Novell continues to make inroads into providing identity management solutions for federal agencies looking to comply with HSPD-12 mandates. HSPD-12 or Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12, establishes a government-wide standard for identification credentials (or smart cards) that deliver a common, two-factor authentication method for accessing physical and logical assets.

"I teach a high school multimedia course. We were scheduled to get new software this year but due to several pointy haired bosses, no software was ordered. The software I have to teach is Flash 5, Dreamweaver 2000, Photoshop 7 and (god help me) Movie Maker. The question is: is it better to teach old commercial software or their open source counterparts (Komposer, Gimp, etc.)? Is the steep learning curve and slightly less uniform design worth a little student frustration to teach them software written in the past 5 years?"

Zenoss announced that Pando Networks, a top provider of managed peer-to-peer (P2P) media distribution services, has deployed Zenoss Enterprise to manage the configuration, health and performance of its rapidly growing IT infrastructure. Pando chose Zenoss over proprietary and open source alternatives to gain access to a powerful yet affordable network, server and application management solution.

DB2 9 is the result of a five-year development project that transformed traditional (static) database technology into an interactive data server that merges the high performance and ease of use of DB2 with the self-describing benefits of XML. Download a free trial version of IBM DB2 9.5 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows.

In September this year, the Macedonian government announced one of the most ambitious educational technology projects ever proposed: to provide 180,000 of its school-age children with computer access.

In a recent interview, representatives from the One Laptop Per Child project disclosed current plans for distributing the XO Laptop in the United States, and discussed the ways in which even local and city school districts can get the XO Laptop for their students.

Last week, Novell began shipping SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time 10 for running high-performance, time-sensitive applications, and apparently Red Hat is feeling a bit threatened.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Linux kernel filesystem maintainer Ted Ts’o is joining the organization as a Fellow and chief platform strategist. Ts’o is one of the most highly regarded members of the Linux and open source community and will contribute his leadership experience working with a broad set of Linux technologies to the LF’s technical efforts, including the Linux Standard Base (LSB).

Sun Microsystems will today release details of a new award program meant to spur growth and activity within the company's open-source efforts, according to a post by Sun's open-source officer, Simon Phipps, on his corporate blog. Are they finally acting on their statements at Java One that open source is Robin Hood in reverse — cash strapped programmers contributing code to rich corporations, or is it an attempt to subvert the open source ethos?

ESET announced three new products for Linux and FreeBSD users. The new Gateway, File and Mail products provide SMB and enterprise users with the highest level of malware protection throughout their Linux infrastructure, without impacting on network performance.

Adobe has released the final version of its Flash Player Update 3, an important update that brings several new features:

Bitter political foes South and North Korea are to jointly develop a version of Linux.

IONA Technologies announced that the Belgium Ministry for Education is using IONA's FUSE Open Source technology for a newly introduced centralized student registration system. The system which was developed with ETNIC, the information technology agency of the Belgium French community, is using IONA's FUSE ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) to integrate the multiple applications, servers and databases to facilitate real-time registration and validation of over one million student records.

Red Hat announced Red Hat Enterprise MRG (Messaging, Realtime, Grid), offering new capabilities for deployment on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and third-party operating platforms that further strengthen Red Hat's position as the strategic supplier for critical enterprise applications in highly demanding environments, such as Financial Services and Government agencies. Red Hat Enterprise MRG is a revolutionary distributed computing platform that provides exceptional performance through reliable enterprise messaging, realtime capabilities and advanced grid and high-throughput computing technologies.

Adé Oyegbola, CEO of LANCOR, the company that says it is suing OLPC, was gracious enough to answer some of the questions I sent to the company and to the attorney representing it in the threatened litigation. I'll present the questions and answers, along with some photographs he sent as attachments, as he presents at least an outline of his case.