European governments have long complained about their dependence on Microsoft’s software, but their rhetoric has not turned into a mass migration away from Windows.
During the past few years, Europe’s elected officials have made a lot of noise about ambitious projects to switch to open source software, including big migrations of government PCs in France, Germany, Spain and Norway.
These plans are often heralded as major inroads against Microsoft’s Windows hegemony in the old country — where Microsoft has been fined close to $1 billion in antitrust violations by the European Commission.
Yet the actual migrations have been negligible. More than 95 percent of all PCs used by European government workers still run on Windows, according to the market research firm IDC.
“No one has come out and said ‘we are migrating every desktop or laptop on Linux,’” said IDC analyst Massimiliano Claps.
In Norway, a project known as eNorway 2009 was begun in 2005 to convert Norway’s public sector to open source software. Read the rest of this entry »

My first reaction when I got an e-mail from Microsoft about a big announcement involving Chief Executive Steve Ballmer this afternoon was that Vista was going to be shipping early. Rumors have been flying that the new and much-delayed version of the Windows operating system is just about done.
Instead, it’s a much bigger bombshell: Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) has announced a partnership with Novell (nasdaq: NOVL - news - people ) and will help promote Linux.
This is stunning. This is like Red Sox fans announcing they’re going to root for the Yankees.
Microsoft has spent ten years bashing the free-of-charge open-source Linux operating system and trying to kill it. Now Microsoft is making nice.
Novell distributes a version of Linux called Suse. The company has been an also-ran in the Linux market, behind Red Hat (nasdaq: RHAT - news - people ), the market leader. But support from Microsoft could give Novell a boost. Read the rest of this entry »

Software radical Richard Stallman helped build the Linux revolution. Now he threatens to tear it apart.
The free Linux operating system set off one of the biggest revolutions in the history of computing when it leapt from the fingertips of a Finnish college kid named Linus Torvalds 15 years ago. Linux now drives $15 billion in annual sales of hardware, software and services, and this wondrous bit of code has been tweaked by thousands of independent programmers to run the world’s most powerful supercomputers, the latest cell phones and TiVo (nasdaq: TIVO - news - people ) video recorders and other gadgets.
But while Torvalds has been enshrined as the Linux movement’s creator, a lesser-known programmer–infamously more obstinate and far more eccentric than Torvalds–wields a startling amount of control as this revolution’s resident enforcer. Richard M. Stallman is a 53-year-old anticorporate crusader who has argued for 20 years that most software should be free of charge. He and a band of anarchist acolytes long have waged war on the commercial software industry, dubbing tech giants “evil” and “enemies of freedom” because they rake in sales and enforce patents and copyrights–when he argues they should be giving it all away. Read the rest of this entry »

Linux creator Linus Torvalds has opposed GPL version 3 since its draft surfaced in January.
Nine months and one discussion draft later, he still isn’t having it and he’s not alone.
A who’s who list of the top Linux kernel developers has joined Torvalds in rejection of the proposed GPLv3. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it, they say.
“Since GPLv2 has served us so well for so long, and since it is the foundation of our developer contract which has helped propel Linux to the successes it enjoys today, we are extremely reluctant to contemplate tampering with that license except as bug fixes to correct exposed problems or updates counter imminent dangers,” the kernel developers position paper states.
“So far, in the whole history of GPLv2, including notable successes both injunctively and at trial, we have not found any bugs significant enough to warrant such corrections.” Read the rest of this entry »

Today, the cheap revolution is focused on back-end data centers, where big shops are replacing expensive Unix servers with clusters of low-cost Linux-on-Intel machines. But phase two of the Linux revolution is targeting user desktops.
Linux today has less than 2% market share on the desktop. That’s because with past versions of Linux only hackers could get Linux installed and running right. But a new batch of easier-to-use versions is putting Linux within reach of regular folks.
And Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) is helping the cause. Running a Windows desktop PC has become increasingly annoying for users who must cope with spyware, adware, viruses, security patches, upgrades, crashes, reboots. Read the rest of this entry »

Fans of the free Linux operating system should be popping champagne tonight. A judge has tossed out most of the claims in a case claiming Linux contained stolen code.
SCO Group (nasdaq: SCOX - news - people ), of Lindon, Utah, is suing IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ), claiming IBM stole code from Unix, for which SCO holds some copyrights, and put it into Linux, which is distributed free. SCO is seeking billions in damages.
The case, filed in 2003, is scheduled for trial in 2007. But Wednesday night, in a blistering 39-page ruling, Magistrate Judge Brooke C. Wells of the United States District Court in Utah tossed out two-thirds of SCO’s claims against IBM.
Wells tossed the claims because SCO refused, after repeated requests, to provide specific details about which lines of code were stolen. Read the rest of this entry »

Novell’s SUSE Linux 10.1, code-named the “Agama Lizard,” is now available for download in its final form.
SUSE Linux developer Andreas Jaeger noted in a March posting to the openSUSE mailing list that the release schedule was revised to “strengthen the quality of SUSE Linux 10.1.” At the time, Jaeger mentioned two areas to be strengthened: virtualization and package management features.
The Xen open source hypervisor is part of SUSE Linux 10.1. Xen is no stranger to SUSE Linux distribution; it’s been part of the distribution for over a year since the SUSE Linux Professional 9.3 release.
Package management also got a boost in the new release with the inclusion of “libzypp,” which is a package manager resolver library. Libzypp is actually the result of two integrated Novell products, the YAST (Yet Another Setup Tool) package manager and Ximian’s libredcarpet. Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft is to give Linux’ penguin mascot a plank across the ice. The software leviathan stunned a rookery of Linux users yesterday at a conference and expo in Boston with the revelation that it will now provide technical support for the open-source software running on Virtual Server, and would make Virtual Server 2005 R2 available free.
The plug-ins will allow users to run leading Linux distributions on Virtual Server 2005, including Red Hat (nasdaq: RHAT - news - people ) Enterprise Linux 4 and Novell (nasdaq: NOVL - news - people ) SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9.
A symbolic gesture from both a technology and support perspective: Zane Adam, director of product marketing in the Windows Server division at Bill Gates’Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ), explained that the move would “help customers safely consolidate their Linux-based applications on Virtual Server”. Read the rest of this entry »

Unlike the early days when Linux provided a learning platform for people who couldn’t afford UNIX, price seems the least important reason.
What about the Microsoft alternative? Again, we saw that as barely a factor. People just like Linux.
People say that change is the only constant in the universe. A young man with a brain tumor once told his children that everything in the universe is on its way to somewhere else. I used these statements as analogies to the phenomenon called GNU/Linux or Linux depending on your leanings.
The things about Linux that one could characterise a year ago have changed. I remember how wonderful I regarded the 2.035 kernel, Samba, Apache and “C” in 1998. We didn’t have KDE and Gnome but that didn’t matter. Read the rest of this entry »

Google Inc. confirmed on Wednesday that it is using the Ubuntu desktop Linux internally, but it wouldn’t give specifics about how it is being used. The Internet search giant denied a widely circulated report that it is secretly developing its own Linux distribution.
The Register, a U.K.-based technology news site, reported Tuesday that Google was in the process of developing its own distro — using as a base the popular Ubuntu open source operating system to go with the Gnome desktop. The report has led to speculation among bloggers that Google might be readying a desktop OS to take on Microsoft Corp.’s Windows, a rumor that has been around for several months.
Google spokeswoman Sonya Boralv told DesktopLinux.com and numerous other media outlets that “we utilize the Ubuntu technology for internal use, but have no plans to distribute it outside of the company.” She also said that staff members were not using the name “Goobunto” internally for the software. Read the rest of this entry »