Stories by: Carol Sliwa

Two words came to mind when John Winske, president of the Boston-based Disability Policy Consortium, learned just before Labor Day last year that Massachusetts was planning to adopt the Open Document Format for Office Applications as a standard for its executive-branch agencies.

Boeing has been discreetly providing feedback to the Mozilla Foundation for the past year or so on features that might encourage enterprise adoption of the open-source Firefox browser. At the top of the list has been a tool kit to help IT departments distribute Firefox with custom configurations to end users.

Sun Microsystems has worked to improve the compatibility of its StarOffice application suite with Microsoft's Office, but it still faces an uphill climb as it tries to entice corporate users to consider the new version released on Tuesday.

Novell's US$290 million in revenue in its most recent quarter fell short of expectations. David Patrick, vice president and general manager of Novell's Linux, open-source platforms and services group, spoke with Computerworld about the company's prospects as it tries to shift its customer base from NetWare to the open-source Linux operating system.

Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive for IBM Corp.'s software division, spoke with Computerworld at the LinuxWorld Conference in San Francisco this week about Linux usage trends and the open-source operating system's future.

Ritz Camera Centers plans to deploy Linux in more than 1,200 stores across the country, joining a growing list of retailers that have opted to run their in-store point-of-sale (POS) applications on the open-source operating system. Novell's announcement that the retail chain has selected its Linux Desktop highlighted the customer-related news at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo.

Open-source zealots may continue to play a part in instigating the spread of Linux across the European continent, nearly 14 years after Linus Torvalds hatched the operating system in Finland. But private corporations and public-sector users in Europe typically cite pragmatic reasons for taking up the open-source operating system. They point to price and performance benefits. They want freedom to swap out hardware. They find the operating system reliable. They like its flexibility.

Some technology industry insiders say there seems to be a little bit of Linux just about everywhere in the corporate IT shops of Australia. But it can sometimes be difficult to quantify exactly where and how much.

In an interview yesterday at Red Hat's inaugural user conference here in New Orleans, CEO Matthew Szulik told Computerworld that the best opportunities for the company's open-source software stack lie outside the U.S:

Microsoft has fleshed out the details of a plan to build virtualisation capabilities directly into Windows as part of its effort to catch up to virtualization software market leader VMware.

Continental Airlines encountered a bit of turbulence last year when it decided to shift the ticket-reissue application it had built for Unix-based servers to a full open-source software stack with a 64-bit database server.