Stories by: Neil McAllister

When you're having problems with your enterprise laptop or workstation, who do you call? Is your IT staff just down the hall, or are they on the other side of the globe?

The tremendous benefits of computing in the Internet Age have come at a price. Viruses, worms, Trojan horses, DDoS attacks, spyware, phishing -- the list of network-based threats seems to grow longer every day. In response, IT managers pile security countermeasures onto servers and workstations, malware authors find ways around them, and the cycle continues.

Don't call it "client/server." Today's database-driven applications are a world apart from the green-screen terminal apps of decades past. And yet, in this age when "the network is the computer," more and more data processing tasks are handed off to remote resources. Server-based applications, centralized content management, SOA (service-oriented architecture), and SaaS (software as a service) are all part of this trend -- and all put increased burden on enterprise network links.

According to Microsoft, it's the most secure operating system the company has ever produced. Five years in the making, Windows Vista promises to lock down the desktop and usher in the era of "trustworthy computing," in which PCs are more reliable, user experience is improved, and rampant malware is a thing of the past.

It wasn't the Oracle-branded Linux that many were expecting. In a way, it was something much worse. A collective gasp rose up from the blogosphere following Larry Ellison's keynote at the recent Oracle OpenWorld conference. To many, Oracle's decision to offer full, enterprise-class support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) - including software updates but sans Red Hat branding - was a direct attack. Red Hat's stock plummeted in response.

What do you get if you cross an open source development consortium with an organisation that promotes free standards? Answer: You get a Linux advocacy group. Or so it seems.

Let the spin control begin. In an open letter issued last month, Novell CEO, Ron Hovsepian, attempted to distance his company from Microsoft's claims that open source software, including the Linux kernel, infringes on Microsoft intellectual property (www.novell.com/linux/ microsoft/community_open_letter.html).

"Making standards is hard work," writes Tim Berners-Lee in a recent blog post. And he should know. The creator of the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee is responsible for developing and popularising some of the most significant open standards in computing. His current project, the Semantic Web, is an attempt to carry Web standards to a level beyond anything we've known so far.

Open source licenses work with copyright law to ensure that code always stays freely accessible, but copyrights aren't the only kind of intellectual property in the software world. Patents can be equally troublesome; in fact, they can often be showstoppers for open source.

There are no two ways about it: open source is everywhere. You'll be hard-pressed to find a single IT shop today that doesn't take advantage of open source software, be it Linux, MySQL, Perl, or the Snort networking tool. Top-tier vendors such as IBM, Novell, Oracle and Sun are investing heavily in open source projects and community-based development. Even Microsoft is getting in on the game. But despite widespread and growing acceptance, making the case for open source in mission-critical enterprise IT environments isn't always easy.

There's a new participant in the process of standardising the OpenDocument office file format: Say hello to Microsoft.