Open source software and widespread instrumentation have lowered the costs of producing IT management software. Open source systems management companies are using the free nature of an open source product, coupled with the cheap distribution the Web enables, to boot-strap their businesses.

I wanted to briefly follow up the discussion about blurring on-line maps. I am currently reading a very enlightening book entitled Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World.

The Windows share of the US netbook market is a staggering 96 percent. That's up from less than 10 percent of US unit sales during the first half of 2008 when the words netbook and Linux pretty much ran together. Now it seems that the netbook revolution is leaving Linux behind. Is Linux a Dead Man Walking?

The upcoming Fonera 2.0 802.11g wireless router from FON uses Linux as its embedded OS and includes several new features.

Over the weekend I did an update on my Elive Compiz powered main PC. I didn’t realize it at the time but the update was actually an upgrade (I ran the update via Syanptic not apt-get - otherwise I would have known) and I wound up running the unstable version.

Last weekend, the Birmingham Perl Mongers group hosted and was main financial sponsor of the 2009 QA Hackathon, which was held at the Birmingham City Inn. Key developers in the Perl Quality Assurance world flew in from as far afield as Sydney, Portland, OR and Birmingham itself to spend 3 days hacking on all aspects of the Perl and CPAN toolchain.

The Linux operating system is the most successful open source project in history, but just how much is the software in a Linux distribution “worth”? We estimate that it would take approximately $10.8 billion to build the Fedora 9 distribution in today’s dollars, with today’s software development costs. Additionally, it would take $1.4 billion to develop the Linux kernel alone.