Red Hat president and CEO Jim Whitehurst sees opportunities for open source firms that might be putting undue burden on their dwindling IT departments because of the current economic downturn. Whitehurst offered his views in a press conference in Munich. His conclusion: "When people look at alternatives, often Open Source wins."

Red Hat president and CEO Jim Whitehurst sees opportunities for open source firms that might be putting undue burden on their dwindling IT departments because of the current economic downturn.

Opera measures up. With a new, faster version of the Presto engine and a 100/100 score in the Acid3 test, the browser might easily get under its competition’s skin.

The feud between Minix inventor and operating system czar Andrew W. Tanenbaum and Linux Torvalds is legendary in the OS world. Before Linux there was Minix. Torvalds used to be a Minix user who set up his first Linux version in 1991 on Professor Tanenbaum’s operating system. Mr. Tanenbaum has now agreed to write a guest editorial for Linux Magazine. His opinion has not changed over the years: Linux (and Windows) are “unreliable.”

The DNSSEC Industry Coalition (DIC) was founded in the U.S. with the goal to drive further development and acceptance of the DNSSEC security protocol. The consortium includes a half dozen top Domain Name Registries and software developers that are currently laying out an action plan.

The FTP team at the Debian project have decided that the Affero GPL version 3 licensing (AGPLv3) is consistent enough with the guidelines of the Linux distro that software with the licensing can go into Debian's main archive.

Moonlight is the name of Novell's Linux implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight 1.0 technology. Moonlight is now available in a Beta version for 32 and 64 Bit Linux systems, albeit only for Firefox users.

After many years of development, the Songbird open source software is finally released as version 1.0.

Information found by a reader on the Phoronix Internet page in the Microsoft game Left 4 Dead, appears to suggest that Half Life developer Valve Software, is currently working on a Linux client for its commercial platform Steam.

Samba versions from 3.0.29 include a security failure. Developers have released an update to fix it.