds, it runs a poor second to OpenOffice.org. However, some European developers expect that situation to change, and to encourage that change, they have created KOfficeSource, a company incorporated in Germany. The company plans to offer support and training not only for KOffice, but also for Open Document Format, and programming using the Qt toolkit. The company's business plan highlights its founders' hopes that KDE-related technologies will become mainstream, and illustrates the current level of acceptance of free software tools in business.