Practical Technology

Unlike Windows or Mac OS X, Linux offers a wide variety of desktop environments. Here are my picks of the most important of these PC interfaces.

Six Clicks: The best Linux desktop environments. More>

PORTLAND — No, I am not making this up. At OSCon, The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), best known to you as the people checking up on you between the airport parking lot and your flight, quietly announced that they’re now offering a service for checking out your open-source code for security holes and bugs: the Software Assurance Marketplace (SWAMP).

Homeland Security gets into software security. More>

Oracle has supported Linux almost from day one. But it wasn’t until 2006, when Larry Ellison got into a disagreement with Red Hat, that Oracle decided it had to have its “own” Linux distribution — a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone, Oracle Linux. It’s eight years later, and Oracle is still copying RHEL with its release of Oracle Linux 7.

Oracle Linux 7 released. More>

Portland, OR: Well, this is surprising. SAP had been pushing forward with bringing its enterprise software suite to the cloud for some time. But no one expected to see SAP really putting its muscle behind the open source cloud and that’s exactly what they’re doing.

SAP supports open source Cloud Foundry and OpenStack for cloud. More>

In 2006 and 2007, there was an enormous documents standards war between Microsoft, with its OpenXML documents format, and the open-source community with its Open Document Format (ODF).

In the end, Microsoft, while eventually supporting ODF, won. ODF, while still supported by such popular open-source office suites as LibreOffice and OpenOffice, became something of an after-thought.

Until, the UK government announced on Tuesday, that it will now require all official office suites to support ODF.

The document format world has just been turned upside down.

UK makes ODF its official documents format standard. More>