IT is no longer a question whether or not local companies should go open source. It is whether local providers can deliver open source solutions, executives of local software companies have said.

Fernando Contreras, Jr., president and chief executive officer of software development and system design firm Imperium Technology Inc., said local customers were now aware of "open source alternatives."

Matthew Garrett expressed frustration with Debian recently, in a blog post that’s become rather famous. Mark shuttleworth (Founder of the Ubuntu project) replies in his blog over the weekend "I’m of the opinion that Ubuntu could not exist without Debian."

Novell and Concurrent announced that Siemens Medical Solutions, a developer of MRI technology and applications, has selected SUSE Linux enterprise real time operating system and NightStar application development tools for its Magnetom magnetic resolution imaging (MRI) products.

Since Linuxlookup news isn't updated over the weekends, here is the weekly wrap-up to hold you over till Monday.

Some top stories this week were:

- Maintainer's resignation highlights problems in Debian project

- First screenshot of Linux Flash Player 9

- Norwegian city puts Linux plan on hold

- KOffice: Summer of Code Students Deliver the Goods

- Debian Bug Squashing around the world this weekend

- Funambol Announces Bounties for its Community Code Sniper Program

- VMware and Linux - friends forever?

- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Beta 1 Released

- openSUSE 10.2 Alpha4 Released

- Mandriva Linux 2007 Beta version "Mona" Released

Don't forget to submit your Linux User Group to our listing.

Server software maker and mobile application development tool wannabe SCO Group Inc yesterday reported its financial results for its fiscal third quarter ended July 31, and once again the company's sales were in decline due to competitive pressures. And once again, the company's top brass singled out Linux as the main culprit that is putting a damper on its revenues.

The Eclipse Foundation, an open source community committed to the implementation of a universal development platform, today announced that it has approved the creation of the Aperi Storage Management Framework Project. The Aperi Project, which was proposed in June 2006, will give customers more choices for deploying open-storage infrastructure software - based on an industry-stand ard framework developed by the open source community.

Linux 2007 Mona is the first release candidate for the Mandriva Linux 2007 release and available via two means. Firstly via the public FTP and HTTP sites mirroring the Mandriva Linux repository. Summary of most important changes in each set of ISO files released can be found in the ChangeLog.

There was some interesting buzz about the state of open source going around ApacheCon in Dublin.

On one hand, Apache is - and is widely seen as - a moderate, pragmatic voice in the FOSS world: the Apache license is explicitly business-friendly, and the conference was very happy to welcome the arch-enemy of more dogmatic FOSS advocates, Microsoft, among us.