At a time when Cisco Systems has aggressively reduced its face-to-face event spending and travel budget, the networking giant has signed on to become a visionary sponsor for the Red Hat Summit

So hats off to Red Hat, whose chairman Matthew Szulik is the subject of this week’s Global Business. Red Hat is built on the computer operating system software system Linux, devised 19 years ago by the Finnish developer Linus Torvalds, and then worked on by thousands of collaborators all over the world, to become a plausible free-to-use option instead of the big brands of proprietary software.

Microsoft made waves this week with their GPLv2 contribution of virtualization code. On the other side of the coin, Microsoft continues to take issue with open source vendors over the issue of patents. One vendor that has called on Microsoft to be more open is Red Hat. In a blog post, Red Hat's legal team praised Microsoft's code contribution while asking Microsoft to change its stance on patents.

Novell-sponsored Mono software gets extended so as to make it interconnected with Microsoft Moonlight, a "forbidden" component by Red Hat's assessment

Red Hat today officially announced the beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 (RHEL), which in my view is a lot more than a typical point release. Sure we're all waiting for the big RHEL 6 release, but there are some major changes in RHEL 5.4.

Red Hat continues to demonstrate that Free software as a business model most certainly works

"A brand new initiative endorsed by Red Hat and Synnex (a business process services company) is called the Open Source Channel Alliance.

Linux vendor Red Hat, and 17 other vendors, have protested a Swiss government contract given to Microsoft without any public bidding.