JasperSoft today announced that it has signed a worldwide alliance agreement with Unisys Corporation. The alliance enables Unisys to deliver JasperSoft-certified consulting services to organizations looking for professional reporting and data analysis functionality, giving users a full range of business intelligence (BI) capabilities.

Leapfrog Enterprises, maker of children's learning toys and electronics, is in the process of ramping up its Internet operations to serve a new series of Web-aware educational products. At the same time, the company's best-of-breed infrastructure planning strategies are leading the company in the direction of open-source software.

Although open-source software has, strictly speaking, only been available for less than ten years, it has resulted in products that rival mainstream packages and operating systems from the world's leading software houses. Now, as Paul Stevens reports, open-source principles are being applied in several ambitious automotive projects.

Explaining what freedom in computing is about, is also talk about the FSF and/or the GNU project; they’re nothing less than the flagship of the free software movement and they’ve made huge steps toward freedom in computing, but they have missed a key point: If the average computer user is not on our side, we’ll get nowhere.

Priced for a student’s budget - free - open source desktop software presents a viable alternative to commercial software packages for those who can’t shell out the big $$$. I’ve never personally been an open-source zealot myself, but at these prices - you can’t afford not to consider them! These programs all run on multiple platforms (yes, even Windows!), and are surprisingly easy to download and install.

Business users of open source software should review their Open Source licensing agreements, audit their use of Open Source and create formal policies for managing source code, especially mixed-source code.

Life is too short to listen to crappy digital music. So I recently decided to begin ripping all of my newly purchased CDs into FLAC, the Free Lossless Audio Codec. Music files in FLAC format sound better than those using lossy compression formats such as MP3--plus, FLAC is an open standard. The only downside is that my 80GB Apple iPod doesn't play FLAC files. Happily, RockBox can fix that.

"I hear the argument everyday. That somehow, any open source project must not be very good because it does not cost anything to use it. Well, allow me to poke some holes into that theory, generally made by people who have yet to ween themselves from closed source dependency."