Plat'Home's latest product, OpenBloks is a pint-sized Linux server that weighs in at a measly 225 grams. It's not much bigger than a deck of cards, but it can run many of the same server applications full-sized machines run. It's ideal for many surveillance and automation processes that rely heavily on reliability.

The public perception of open source software is changing fast, said Mark Shuttleworth, who leads distribution of the Ubuntu operating system (OS).
A new version of Ubuntu, a version of the Linux OS, is released on Thursday.

"Early results in a study that aims to track open source installations in business has seen Ubuntu and Firefox race to the top of the charts."

After failing to get any response from Linspire as to why they are not holding annual shareholder meetings, I asked them publicly to do so in my last blog, in a hopes that pressure from customers, partners and shareholders would encourage them to do the right thing. I hold a fairly large amount of Linspire stock, but I remain in a minority position with about 100 other shareholders.

A visiting Red Hat executive has said that wariness on the part of a number of government CIOs over adopting open source is not a reflection of Australia's tech savvy, but the result of a "lack of understanding" of the software and its community.

"Spencer is the inventor of Asterisk, a free software program that establishes phone calls over the Internet and handles voicemail, caller ID, teleconferencing and a host of novel features for the phone [...] Outsourcing company Sutherland Global Services has tested Asterisk in 400-person call centers, finding it cuts telephone costs by two-thirds."

Red Hat Inc. and Novell Inc. will soon face more competition from a small rival, Ubuntu Linux, in the market for open-source software programs that run server computers.

"Yesterday, Linux-Watch released some figures that demonstrate how much of work toward the development of the Linux kernel has been contributed by paid professionals hired by large, profit-seeking corporations."