Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the Italian Ministry of Economics and Finance has selected Red Hat solutions to power the organization's mission-critical applications.

The Dutch government has set a soft deadline of April 2008 for its agencies to start using open-source software -- freely distributed programs that anyone can modify -- the Netherlands Economic Affairs Ministry said Thursday.

"In 2008 we will see the Linux ecosystem applying a federation into one platform," said Jim Zemlin, director of The Linux Foundation. "A lot of Linux distros will compete in the marketplace. The particular flavor of Linux will matter in that different distros will cater to specific environments such as the Mobile Internet. All of these will center on the Linux Standard Base."

In 2004, health care software vendor McKesson Provider Technologies began focusing on ways to cut IT costs for customers, including hospitals and medical offices. The cure for IT cost bloat: moving many of McKesson's medical software applications to Linux, which could then be used on less expensive commodity hardware instead of expensive mainframes.

There are many of you out there who are looking to make a change from your current Windows operating system to the Linux operating system. Some of you may have doubts, many of you most likely have questions before taking the plunge. I’ll try to point you in the right directions before you switch from Windows to Linux.

I read a recent post called “Why I Won’t Be Recommending Linux to Family this Holiday Season.” The funny part is, the real reason…he doesn’t want to take the heat for telling them to use Linux and have something go wrong! Wimp!

I’ve been fiddling with Linux for a decade now. And, frankly, back then it was a total bear to get it working - you had to really, really, want to.

Many of us wonder, why is there so much excitement over Skype when, at its core, Ekiga is a more robust application with even more maturity behind it?