Red Hat is sporting a feather in its chapeau. It's got the mighty NYSE Euronext using its operating system for its mission-critical trading platform and purring compliments like 'Red Hat is almost like water, it's pervasive within our architecture. Red Hat is extremely strategic and without it, most of our computers wouldn't be running.'

Red Hat is a trusted open source provider. Red Hat offers enterprise customers a long-term plan for building infrastructures on the quality and innovation of open source. Combining open source operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management, and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite.

Mainsoft announced that its latest release of Mainsoft products provide full support for Microsoft's ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions and AJAX Control Toolkit. Mainsoft for Java EE, version 2.2, allows Visual C# and Visual Basic developers to use ASP.NET 2.0 components from Microsoft to create Java pages with sophisticated, responsive user interfaces and efficient client-server communications by adding a few server controls to their ASP.NET pages. Ported applications deliver equivalent performance and scalability on Java as the original application delivers in .NET.

From Application Virtualization to Xen, a round-up of the virtualization themes & topics being discussed in NYC June 23-24, 2008 by the world-class speaker faculty at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held by SYS-CON Events in The Roosevelt Hotel, in midtown Manhattan.

Brian Stevens, the Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering of Red Hat, delivered his Virtualization Keynote 'The Future of the Virtual Enterprise' at SYS-CON's Virtualization Conference & Expo 2007 West in San Francisco. 'Virtualization is the hottest subject today,' said Stevens, an industry luminary, who is credited with having pioneered new technologies that contributed to the rise of Linux as an industry-standard operating platform.

Ulitzer, Inc., which initially made the headlines with its 'job descriptions from the future,' announced today that it will launch its Ulitzer 'beta' site on July 4, 2008, with 5,500 authors and 600,000 original articles, published in more than 5,000 topic-specific online journals. Each journal offers up to 14 content-specific sections, written by the world's most respected authors, who are experts in their particular fields. All Ulitzer authors will get paid for their contributions.

Verizon Wireless is snubbing Google's Linux-based Android initiative to go with the LiMo Foundation's mobile Linux spec for its next wave of mobile phones expected next year. Along with Verizon, Mozilla signed up - giving the consortium its first major open source ISV - and a key one for conveying applications.

Adaptec unveiled a new family of entry-level Unified Serial RAID controllers. The new low-profile Series 2 RAID controllers, built on the same Adaptec dual core RAID-on-Chip (ROC) architecture used in its successful Series 5 RAID controllers, provide significant performance enhancement and scalability to low-cost data storage systems. The Series 2 controllers eliminate the limitations of software RAID-based hardware solutions commonly found in entry-level systems, delivering a wide range of advantages for inexpensive SATA and SAS disk and tape drive systems.

Sun's mule train has finally pulled into Indiana after three years on the road. Indiana is the Linux-friendly Fedora-like OpenSolaris project meant to move the Solaris-shy Linux community off Linux and on to Solaris tempted by Solaris widgetry like the highly scalable, rollback-easy, 128-bit ZFS default filesystem, Linux-like network-based Image Packaging System (IPS) application install accelerator, DTrace predictive self-healing and scalable Containers virtualization, not to mention its Gnome 2.22 front-end and built-in Firefox browser.

Curl announced it has released the availability of an Ubuntu Installer for the Curl Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform. Curl is a Rich Internet Application platform that competes with Adobe AIR/Flex, Silverlight, and Ajax. Curl has been shipping with Linux support for RedHat 9, SusE 9, and Turbolinux 10 and 11. Ubuntu is the latest Linux platform Curl 6.0 supports. Curl 6.0 also supports Microsoft Windows (XP, and Vista) as well as a beta version for Mac OS X (PowerPC and Intel).

Founded in 2006, SYS-CON Media's 'Virtualization Journal' is the world's first magazine devoted exclusively to what Gartner has earmarked as the single highest-impact IT trend through 2012: virtualization. And now it will be available on newsstands worldwide, as SYS-CON Media seeks to support the world-beating 'International Virtualization Conference & Expo' series produced by SYS-CON Events with top-quality print collateral, available at newsstands wherever fine-quality technical journals are sold.

Linspire announced the support for the Linux Mint operating system. To gain access to the free CNR Service, Linux Mint 4.0 users simply install the free CNR Client that is available at CNR.com. With Linux Mint support, CNR.com now offers its one-click software delivery service to five Linux distributions available, including Freespire 2.0, Kubuntu 7.04 & 7.10, Linspire 6.0 and Ubuntu 7.04, 7.10 & 8.04 (32bit).

The Ubuntu Linux-based gOS operating system from Good OS LLC (www.thinkgos.com) includes so many Google applications like Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google News Google Maps and YouTube that it's often referred to as the Google operating system. It also includes Firefox, Skype, Facebook and OpenOffice 2.3.

In 2006 IDC released a study showing that the costs associated with data center management escalate at an alarming rate - in large part because of rising software management expenses. Virtualization has many definitions and uses in today's computing world, but three instances of virtualization are of key importance to solving the problems remaining in the data center after the implementation of state-based management and automation.

SCO and Novell have been in court this week trying to figure out how much SCO is supposed to owe Novell in royalties for its attempt to tax Linux. This is the money that SCO claims it doesn't owe Novell at all because Novell signed away its source code rights and can only claim royalties on binaries.

VIA is setting up a Linux Portal, still in beta, to get open source driver developed. It will initially focus on graphics drivers for its CN896 digital media IGP chipset for the latest Ubuntu distribution. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, says it will work to get the drivers built into Ubuntu.

Likewise, pretty much the de facto standard in cross-platform authentication these days, has added Oracle Enterprise Linux 4 and 5, Oracle's version of Red Hat, to the list of some 110 Linux, Unix and Mac platforms that it supports on a Microsoft network using Active Directory. Oracle Linux now claims 2,000 customers give or take.

IBM claims to have created new species of custom-built, industry-standard, Linux-based rack server for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing companies with massive data centers and tens of thousands of servers, like online gaming, social networks, search and Internet firms. A relatively limited marketplace of maybe a thousand companies with fat wallets capable of shelling out tens of millions for such system. IBM means to replace the white boxes they use now or build themselves like Google does.

Peer networks are really just logical graphs of computers, or, in many cases, logical graphs of connected applications. The physical topology of the peer network, means of communication, and weighting of the edges are all implementation-specific details that differ from P2P network to P2P network, but all of them can be reduced down at some point to a drawing containing nodes and edges.

Linux programmer Hans Reiser has been found guilty of the first-degree murder of his estranged Russian-born wife Nina, who went missing after dropping their two small children with their father on Labor Day weekend 2006. Reiser, who's been in jail since October of 2006, is now looking at a mandatory sentence of 25 years to life in prison. First-degree murder assumes the killing was premeditated.

Well, it looks like Richard Stallman, the father of FOSS, is going to have to cut his hair and get a suit because the warmed-over hippie movement he's been leading is no longer the radical anti-software establishment counter-culture his rag-tag army fancies it is. Nope, it IS the software establishment. That is the finding of the Standish Group, which after five years of research on open source has delivered a $1,000 report called 'Trends in Open Source,' a study that finds that FOSS is now costing software vendors $60 billion a year in annual revenues, and it's still only 6% of the global spend.

Sun Microsystems, Canonical and Red Hat announced the inclusion of OpenJDK-based implementations in Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8.04 Long Term Support (LTS) Server and Desktop editions, furthering the promise of Sun's open source Java technology initiative. In addition, the NetBeans 6.0 Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is being delivered as part of the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS release and Canonical has certified Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition on several Sun x86 systems.

Likewise Software announced support for IBM zSeries servers that are using either Red Hat or the Novell SUSE Linux platforms. Customers that rely on zSeries for their mission critical applications can now use Likewise Software products to directly join their systems to MicrosoftR Active Directory. zSeries servers are used by IBM customers for business-critical installations where scheduled and unscheduled downtime costs are high.

Red Hat announced that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, in combination with Reuters Market Data System (RMDS 6.0), IBM BladeCenter H and 10 Gigabit Ethernet technology from Blade Network Technologies and Chelsio Communications, delivers record-breaking performance results that meet key demands of the financial services industry. Together, the combination provides both the lowest mean latency and lowest standard deviation of latency reported with RMDS.

Red Hat in collaboration with HP and AMD announced continued delivery of virtualization capabilities offered through Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Customers are now able to achieve performance gains by coupling new high-performance device drivers with the features provided by Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, available with HP ProLiant DL585 G5 servers.

Ubuntu's first 'Long Term Support (LTS' rev in almost 23 months was pushed out the door this week along with the promise that another LTS rev would follow every two years from now on out and in between there would be point releases first at the three-month mark and then every six month after that. Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth borrowed Intel's 'Tick Tock' metaphor to explain Ubuntu's plans. The only thing that would upset the planned schedule, he said, would be if other major distributions aligned their releases.

Parallels said Wednesday that its Desktop virtualization widgetry for the Mac, which lets Intel-based Apples run Windows or Linux along with Mac OS X, has sold more than a million copies, a nice chunk of the Macs out there. It is the largest-selling Mac utility and gives Mac users access to all those Windows programs it?s starved for.

Chelsio announced new software drivers that are fully integrated within XenServer 4.1 from Citrix. The 'in-box' drivers provide seamless deployment of Chelsio 10GbE Unified Wire adapters with Citrix XenServer 4.1, enabling I/O performance for single or multiple Windows and Linux virtual machines (VM) while delivering on the promise of the unified wire.

Microsoft and Novell have taken it into their collective head to push their peculiar axis into China - and elsewhere - to convert unsupported Linux users to SUSE. They say they've had demand 'to build a bridge between open source and proprietary software and provide interoperability and IP peace of mind,' a claim that set off guffaws across the open source community considering China's reputation for ignoring IP rights - among other civil liberties - and the fact that it's been a big-time Windows pirate.

Is software development a science or an art? The software industry treats it as a science. It uses processes like MRDs, PRDs, and functional specs to convert customer needs into software that solves their problems. Various roles like product managers, engineering managers, project managers, architects, and programmers work together to drive the process like an efficient machine.

One Laptop Per Child, the effort to put technology in the hands of third-world kids, has lost its number two guy Walter Bender, who was president, software and content until last month when he was shifted to head of deployment although not many of OLPC's novel Linux-based XO machines have been getting deployed. Bender, credited with building OLPC, has now reportedly gone off to develop XO's icon-based Sugar GU interface - meant to be an intuitive educational tool - and port it to other species of Linux besides the Red Hat Fedora operating system XO uses.

Acronis announced a partnership with Technalign to bring Acronis backup and disaster recovery software to Linux users. As an Acronis Gold Authorized Solution Provider, Technalign will be able to offer its customers Acronis True Image Echo Server for Linux software for trial and evaluation, as well as providing discounted customer support and training. Acronis True Image allows IT administrators to capture a hardware image and to restore it. The software also helps increase hardware utilization for better datacenter ROI by backing up both physical and virtual computers.

BT is going to distribute and support both SugarCRM, the commercial open source CRM people, and its rival NetSuite, Larry Ellison's other company. Both companies are competing against salesforce.com, the brainchild of former Ellison lieutenant Marc Benioff, with on-demand CRM applications. No terms were disclosed. BT is supposed to go chase SMBs and divisions of large companies, targeting its roughly1.6 million business customers in the UK and EMEA with NetSuite's stuff.

With only two weeks to go now before JavaOne, its annual Javaganza for developers, Sun has revealed that Java is at long last to be made 100% open source. 'We're trying to get Java into places it's never been before,' Rich Sands, group manager for developer marketing at Sun, told an interviewer on Tuesday.

Curl announced the beta release of Curl Nitro, the code name for an extension of the Curl Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform which offers enhanced desktop capabilities required by today's enterprises. The Nitro extension simplifies the process of installing and managing Curl applications accessed via a browser as well as directly from the desktop. Curl Nitro is the only platform for both traditional RIA and Desktop RIA that provides enterprise-level security, high performance and support for large data sets.

Moonwalk announced that its Moonwalk 6.0 software suite, which delivers an archive, backup and disaster recovery solution to heterogeneous networks, has become an approved application for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0. As a Red Hat Ready Partner, Moonwalk has extended support for its software to allow Red Hat customers to use its technology for storage management.

Red Hat announced that Behr has migrated its Website from IBM WebSphere to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform in an effort to reduce total cost of ownership, increase reliability, eliminate vendor lock-in and accelerate its development lifecycle. The Behr.com Website is an important marketing tool for the company and was the centerpiece of a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign in 2007. With approximately 450,000 visitors per month and projected continuing growth, the Behr IT developers began to consider alternative technologies to meet the site's complex demands.

Novell says it's going to 'simplify' pricing and discounts on SLES for mainframes for the rest of the year. That means it's going to cut prices by 33%-47% by offering a three-year subscription for the price of a two-year subscription or a five-year subscription for the price of a three-year subscription. The discounts apply to workload consolidation from non-System z platforms and renewals of existing SLES subscriptions.

Novell wants ISVs to create appliances that marry their applications to the SUSE and to underpin the idea has trotted out a beta of SLES JeOS, a 'Just enough Operating System,' so it'll all make sense. Red Hat also has an Appliance Operating System in the works and says it expects the project to go into beta mid-year.

rPath announced a technology partnership enabling application providers to use rPath's rBuilder to create virtual appliances using the rPath Appliance Platform and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell. The agreement promises to reduce complexity and costs of application distribution and deployment, while maintaining the strategic value of investments in application certification. The Novell-rPath collaboration marks an industry milestone, enabling customers to utilize an open-source operating system with a virtual appliance lifecycle management platform.