Motor giant Ford's European arm is planning to ditch Microsoft as its desktop operating systems provider and move to an open source model, according to its European head of IT.

"AbiWord is a word processor that in a few respects looks it 0.7.14 version-age. And there's no getting around it, these shortcomings will need to be fixed before version 1.0. But there are a lot of areas where AbiWord has positioned itself very well against the product it is emulating."

"FreePM is a full-service open source medical practice management system that is licensed under the GPL. FreePM has reached its current beta 3 state of development in only 1.5 years and according to the company, it is ready for comparison to its closed-source competitors that cost far more."

"Numerous reasons have been offered as to why Microsoft has become fearful of open-source software. The real reason is more basic. It's simple economics. with OSS competition, Microsoft has to deal with a product that it can never undercut on price and can never block from distribution because OSS products are not competing for the preload channel."

The new release of Mozilla is out, fixing some major crash bugs, adding context sensitive help and a fully integrated Security UI.

The new release of Mozilla is out, fixing some major crash bugs, adding context sensitive help and a fully integrated Security UI.

This is a fairly comprehensive article on using the java ssh client MindTerm along with SSH as a quick, reliable, and secure VPN-like setup.

"If one asks prominent opensource authors what they mean by "opensource" and why they are working on this type of product each answer will be different. People outside the movement tend to think of those great authors as  a rather homogenous crowd  who are in complete agreement with the movement's political and business leaders.  I think that this is far from true ..."

A common problem faced is allowing non root users to dial and establish a connection to the Internet.

An easy and safe solution with sudo, assuming you use wvdial, is to put the following line in /etc/sudoers. (syntax explained later)

ALL ALL=/usr/bin/wvdial

This allows any user to run the program wvdial with root privileges when the user runs sudo as

sudo wvdial

Note: sudo issues a password prompt where the password to be entered is that of the user running sudo.

How does sudo make handing out root privileges more secure?

Open Source has become the rallying cry for the software industry... an industry which only twenty years ago was as deeply mired into the old economy way of thinking as most other industries are today. The question is, can we take our 'lessons learned' and help other industries take the next step to a truly "new economy"? This article discusses the issue and offers at least one possible way of moving forward (specifically for the auto and energy industries, but probably applicable to other industries, as well).