SCO Group CEO Darl McBride says competition from the open source Linux operating system was a major reason why the company was forced to file for Chapter 11 on Friday. The slump, McBride said, "has been attributable to competition from alternative operating systems, including Linux."

At least 80 percent of all commercial software products will include elements of open-source code by 2010, according to Mark Driver, vice president of research at Gartner.

With open source software becoming a household name, another open source movement that may one day see some fanfare is already taking shape. Open source hardware, which I once thought to be little more than a pipe dream left over from a bygone era, is proving to be a dream that it is very much alive and growing.

Communications chip giant Broadcom has joined the LiMo (Linux Mobile) Foundation, an industry group building a shared Linux stack for mobile phones. The company said it hopes to work with the Foundation to reduce Linux's power requirements, size, and cost, in order to "achieve widespread adoption of Linux-based handsets."

Linux users want two things for their hardware: drivers; and easy access to those drivers. The first is finally happening; and now, thanks to a Dell Linux project called DKMS (Dynamic Kernel Module Support), the other is on its way.

At stake here is far more than SCO's existence. It is the front line in a battle between two diametrically opposed ideologies. In the red corner we have open source - the idea that software should be freely available and that it is best developed by a community of interested individuals who incrementally add to it for the common good.

South African payment gateway service, MyGate, have developed a service that allows e-commerce merchants running Linux to access credit card security services that were developed for Windows platforms.

Better security protection tops the list of buying criteria for open source software, reveals a new study conducted on Australia, China, India and Korea.