June is off to a rocky in the markets for technology companies as shares slump in the wake of troubling economic reports, though cooler heads appear to have confidence in the sector for the long term.

The newest release of the Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Linux distribution includes a number of technologies that haven't made their way into Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) yet, including a new version of the OpenStack cloud platform, code-named Essex, that the company plans to adopt in future editions of its flagship distribution.

The next major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), version 7, is targeted for release in the second half of 2013, Red Hat said on Tuesday, as it also celebrated the tenth anniversary of its enterprise OS.

This evening's annual Codie awards for business software features a three-way tie in cloud computing, with Google, Keynote Systems, and Scribe Software all winning in the Best Cloud Application/Service category.

The announcement Tuesday of a new partnership between Dell and Red Hat could mark a further expansion of open-source software use in the enterprise.

Red Hat released a feature-packed beta of Enterprise Linux 6.3 earlier this week, making major changes in areas ranging from security to virtualization.

The news that Microsoft's new Open Technologies unit would be spun off from the company and dedicated to advancing its interests in the open-source market drew a mostly positive response from Red Hat this morning.

The open-source OpenStack cloud infrastructure stack has gained a number of additional powerful allies, as IBM and Red Hat have both agreed to support the OpenStack Foundation, according to organizers behind the soon-to-be-created body.

Coming up with a great technology product or service is only half the battle these days. Creating a name for said product that is at once cool but not too cool or exclusionary, marketable to both early adopters and a broader audience, and, of course, isn't already in use and protected by various trademarks and copyright laws is difficult--to say the least.

The sprawl of management consoles, the proliferation of data they provide and the rising use of virtualization are adding challenges to corporations looking to more effectively manage mixed Linux, Windows and cloud environments.