One of India’s 28 states plans to distribute 100,000 Linux laptops to students there.

Microsoft on Monday unveiled projects to improve data portability between Office 2007 and other document file formats, including the design of a new translator for exchanging OOXML and HTML documents.

Apple’s OS X, which has been an official certified Unix system for some time now, is often installed onto Internet-exposed or intranet-only Web servers for serving up dynamic content. I’ve worked with such configurations for a couple of years, and with GNU/Linux alternatives for even longer. There are at least three reasons why GNU/Linux systems do the job better.

Are you an Microsoft partner based in Australia focused on Advanced Infrastructure? Are you interested in conducing a joint campaign? Look no further, send me an email at mheald@microsoft.com to find out next …

Big Buck Bunny is the colorful product of the Peach open movie project: an animated short released online and on DVD. But in addition to the ‘toon itself, Peach has produced an altogether different yield: improvements to the Blender 3-D modeling application. Like its predecessor Project Orange, Peach pushed the open source tool forward with the demands of a real-world media production, in a way that hobbyist usage cannot. Could other free software projects use the same model?

NETGEAR , Inc. , a worldwide provider of technologically advanced, branded networking solutions, today announced the launch of the Open Source Wireless-G Router , a full-featured wireless router designed to …

There is no dearth of software that can help you run that indispensable Windows app over Linux. Win4Lin has managed to survive through the years as an inexpensive tool for people who like to pay for support. The recently released Win4Lin 5, available for $30 a pop, has shrugged off the shortcomings of its predecessor and delivers on its "near native-performance" promise.

As the Open Source Census grinds on (over 250,000 installations so far) it occurs to me just how useful it can be for an enterprise to participate.

You might learn something you can profit from.

At CIO India, for instance, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz tells the story of a financial firm which thought it had no open source at all, only to discover it had 1,300 downloads of mySQL.

Schwartz used this teaching moment to make a sale, but such revelations can mean more than a ka-ching in a vendor’s bank account.

They can point the way to big savings for you.

In the case noted above open source came in through the back door, serreptitiously. It’s not just that users lacked support, many probably didn’t know who else was using. Open source was illicit.

But when enterprise open source use comes out of the closet (so to speak) miracles occur. You  find yourself with a vast internal user group. You may even find you can replace some proprietary tools with open source alternatives. And you’ve opened up conversations both inside and outside your shop.

Open source does not do its best work in the dark corners, but in the light of day. That’s where you’ll realize the value, when your own people can share knowledge, and you get to share with the wider world.

It’s not just a question of downloading and using. It’s a question of sharing and improving. This activity exists in the proprietary world, too. It’s just easier in an open source environment.

So do join the census, and do check around. The results will surprise you. And opening yourself up fully to the open source process will both save you money and spur productivity. Guaranteed.

We’re about to find out.

Netgear, a reputable name in routers, has launched the WGR614L, an open source 802.11g router.

It looks like any other Netgear router, it can even run under Vista (thanks Nachi), but it can run everything at a new Netgear site, MyOpenRouter, and more besides.

While Cisco accidentally created an open source router a few years ago, getting caught with Linux in its Linksys, the company never exploited this as a feature, but treated it as a bug, blaming chip supplier Broadcom.

Netgear is definitely treating this as a feature.

MyOpenRouter offers developers a comprehensive user guide, applications forums and downloads. Best of all this isn’t a stinky would-not-sell-otherwise router. It’s got an internal diversity antenna to improve performance, and supports WPS.

The site’s home page also has direct links to popular open source router software like Tomato and DD-WRT. Tomato downloads are even hosted from the site.

Nachiketa Prachanda, no relation (we assume) to the Nachi worm of five years ago, seems to be the main host-blogger at MyOpenRouter, and that’s a great idea because it immediately personalizes a site, gives it a voice.

So if there is a substantial open source router market out there, in 2008, Netgear will find it. I just wish the industry had this attitude back in 2003.

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