OStatic

Even though the economy is rough all over, this really is one of the best times to be working in an open source company. There are advantages for those running the business, and for those using its services. Perhaps the only better arrangement would be along the lines of what Likewise Software has put together -- an open source company developing and offering support services for software that integrates and secures mixed network environments.

There are a lot of mixed networks out in the wild, of course. This is why Likewise has successfully secured a $10 million Series C round of funding, which the company plans to use to pursue growth in new markets and fund the development of its product line.

Last week, Net Applications reported Microsoft's operating system share had fallen below the 90 percent mark on the 40,000 or so websites where it gathers its traffic statistics. InternetNews is reporting that Net Applications made another interesting, if puzzling, discovery.

It seems the statistics gathered from Google.com (this only includes Google employees -- not the public using the search engine) were showing that a third of these users were accessing sites with an unknown operating system. It's more interesting when you consider that proxy servers block all identifying information, but the Google.com unknown systems only had the operating system information obscured.

Theories abound, of course, as to what Google might have up its sleeve. There's the Google is bringing Android to the PC school of thought, and the networking application infrastructure development theory.

On Monday, Michael DeHaan cast his net into Debian/Ubuntu waters, seeking out those who might be interested in packaging and maintaining the Red Hat-centric installation/provisioning server, Cobbler.

DeHaan states that recent additions and improvements added to Cobbler's development branch are shaping the project into a viable alternative to Debian's FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) package.

If the fact that the ParanoidLinux distribution (now in an alpha-alpha stage ) is based on a work of science fiction isn't unsettling, consider two key peripheral issues.

The first unsettling issue is that in some censorship-centric areas of the world, an operating system granting a user anonymity could be literally life-saving.

The second unsettling issue is that an effort is being made to package security tools -- ones that exist in current Linux and BSD systems, or are readily available through repositories -- into yet another distribution.

I just spent several days helping to upgrade an organization's servers from Red Hat Enterprise 3 to the latest version, Red Hat Enterprise 5.2. One of the most important, and impressive, issues we dealt with during this upgrade was SELinux, or security-enhanced Linux. SELinux offers a great deal of functionality, and helps to protect Linux boxes from a variety of threats. It forces system administrators to learn a new vocabulary, as well as permissions, logfiles, and programs with which they were previously unfamiliar. Fortunately, there are many good tutorials for SELinux on the Web.