Over the past few weeks, a new type of trade war has been brewing in a number of smaller, poorer countries around the world. Country after country has begun to evaluate whether to mandate Open Source software for government agencies and schools. Microsoft has fought back with its own form of free programs. However, countries comparing Open Source to Microsoft programs are considering a lot of other factors completely unrelated to the technical merits of the two platforms.

Reuters will announce plans Thursday to bring its financial information software to Linux in conjunction with Red Hat, Intel and Hewlett-Packard, sources said, a major achievement for the comparatively young open-source operating system

Two Wednesdays ago, OpenOffice.org 1.0 arrived, and Microsoft Office\'s long winning streak may finally screech to a halt. OpenOffice is what many computer users have been waiting and wishing for: It\'s free, open-source, Office-compatible and cross-platform (Windows, Linux and Solaris, with a Mac OS X version in early development).

Two Wednesdays ago, OpenOffice.org 1.0 arrived, and Microsoft Office\'s long winning streak may finally screech to a halt. OpenOffice is what many computer users have been waiting and wishing for: It\'s free, open-source, Office-compatible and cross-platform (Windows, Linux and Solaris, with a Mac OS X version in early development).

For Windows system administrators, making the leap to introducing Linux systems into their organisations might be a little intimidating at first. But, with a few pointers, administering and supporting Linux is not as difficult as it seems.

The New York financial community is increasingly adopting Linux to cut costs, and London\'s banks aren\'t far behind.

The company, whose Caldera Open Linux distribution had achieved wide acceptance before it was withdrawn from the retail channel in 2000, reports that its second-quarter revenues will fall between 15 and 20 percent short of estimates, coming in at between $15.1 and $15.5 million. The company had earlier estimated that revenues would be as high as $18 million for the quarter

The poorest region of Spain has adopted Linux as the official operating system of public schools and offices, in hopes of improving the area\'s vast technological and economic lag.

Bill Gates took another shot at the Open Source question last week, and came up with some interesting new spin. Essentially, if your country standardises on Linux, then you\'re not going to have any IT jobs in your country, says Bill.

The Samba open source file and print server outperforms Windows 2000 by a wide margin.