The beta release of Glassfish Version 2 is a good place for evaluating Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz' open source strategy.

As with any copyright licence, software developers who use any version of the GPL can also grant additional permissions to recipients for code that they hold the copyright of. That is, they can say that you can distribute the software under the terms of the GPL, and they can additionally say that, at your option, you can also distribute the software in this way or that way.

Government agencies are no strangers to open source, according to an FCW.com piece published today. At first blush, we imagined part of the attraction lies in cost savings, just like it does for many businesses investigating open source; however, FCW.com points out we’re wrong.

Eugene Ciurana, one of Walmart.com’s most influential platform architects, says that large F100 companies are setting their future enterprise IT strategies using many more open standards and Open Source components.

While everyone knows that Linux is now pervasive in IT organizations, the slippery nature of open source software makes it difficult to gauge how deeply it has penetrated into the data centers of the world.

"I’ve been nominated for and elected to, and have accepted, a seat on the board of the Linux Foundation, not in my capacity as founder of Ubuntu or via Canonical, but as an independent representative of the free software and Linux community. I’ll endeavor to wear that hat as effectively as possible in the role!"

At the core of open source is the belief that mysterious others assure the quality of an open source product. However, few actually have the skills required to do such a review. If, in the case of Wikipedia -- where there should be a lot of experts -- you still can't trust the content, the people or the quality, then how can you trust that open source works where such a review is less likely?

If you went to the keynote speech at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival here Sunday and found your cell phone not working, it wasn't your carrier's fault.

You can blame the SXSWi keynote speakers, Make magazine Senior Editor Phil Torrone and do-it-yourself electronics pioneer Limor Fried. During their on-stage conversation, the pranksters took the opportunity to show how to jam cell phone signals.