Almost two thirds of Irish IT experts say the main motivation for migrating to the Linux operating system from UNIX for use in servers is cost, according to a recent survey from Novell’s Open Enterprise Summit in Dublin.

At the beginning of November, Wal-Mart gave shoppers a chance to get an early start on their holiday shopping by offering a $199 desktop computer, both in its stores and online at WalMart.com. As desktop machines go, the Everex TC2502 is not particularly powerful, with a 1.5-gigahertz processor, 512 megabytes of RAM, an 80-gigabyte hard drive and no monitor.

A friend said to me recently that “Firefox is for the home, Internet Explorer is for the office.” His comments reflect commonly found stigma and fears that free and open source software – and Linux too – are not suitable for a business environment. Let me set the record straight, giving real feedback from companies who have made the switch and don’t look back.

Intel’s agreement with the OLPC Foundation included a ‘non disparagement’ clause, under which Intel and One Laptop promised not to criticize each other, according to Nicholas Negroponte in the latest article in the Wall Street Journal.

Can something you give away for free turn into a gold mine? That's the multimillion-dollar question Google Inc. is betting on with its push into open-source software.

Although some companies and government agencies have embraced open source, the level of adoption in Singapore is still low by most counts, industry observers say.

CIO.com asked the lead guys for each distro about its suitability for business use. In "Red Hat Enterprise Linux: The Business OS for Flexibility and Value" Brian Stevens, CTO and vice president of engineering, Red Hat makes his case that Red Hat is the choice for reducing operating costs and providing a secure, reliable, scalable operating system.

CIO.com asked the lead guys for each distro about its suitability for business use. Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu Project, says that besides ease of use for end users, Ubuntu is cost-effective and even eliminates per-seat license costs entirely, on both the desktop and the server.