Stories by: Matthew Broersma

Red Hat has rolled out a beta-test of the next version of its flagship OS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.2, with a new kernel and significant changes aimed at server farms and at workstations.

The European Commission has cleared the way for French government plans to fund a European search engine to rival Google.

In a move to challenge Microsoft on the desktop, IBM has teamed up with Austrian and Polish system integrators to supply the emerging Eastern European and Russian business PC markets with "Microsoft-free" systems based on Red Hat Linux and open standards-based productivity software.

It looks like Microsoft's proposed Yahoo acquisition is already attracting its share of buzzards: Open-Xchange, a prominent open source competitor to Microsoft Exchange, is looking to lure customers of Yahoo subsidiary Zimbra with an offer of steep discounts.

Security researchers have uncovered "critical" security flaws in a version of the Linux kernel used by a large number of popular distributions.

Open source developers have taken Apple to task for "undermining" a key piece of open source developer code in its Mac OS X implementation.

Secunia has found that the number of security bugs in the open source Red Hat Linux operating system and Firefox browsers far outstripped comparable products from Microsoft last year.

Google's Android developer kit for mobile phones has been successfully installed on several hardware devices, a step toward turning it into a genuine mobile-phone platform.

A US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) bug-fixing scheme has uncovered an average of one security glitch per 1,000 lines of code in 180 widely used open source software projects.

McAfee has warned investors that the "ambiguous" nature of open source licensing could turn into a business threat.

Red Hat has followed up its release of release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.1 two weeks ago with an update to its older RHEL 4 line of operating systems, including kernel updates and hardware tweaks.