OpenBusiness took the opportunity at MiniBar to interview Mark Shuttleworth and he took us on a space ride through the Ubuntu galaxy Open Source land. Using our new, sophisticated Edirol R-09 MP3 recorder Mark told us about Ubuntu’s unique business model - being absolutely free to use - but making a revenue in the surrounding ecology.

The founder of the Ubuntu-project talks in an interview about the integration of proprietary drivers, the One Laptop per Child project and "great applications" from Microsoft.

Scott Handy started with IBM in 1983 as a systems engineer and went on to sales, marketing, and strategy positions covering large accounts, channels, small and medium business, and IBM products for Windows NT, Sun Solaris, and OS/2 Warp. Now, as vice president for Linux and open source, he is one of the main public faces articulating IBM's open-source strategy. IDG News Service Senior Writer Elizabeth Montalbano caught up with Handy at the sidelines of the recent LinuxWorld Open Solutions Summit in New York. He talked about how the industry giant manages to support a vast product portfolio for Linux and open-source initiatives.

Learn from AIGLX creator Kristian Høgsberg what he thinks is important in the world of desktop 3D and... FireWire!

Samba guru explains why he couldn't stomach the Microsoft-Novell deal. “If you want to sell out, you should ask for more," he says.

Jeremy Allison is a hero in the open source community these days. After spending two years at Novell, he decided to leave the Waltham, Mass.-based software company for reasons of principle right after the Linux-vendor signed a deal with Microsoft.

The pact between Microsoft and Novell has led to widespread speculation over the long-term impact on the adoption of open-source software. Under the deal, the companies will work on ways to enable Novell's Linux distribution, Suse, and Microsoft's Windows operating system to work better together. Microsoft's Bill Hilf, GM for platform strategy, spoke further about the deal addressing how Microsoft views its intellectual property relative to Linux.

But, in general, Linux is not nearly as high-volume as Windows is on servers. But (it's) significant, so customers want new kinds of interoperability.

The Internet was buzzing these days about the recent Novell-Microsoft agreement. Under an unprecedented deal, Microsoft has agreed to offer sales support for SUSE Linux and start working on interoperability. Furthermore, the Redmond giant agreed not to use it's patent portofolio to sue SUSE Linux users. We wanted to know more, you wanted to know more, so we went straight to the source and began asking.

Let's see what Novell has to say about this agreement as Justin Steinman, Director of Marketing for Linux & Open Platform Solutions for Novell, answers some questions on LinuxInterviews.