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Almost four months after Google emerged from the background in social networking with its OpenSocial initiative, there is no shortage of skepticism around the project.

When Matthew Szulik left Red Hat abruptly for family health reasons in December, many people were scratching their heads over the company's new choice of CEO - a young executive from Delta Airlines, Jim Whitehurst. But Whitehurst's chief operating officer title at Delta and position outside of the technology industry are misleading; a peek into his past reveals a computer science degree and a passion for open-source technology, not to mention a smooth operator who helped bring a struggling airline out of bankruptcy.

Mary Lou Jepsen stirred up a controversy when she left the struggling One Laptop Per Child nonprofit effort in December to start her own for-profit company, Pixel Qi, with the goal to create a US$75 laptop using technologies she invented at OLPC.

The issue of whether companies, government agencies and ISPs should be allowed to buy and sell excess IPv4 addresses is a sticky one, as outlined in our story about a new proposal by Internet policymakers. Carolyn Duffy Marsan posed a few questions about the prospects for IPv4 address trading to David Conrad, general manager of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and a long-time participant in the Internet engineering community.

Since being acquired by Linux vendor Red Hat in mid-2006, open-source middleware vendor JBoss has been a company in transition. It was well-known for its open-source middleware line that could be used by large businesses to better tie together their divergent applications.

SugarCRM began in 2004 and offers its Sugar CRM package via a hybrid commercial-open source model and delivers it via onsite and on-demand modes. The company has amassed more than 3,000 customers in 30 countries, SugarCRM officials said. InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill met with Clint Oram, SugarCRM co-founder and vice president of open source community relations, at the company's conference in California this week to talk about the company and where it is headed.

Window Snyder has the somewhat offbeat title of "chief security something-or-other" at Mozilla, where she is responsible for overseeing efforts to boost the security of the company's open-source offerings, including the Firefox browser.

With the recent release of version 4.0, the KDE open source project has garnered a lot of international attention. One of KDE's lead developers, and best known personality, Aaron J Seigo is in Australia to speak at this year's Linux.conf.au on his vision for better desktop computing. Computerworld spoke with Seigo, a native of Calgary, Canada, about his view of the world and how a little bit of innovation will permanently change how people interact with software.

Linux and High Performance Computing go hand in hand. So to see what Australian users have been doing with Linux and HPC, this year's linux.conf.au is holding a Birds of a Feather session on the topic. Before the session kicks off we take time to speak to the BoF coordinator Anthony David. During the working day David works for SGI as the onsite engineer for the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC). Here, we ask him about the state of HPC in Australia and where it is heading. The following responses are his own personal beliefs and not that of his employer.

Simon Horman works as a software engineer for VA Linux Systems Japan. In his downtime he also busies himself working on open source projects such as kexec-tools, kexec for Xen IA64, the Linux Virtual Server Project, and the Linux High-Availability Project, which seeks to provide high availability clustering solutions for Linux. At this year's linux.conf.au in Melbourne, Horman will leave his Tokyo base to participate in the conference and to help organise the informal Linux HA Birds of a Feather session. He speaks to Howard Dahdah ahead of his arrival.

Jonathan Corbet is an active kernel contributor, co-founder and president of Linux development community news site LWN.net, and the lead author of Linux Device Drivers, Third Edition. His renowned Kernel Report has been presented to audiences worldwide, and this year marks his fourth appearance at Linux.conf.au. Here, Corbet offers Computerworld readers a sneak peek at the major themes behind this year's Kernel Report.

Open source guru Stormy Peters talks about the global initiative to count how much open source software is used by enterprise, and her upcoming keynote at Melbourne's Linux Conference.

Internationally renowned security guru, Bruce Schneier, will be encouraging technologists at linux.conf.au to take a lesson from Luke Skywalker, and "feel the force" a little more when it comes to security.

The Internet has 1.3 billion users, but that's not enough for Lynn St. Amour. As CEO of the Internet Society, she is expanding the nonprofit group, which promotes development of the Internet globally. St. Amour doubled the group's staff in 2007 and beefed up its outreach activities in Africa, South America and Asia in her bid to add another billion Internet users worldwide. National Correspondent Carolyn Duffy Marsan sat down with St. Amour this week at a meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force, an ISOC-funded standards group. Here are excerpts from their conversation:

As a lawyer, law professor and software programmer, Eben Moglen is passionate about technology, software and user freedom. A former board member of the Free Software Foundation and the founder, president and executive director of the Software Freedom Law Center in New York since 2005, Moglen has worked to protect and advance open source and free software. Moglen, 48, is a Connecticut native who grew up in Manhattan and began programming for pay at the age of 13. Eventually, he worked as a developer at IBM to put himself through college and law school. A longtime friend of free software advocate, Richard Stallman, Moglen recently talked with Computerworld about his work, his belief in open source and what he sees as the changing future of software in the world economy.