One of the challenges open source companies have is that you serve two distinct markets: your customers as well as non-paying community users. Paradoxically, the non-paying users can be the most vocal and demanding.

This will be an ongoing series of articles highlighting lesser known applications for Linux. These articles will be a bit Ubuntu-centric, but these applications should run nicely on your distribution of choice.

SCO CEO Darl McBride has sent a letter to partners and customers about the ruling in SCO v. Novell and its impact on SCO as a company. We get the clearest hint yet of what SCO may be thinking for the future, and as I expected, there is no white flag flying yet.

On June 15, the New York Law School's Institute for Information Law and Policy, in cooperation with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), launched the Peer-to-Patent community patent review pilot program.

The SCO Group's copyright case may have done little to discourage enterprise Linux use, but the next generation of legal conflicts around open source have only begun, experts said Monday.

The Sabayon Linux live DVD distribution, based on the unstable branch of Gentoo Linux, has been in development for several years and caters to a wide variety of users.

True believers will tell you that open source browsers are much less likely to be exploited by hackers. Microsoft evangelists will just as vehemently argue the easy availability of open source browser code actually encourages tampering. Now that Firefox is gaining popularity, obscurity is no longer a defense, insist fence-sitters.

Printing on Linux has traditionally been possible mainly thanks to the efforts of heroic Linux developers, with little support from printer manufacturers.