The thing I like about Linux.SYS-CON.com is that most of the authors by and large practice what they preach. Every one of our staff is involved with a Linux vendor company, a non-profit, or is an active user of Open Source technology.

Where do you go if you want to discuss Open Source with some of the most influential Open Source leaders in Asia, Australia, and the rest of the Pacific Rim?

Organizations that gather and store critical information have to protect it. While there are tried and true techniques for data protection, there are also new and innovative ones. These new practices and tools greatly enhance an organization's ability to protect mission-critical data. Linux and Open Source users are specially challenged when trying to take advantage of much of this new technology.

Robert C. Seacord, a senior vulnerability analyst at the CERT/Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University, has just published the book Secure Coding in C and C++ (Addison-Wesley, 2005). I sat down with him to discuss software security in the Linux environment and elsewhere.

Matt Asay, the founder of the Open Source Business Conference, discusses his views on the conference and open source businesses and products. Matt works at Novell as director, Open Source Strategy. Prior to Novell, he worked with Lawrence Lessig at Stanford and subsequently at Lineo.

In September, core developers of Mambo, the popular open source content management system, announced a fork of the project, called Joomla!, with virtually all active participants following the fork.

There's been some interesting debate in the Open Source community regarding Open Source applications that run both on Linux and Windows. One camp feels most users select an operating system based on its available applications. If the applications people want are on Windows, they will tend to stick with Windows. Conversely, if the applications they want are only on Linux, they will eventually end up using Linux. By porting free software to Windows one increases the valuable applications on that platform. If Windows has Microsoft applications plus a stable of free software apps while desktop Linux has only the free software apps, why would anyone switch to Linux (and incur the training and data migration costs) when they already have all the software they need and want right? And as long as Microsoft can keep people on Windows Microsoft will gain the time needed to improve its applications and, most importantly, the supporting software stack.

Firefox and Thunderbird are Open Source products that are made available by the Mozilla Foundation. Open Source development lets anyone who wants to to examine the source code, or if they wish, to modify it. There are a number of advantages to Open Source development, including the fact that many people look at the code every day, which results in better responsiveness as bugs are uncovered. This dynamic development community is able to provide continual feedback to make the product better, paving the way for a better browsing and e-mail experience for everyone.

Userful of Calgary, Alberta, makes a resource-sharing system for Linux called 1-Box (www.userful.com). 1-Box is a multiuser approach to Linux desktop computing that turns a single computer into a network of up to 10 workstations. Traditional networks require a server, networking equipment, and individual PCs for each user. 1-Box approach eliminates all this. Each station requires only a standard monitor, keyboard, and mouse, but operates like an independent PC. Each user can operate simultaneously and independently, running the same or different applications securely and privately.

After all the buzz about SugarCRM at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo this year in Boston, we caught up with the company's co-founder and VP of Open Source, Clint Oram, to find out more about his hot new project and what SugarCRM's plans are for the future.

'Commit reporting has been done before,' Micah Dowty tells LinuxWorld Magazine's founding editor Alan Williamson in this exclusive interview at the recent Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco, 'but one of the things that makes CIA really unique is that it brings projects together into a larger community.' There are several large projects that are making use of CIA and showing their support by linking to the web interface, Dowty says. Gaim, AnhkSVN, Enlightenment, Gentoo, Adium, and Beagle are just a few of the larger projects that use CIA and link to it prominently on their web sites.

The MySQL Network is a new service operated by MySQL AB to help companies use and deploy MySQL technology in their applications. It bundles up a number of different components into a single chargeable service and includes certified copies of the MySQL binaries, online and phone-based support, full access to the MySQL KnowledgeBase, and updates and notifications of new releases.

The Open Source Software Institute is an advocacy group with a mission to promote Open Source software in government. We caught up with executive director John Weathersby to tell us more.

If you have ever met Robin Miller or 'Roblimo' as he prefers to be called, you immediately realize that he's one of the endearing 'characters' that make Linux colorful. Roblimo is editor-in-chief for the Open Source Technology Group, which includes Linux.com, slashdot.org, and SourceForge.net, and is the author of the Online Rules of Successful Companies (FT Prentice Hall).

Martin Fink's book on the business side of Linux and open source was one of the first books that looked at Linux and open source from the perspective of corporate managers and executives. In this extremely influential book, he explained in business terms why Linux and open source are here to stay and why companies everywhere should be aggressively moving to develop strategies for their adoption. He now speaks at conferences around the world delivering this same message.

Recently I had the opportunity to talk with the authors of Version Control with Subversion. In this interview, they discuss what Subversion is, migrating to Subversion, and, of course, music.

Swainson: 'Let's start by defining 'on demand.' First, on demand reflects what our customers are doing with their businesses - streamlining their business processes to make them more flexible and adaptive to new markets and opportunities. They use information technology as a tool to integrate these processes, so obviously IT is a critical enabler of on demand.'

Linux.SYS-CON.com's senior contributing analyst, Bill Claybrook, spoke with John Loiacono, executive vice president of Sun Microsystem's Software Group about his new job, and what he has in store for Sun's Linux strategy.

Data Center Linux (DCL), one of four OSDL initiatives, has the goal to accelerate Linux adoption in corporate data centers. DCL provides a center of gravity for developers, users, vendors, and the open source community to work together to improve Linux capabilities and feature requirements, accelerating the development and adoption of Linux in the data center.

LWM's senior contributing analyst, Bill Claybrook, spoke with Doug Levin (CEO and president), Palle Pedersen (CTO), and Karen Faulds Copenhaver (executive VP and general counsel) of Black Duck Software in Waltham, MA, about the company and their role in helping Linux and open source software succeed in the enterprise.

Mark Hinkle, LinuxWorld Magazine's editor of desktop technology and CIO of NeTraverse, makers of Win4Lin, talks to Kevin Bedell about the latest developments in the Linux desktop and Windows-to-Linux migration.

For this issue, I'm going to talk with long-time Linux author Mark Sobell. Mark's first Linux book came out in 1996, when Linux was in its infancy. In this interview Mark discusses Red Hat's Fedora Core 2 version of Linux and his experiences writing Linux books.

One of most exciting areas to emerge in information security has been honeynets. These networks are designed to be compromised in order to capture all the tools and activities of the attackers. We had the opportunity to talk with members of the Honeynet Project, a nonprofit security research organization, and the group's founder, Lance Spitzner, about their latest book, Know Your Enemy: Learning About Security Threats, Second Edition (Addison-Wesley). We asked many questions and discovered some surprising truths about security. Read on for the rest of the story.

LWM's editor-in-chief, Kevin Bedell, recently had the opportunity to ask Ranajit Nevatia, director of Linux Strategy for VERITAS, a few questions about how Linux is impacting VERITAS and how the company is contributing to the world of open source.

LWM's editor-in-chief, Kevin Bedell, spoke with Sun's John Fowler about what's new - with Sun, with Fowler's new position, and with Sun's place in the open source world - and learned a little history as well.

In previous LWM articles, we have discussed the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), Carrier Grade Linux (CGL), and the momentum Linux is gaining in telecom. We have also covered the current technological trend of companies moving away from proprietary technologies towards open and standardized platform components (hardware, operating system, and middleware).

A funny thing has happened to the computer industry over the last few years. The traditional wisdom was that there were two types of companies. At one extreme, there were small, fast startups that could maneuver nimbly and rapidly gain market share. On the other end of the spectrum were old, established, conservative companies that slowly faded into extinction or irrelevance as they lost track of what the market wanted.

Providing continuous service availability is a crucial factor for many industries, especially in the telecommunication sector. For instance, people always expect to hear a dial tone when they pick up their phones, and they always do. This is the level of reliability and service availability that is needed in the newly converged mobile phones IP networks.

It turns out that, indeed, many MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) are running Linux on their back ends. Christian Berentsen, the operations director of Funcom (www.funcom.com) kindly agreed to a virtual talk with Dee-Ann LeBlanc, LinuxWorld Magazine's gaming industry editor, about how Anarchy Online (www.anarchyonline.com) uses Linux to bring the world of Rubi-Ka to life for their user base.

In this interview, LWM Editor-in-Chief Kevin Bedell speaks with Francois Bancilhon, CEO of Mandrakesoft, about the success they've had over the past year...and how they plan to build upon it.

With a new business desktop, a 'Best Front Office Solution' award, and an expanding product line, things are looking good for Xandros. LWM Editor-in-Chief Kevin Bedell spoke with Dr. Frederick H. Berenstein at LinuxWorld Expo; here he shares the history of Xandros and, more important, what he sees in the future.

Bruce Perens, cofounder of the Open Source Initiative and long-time leader of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution, announced plans at the November 2003 Desktop Linux Consortium event in Boston to start a project called UserLinux. UserLinux is to be a Linux distribution based on a subset of Debian that will target large and small business desktops and servers. Bruce is currently continuing negotiations with his customers while also beginning to put the first broad brush strokes on UserLinux as a technology.

LinuxWorld Magazine's editor-in-chief Kevin Bedell recently met with professor Eben Moglen of Columbia University. Eben's the general counsel for the Free Software Foundation; here he shares with LWM readers his insight on the distribution of culture and information in our Internet world.

Tim O'Reilly, founder and president of O'Reilly & Associates, was a pioneer in the popularization of the Internet and has been an activist for Internet standards and open source software. He has led successful public relations campaigns on behalf of key Internet technologies, most recently organizing a series of protests against frivolous software patents.

Richard Stallman is the founder of the GNU Project, launched in 1984 to develop the free operating system GNU, and thereby give computer users the freedom that most of them have lost. Here he shares with Kevin Bedell and LWM readers the history of the GNU Project and, more important, the philosophy behind it.

Four hundred years from now, Earth is a shadow of her former self. On August 24th, 2202, a near calamitous strike from a planetary fragment sent 12 billion souls into backup and made extinct hundreds of thousands of animal and plant species.

The latest dirty word to creep into people's vocabularies is used to describe the flood of unwanted e-mail: spam. This unintended consequence of the Internet has made checking e-mail a chore of wading through obscene and unwarranted material.

In a week when the Slashdot community has been especially active interacting with LinuxWorld's 'What Would UserLinux look Like?' item, James Turner interviews Rob Malda of Slashdot. Listen to the exclusive interview.

Linux is moving into businesses across a broad range of industries, and IBM is a big supporter. In this exclusive LWM interview, Scott Handy, director of Linux Software Solutions for IBM Corporation, shares with editor-in-chief Kevin Bedell his thoughts on the mainstream acceptance of Linux - the past, present, and possible.

Eric Raymond has the unique ability to focus on low-level technical details while at the same time tracking the highest-level technology trends. His book The Cathedral and the Bazaar is both a great history of early Linux development and a great introduction to the workings and the culture of the open source community. Eric (who is often referred to simply as 'esr') has been associated with the Unix community for 20 years. He's contributed code to different versions of Unix, spoken frequently as an open source advocate, and has a new book coming out - The Art of Unix Programming. Eric is president and cofounder of the Open Source Initiative (OSI).