Kurt Pfeifle and Simon Peter are the authors of klik. At FOSDEM 2008 they will talk about the advantages of klik, and the architecture of the upcoming klik2.

Gartner has made 10 technology predictions for the next few years, and in the analyst firm's view, life has never been better for open source. Among the predictions: Apple will double its market share by 2011 and software-as-service will account for at least one-third of all business software spending by 2012.

Google Inc. raised the specter of Microsoft Corp. using its proposed $42 billion acquisition of Yahoo Inc. to gain illegal control over the Internet, underscoring the online search leader's queasiness about its two biggest rivals teaming up.

Yes, Sun is acquiring MySQL for $1 billion. But Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz isn’t done modernizing his company. Not by a long shot. The VAR Guy isn’t ready to predict which company Sun will acquire next, but he has noticed Schwartz getting pretty darn cozy with two fast-growing open source businesses.

Novell (NOVL), the struggling software maker once among the computer industry's best known names, is trying to reclaim relevance through an embrace of open-source software and a détente with onetime rival Microsoft (MSFT). Now, having stemmed a multiyear revenue decline and beefed up its balance sheet, Novell plans to start acquiring smaller software companies in a quest for growth.

At MySQL there were few things we loved as much as the thought of being our own masters. We had always been contrarians and we prided ourselves with not following what we saw as outdated ideas from big companies. We made the dolphin on our logo jump surprisingly from right to left (as opposed to the typical left to right) - because we wanted it to be clear: we were not afraid to be different.

When Matthew Szulik left Red Hat abruptly for family health reasons in December, many people were scratching their heads over the company's new choice of CEO: a young executive from Delta Airlines, Jim Whitehurst. But Whitehurst's chief operating officer title at Delta and position outside of the technology industry are misleading; a peek into his past reveals a computer science degree and a passion for open source technology, not to mention a smooth operator who helped bring a struggling airline out of bankruptcy.

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.