With IT budgets getting tighter, managers need to trim costs. Service contracts are expensive for any technology; firewalls are no exception. Netfilter, the project that provides the packet filtering program iptables, is a free firewall alternative. While it lacks the service contract of commercial solutions and a pretty interfaces to make firewall modification easy, it has solid performance, performs effectively at firewalling, and allows for add-on functionality to enhance its reporting and response functions.

Red Hat yet again has delayed a major Linux desktop release. Sure, Red Hat intends to ship the PC software in January. But repeated delays have given Ubuntu Linux repeated opportunities to further accelerate its desktop momentum.

A top Red Hat executive has accused arch-rival Novell of reselling a beta version of the company's open source code.

How can Red Hat stay in business when CentOS is giving away Red Hat code for free? The answer is because Red Hat is also giving away Red Hat code for free.

Sun Microsystems on Wednesday will release details of a new award program meant to spur growth and activity within the company's open-source efforts, according to a post by Sun's open-source officer, Simon Phipps, on his corporate blog.

British Airways (BA) has set up a special innovation unit to explore ways the airline can use web 2.0, shareware and open source technologies.

It appears from almost two years of IDC data that the Unix/Linux share of the market is stabilizing in the 40-45% range. The major question is how quickly Linux systems will displace Unix. That’s the market chunk that Red Hat (RHT) is aiming at with its recent announcement that it plans to “own” 50% of the server market by 2015.

PayPal is currently processing $1,571 worth of transactions per second in 17 different currencies on about 4,000 servers running Red Hat Linux.