What do you get if you combine an ailing US application development tools company with a Canadian software house that's also seen better days?

Remember Wintel? In the 1990s, Microsoft made Windows and Intel made chips, and together the two titans ruled the computing universe. Seemed like a great marriage. Then again, so did Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley. Now, Microsoft must feel jilted watching its old ally enthusiastically aid and abet Linux, the open-source operating system that is seen as a burgeoning threat to Microsoft's sprawling software fiefdom.

Since my first experiences with Linux, running Red Hat 4.2 on my home system and using Slackware 3.2 at work and school I have always been completely in awe at the dramatic improvements each new distribution release brings along with it. When I went from Red Hat 5.1 to 6.0, I was amazed at the new options in GUI's I had, as well as the fact that now all my devices were supported.

My question is, how do I convince my management that "giving something back" to the Linux and/or Open Source community is a good idea? A bit of background: we are almost entirely a Linux-based shop and base most of our services and products around Open Source Software of some kind.

The object of the page appears to be to spread FUD about Sun and it's products. The reason for this is obvious, despite the success of Linux, Sun still has a hold on many of the largest computer sites; sites that Microsoft would love to assimilate into the Borg collective. Anything that may help assimilation is fair in the moral world that Microsoft lives in.

Dave Whitinger, 24, currently works as Community Relations Director for Atipa Linux Solutions. Most members of the Linux community probably use a website on a daily basis that Dave Whitinger co-founded: Linux Today.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. Everybody said the operating system of a computer would become irrelevant as computing moved to the Web. Applications would run on the Web so that, in effect, the browser would become the application. Then we wouldn't need operating systems.

Inprise Corp. has made official the spin-off of its InterBase database division into a separate company, which will open the database's source code in an upgrade planned for mid-year.

The Linux upgrade train keeps rollin', this time with SuSE 6.3. This souped-up Linux distribution sports a snazzy new graphical installer designed to ease the setup hassles of version 6.2. But SuSE's slicker installation routine, free phone-based support, more than 1,500 bundled apps, and additions to the manual don't necessarily add up to a surefire winner.

Kenwood runs day-to-day order entry, invoicing and credit processing applications over jBASE(tm) on an application server running Red Hat Linux. Red Hat Linux also powers Kenwood's DNS, mail relay, print servers and intranet functions.