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A few months ago, Canonical and Eucalyptus Systems aligned their product development to create an integrated cloud-software-on-Ubuntu-Linux stack. The startups are now collaborating on service and support, giving IT departments a new option for creating internal cloud computing environments.

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After installing 64-bit Windows on one of my test machines, I scurried around to see what 64-bit desktop applications are available in the open source world. Firefox is one of them, but not officially -- at least, not yet. The reasons for this are not what you might think.

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At the New Yorker, there's a review of Chris Anderson's new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell. The points made in the article, while not aimed directly at die-hard open source advocates, might well have been. Free, as Gladwell puts it, is just another price.

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If the latest round of statistics are to be believed, the GPL -- the most popular license for open source software -- is undergoing a slow but fundamental shift. But if the same statistics are to be further believed, other licenses are also gaining ground on the GPL.

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Till now, certification requirements for electronic medical records were pretty hefty, addressing hundreds of stringent criteria that comprehensive inpatient and ambulatory systems must meet in order to get a seal of approval from the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology, or CCHIT, a non-profit federally supported group.

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Free software grand master Richard Stallman weighed in not long ago about Mono, the open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET. He's not against it in principle, he just doesn't feel it's a good idea to depend on it for anything, especially not the core GNU tools.

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Yesterday I sat down on the phone with Larry Wake -- official title: Group Manager, Solaris Strategic Marketing -- to chat about OpenSolaris. I ended up with an answer to an unexpected question: How do you get people who use software measured in lifetimes of years and decades to move to software lifetimes of mere months?

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Firefox 3.5 went to public release-candidate status earlier this week. But while the whole 3.5 branch was still under wraps, I was sticking my neck out and running the bleeding-edge nightly builds of the browser -- and was surprised at how un-beta it was.

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Oracle and MySQL are the favorite databases of developers who use the Eclipse open source programmers workbench. That's no surprise, I thought. Developers like to develop in free MySQL and deploy in Oracle, right? Actually, Oracle and MySQL are their two favorite deployment databases, contrary to what I would have expected.

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You might remember Bryan Lunduke from his extremely pointed "Linux Sucks -- Let's Fix It" presentation of a few months back. Now he's aiming fighting words at Fedora over F11, and from that I've gleaned a few larger questions about what is the real role of any given Linux distribution.

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It's always compelling news when an open source project of some renown is forked. It's twice as compelling when it's a fork of a project you use and rely on personally. I speak of Melody, a spinoff of the open-source branch of the blogging and publishing system Movable Type.

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After all the recent talk about "open-source leeches", it's sobering to come across an entity that sorely deserves the label. I'm talking about LiberKey, the creators of an open source application collection along the lines of PortableApps.com. If even half of what's reported about them is true, their lack of ethics or scruples is jaw-dropping.

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This month's catch: the cutting- (bleeding?-) -edge editions of Chrome and VirtualBox, and an HTML editor comes back from the dead.

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At first it seemed like Amazon had released the source code to the Kindle -- although, as it turns out, they haven't. Not really, anyway. One would think they've got nothing to lose by doing so, since the real value of the Kindle isn't in the device itself anyway.

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If Tim O'Reilly's comments in a recent podcast are on the mark, the future of software won't be open or proprietary, or even revolve around software at all. It'll be about open, user-aggregated data, and how we get there will become increasingly unimportant.

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Open source seems to attract -- or maybe breed -- controversy, both from without and within. This week there's been a good deal of noise on the role of Mono -- the open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET framework -- in Linux. Is it a legitimate worry or much ado about nothing?

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Love it or hate it, YouTube has become the de facto video presentation portal for, well, everyone. Now comes some worried discussion about what format YouTube may support when HTML 5 and its <video> tag make their debut.

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The newest word from the Canonical camp about future features for Ubuntu Linux is booting to a desktop in, get this, ten seconds. If they can do it, great! But I suspect another reason might be to do an end run around the rather flaky state of power management in Linux.

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The newest version of the Linux kernel, 2.6.30, went out into the wild on the 9th. I took a peek at the "what's new" document and saw plenty of evidence that the kernel's becoming a place where Big Software has come to contribute.

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I've been writing on and off about using the Linux kernel as a base for OS projects with closed but stable and centrally architected designs. Here's such an experiment already in progress: SkyOS.

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Version 11 of Red Hat's Fedora Linux has hit the streets. I'm downloading it as I write this, although rather than simply picking through its feature set, I find myself thinking more of what each successive major-distro release means for Linux as a whole.

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Not long after my post about the newest rev of OpenSolaris, a programmer friend called me to dissent. He'd tried OpSol, too, found it sorely lacking, and from his comments I found a criticism that now applies to Linux as well.

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Scott McNealy received a standing ovation at JavaOne in what was possibly his last appearance before the mammoth Java user group--last, that is, before Sun disappears inside Oracle once the $7.4 billion acquisition is complete. So why, if McNealy was such a celebrated leader, is his company being swallowed up?

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With all the gloom-and-doom about Sun in the air, it almost went unnoticed that they have a new rev of OpenSolaris out in the wild. I took a quick end-user-experience peek.

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By my own tally I count at least two articles in the past week on the subject of "open source freeloading": those who use open source to build new IP but don't give back to the community. Hot subject, and by no means cut-and-dried.

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Behind the scenes, Moblin's taking off. Both MSI and Acer have tapped Intel for the netbook-friendly distro to power future editions of each of their products. So what's to stop history from repeating itself -- i.e., Windows (7) gobbling up Moblin there, too?

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The name Canola probably makes you think of vegetable oil, but it's also the name of a newly open sourced media-center application for tablet-style PCs that run Linux. And whenever something is newly open sourced, that almost inevitably means close attention is paid to the terms of the licensing.

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Time and again I run into the belief that the open source community has an infinite amount of energy to spare for its galaxy of projects. It's not true, and we need to stop acting like it is.

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Here's one for the "only in the Linux world" folder: an attempt to place the Windows NT kernel mechanisms directly in the Linux kernel. Am I the only one who thinks, outside of extremely specialized use cases, this isn't such a hot idea?

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Here's a curious open source crossover for you: a Canonical programmer who's authored an emulation system to allow Android mobile apps to run on Ubuntu. I guess it really all is about the programs (stupid).

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The other week I theorized about "Invisible Linux" -- what Linux would need to become to really make inroads on the desktop. Since making that post, I've been refining my ideas about what this would be and how it could be created. Read on for more.

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With Chrome 2.0 out this week for Windows only, the hue and cry arises once more: why is there still no Chrome for Linux -- or for that matter, anything other than Windows?

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Open source on Wall Street isn't exactly news, but the "where" and "how" are crucial. It's looking more and more like the big-money men are turning to open source not just to build their networks and backends, but to actually crunch and count the money. I hope it's not just a strategy only for hard times.

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The first truly significant public beta of Intel's Moblin distribution went public the other day. It's also the first peek we've had at Moblin's native interface, which straddles a curiously wavering line between netbook, notebook, and phone interface.

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Is that flapping sound I hear the wings of pigs? Microsoft and the Linux Foundation both agree on something? Yes. In this case, it's proposed guidelines for software licensing that would make both open source and proprietary software authors that much more liable.

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Canonical calls it "Ubuntu One". The goal is, according to Stefano Forenza, to build a full-blown online platform -- Canonical's version of Windows Live, or MobileMe / .Mac / iTools. But can they do it without having their intended userbase siphoned away?

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Sound, video, distros and programming all figure into this month's roundup of open source goodies. Read on for more.

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It was back in 2002, according to Sam Trenholme, the creator of the secure DNS server software MaraDNS. That was the year that forces conspired to make sure Linux on the desktop would never become a reality. Linux as a server was another matter entirely, but to him the "Linux desktop" is as dead as the Amiga.

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Linux.com was nobody's idea of a portal to the world of Linux, and now thanks to the Linux Foundation -- the best gang for the job, I'd think -- it's now online with a snappy new look and feel. All right in time with Linux's recent uptick (however minor) in popularity: the last thing people new to this whole Linux thing is a site that looks like a bad fan page.

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Apparently I'm not the only one fed up with the vocabulary wars that seem to be part for the course in the open source world. To wit: is free software the same as open source in all but the terminology? The problem is, the terminology does seem to make all the difference -- because we allow it to.

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I haven't been all that impressed with Arnold Schwarzenegger's record as governator -- er, governor -- of California. But he's eyeing a plan that could have major implications for education and open content if it takes off: a state-supported repository of digital textbooks.

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Mozilla's Prism entered public beta testing on Friday, a milestone marking the software's readiness for general use and the convergence of local computing with the cloud.

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Okay, so I'm bad at portmanteaus. But here we have a buddying-up between two corporate outfits with more than a tentative involvement in open source, even if the exact terms of the deal are still rather vague.

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Most of us don't get to vote on the Oscars. But most anyone can get into the action with SourceForge's Community Choice Awards, where your votes choose which open source projects stand out in their respective fields.

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A programmer friend of mine has done something that looks paradoxical at first: he's a free-software user, creator and advocate, but he doesn't use the GPL anymore. Is he out on a limb, or just wising up?

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No, I'm not talking about the fact that Linux is effectively invisible on the desktop right now (with a whopping 1% market share, if even that). Rather, this is about how the best Linux on the desktop won't need to even call itself that.

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I had the chance to corner Andrew Updegrove to talk about Microsoft's settlement with TomTom, the Dutch GPS navigation device maker that embeds Linux in its product. Microsoft claimed TomTom had violated three of its patents governing file system management. Updegrove painted the settlement as a partial victory.

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Word's been flying around all weekend about Linux finally breaking 1% consumer market share, up from 0.8% as of June last year. Red herring or milestone?

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For my last shot at what's going wrong with Oracle and Sun, I've singled out one of Sun's most important projects -- and also one of its most contentious: OpenOffice.

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