50,000 Arduino units have been sold worldwide since mass production began two years ago. Those are small numbers by Intel standards but large for a startup outfit in a highly specialized market. What's really remarkable, though, is Arduino's business model: The team has created a company based on giving everything away.

Companies who have previously relied upon software to generate revenue will see financial decline if they take the open source road. This decline however is to be short lived and in the long run will prove to be a power play that will pay off in the future and here is why.

Wind River has completed its $16M acquisition of Linux smartphone pioneer Mizi Research, it announced.

The Global 2000 is nice. The Fortune 500 is very nice. But selling into the Fortune 50 — especially for a small open source company like Pentaho — is extra sweet.

There's little question that Linux on laptops (and on PCs in general) is no longer nearly as complicated or painful as it used to be. The new problem is whether notebook manufacturers are going to readily offer Linux to consumers -- both regular folks on the street and corporate clients -- outside of designated niches.

Dell is spending advertising dollars to promote PCs with Ubuntu Linux preinstalled. The move has significant implications for the business world as well. Here’s why.

One thing that has always struck me in the free software world is the power of example. Once it emerged that Google ran on GNU/Linux, there could be no more argument about the latter's suitability for the enterprise.

OpenOffice.org 3.0, which is being released today, is not the great leap forward in look and feel that version 2.0 represented, but it justifies its label as a major release with dozens of changes, some major, some minor, but in all more than can be easily summarized.