Opinions

With LinuxWorld showcasing the popularity of the open source operating system, and with open source in general finding its legs in the enterprise, Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president of open source and standards, made a slate of predictions for Linux and open source during his keynote address on Wednesday at the Black Hat conference.

At this point in the game, Microsoft should really come clean with a statement that rescinds its Linux/patent/suing threat altogether. Granted, Microsoft put itself in a hard spot with this one, since it had its channel singing the same tune for those murky months after the threat. If it stands up says, "Sorry, just kidding!" that won't make the channel partners happy, particularly if they used the threat to convince customers they must buy SUSE or Windows over Red Hat and other distros. But the fact is, we are seeing actions by Microsoft that indicate that the "suing Linux users" jig is up.

If you missed the recent news it appears that Google has gone, in effect, head to head with Wikipedia, but with differences.

The obvious thought came to me while writing last week's column, that about the only folk (other than the deluded and amoral management of the SCO Group) that want the SCO Group effort attacking Linux and other open source initiatives to succeed is Microsoft. So I decided to explore that side in this follow-up column, but a bit of reading led me to the conclusion that things are not as simple as they appear.

Zimbra has long been one of my favorite open source products. I remember getting a first demo of Zimbra from CEO Satish Dharmaraj at the Red Hat conference about three years ago, while they were still in stealth mode. Satish, Scott Dietzen and the rest of the crew weren't setting out to build a me-too mail client. They were attacking a much larger problem.

Have you ever experienced a software bug and thought to yourself, "I could fix that"? If you could, would you? How could that even be possible?

You knew the argument had to come up sometime: survive the economic down turn by using open source to help you save money. Now Computer World's Steve J. Vaughan-Nichols makes that claim in Linux Will Save Us'.

In case you haven't noticed, the economy is collapsing.

Security company Finjan Wednesday reported it has found more than 1,000 sites infected by an attack toolkit called "Asprox," which exploits discovered flaws in a vulnerable site's programming to add hidden attack code. The attack code in turn searches for flaws on a browser's PC, and if any such holes are found it will download malware onto the computer.

Last week I began to discuss a remarkable virtual-appliance-based system for network monitoring and management called Groundwork Monitor Community Edition.

A couple of weeks ago I reviewed WhatsUp Gold and liked what I found. Of course the topic of network management tools is one that is close to the heart of every network manager so a flurry of letters followed.

Google went from startup to behemoth in record time. But there are increasing signs that Google has become just another fat, happy, and even arrogant company, no longer the lean, industry-changing giant of the past. And that spells good news for Microsoft.

Version 3.0 of BackTrack has been released. BackTrack is a Linux-based distribution dedicated to penetration testing or hacking (depending on how you look at it). It contains more than 300 of the world's most popular open source or freely distributable hacking tools.

Microsoft has welcomed the transformation of the Symbian mobile-phone platform into an open source project, because the software giant contends the change will create a host of new problems for the Symbian community.

The global battle to control the smarts in your smartphone escalated this week when some of the combatants redeployed their forces in two big moves.