Red Hat president and CEO Jim Whitehurst sees opportunities for open source firms that might be putting undue burden on their dwindling IT departments because of the current economic downturn. Whitehurst offered his views in a press conference in Munich. His conclusion: "When people look at alternatives, often Open Source wins."

Red Hat president and CEO Jim Whitehurst sees opportunities for open source firms that might be putting undue burden on their dwindling IT departments because of the current economic downturn.

The feud between Minix inventor and operating system czar Andrew W. Tanenbaum and Linux Torvalds is legendary in the OS world. Before Linux there was Minix. Torvalds used to be a Minix user who set up his first Linux version in 1991 on Professor Tanenbaum’s operating system. Mr. Tanenbaum has now agreed to write a guest editorial for Linux Magazine. His opinion has not changed over the years: Linux (and Windows) are “unreliable.”

The FTP team at the Debian project have decided that the Affero GPL version 3 licensing (AGPLv3) is consistent enough with the guidelines of the Linux distro that software with the licensing can go into Debian's main archive.