"Texas state agencies spend more than $450 million annually on information technology, not counting staffing costs and purchases from local or federal funds. With this amount of money in play, Texas is a significant target for hardware, software and technical support vendors.
"Key Texans believe state and local governments should embrace Linux and open-source software (OSS) to reduce taxes. The local media decided differently and did not inform the general public about OSS initiatives in the legislature. This is especially odd, as the Houston Chronicle runs Linux on an IBM mainframe and the city administrators made the front page of USA Today for bucking Microsoft. In addition to the Chronicle, the parent of the Dallas Morning News, Belo Corporation, uses Linux to host web sites and invested heavily in :CueCat, a product driven by the Linux operating system. So, advocates of the OSS bill feel baffled.
"Specifically, when Texas Senator John Carona filed SB 1579, a bill to make the state consider OSS, the media remained silent. Most voters did not have a clue that the State Auditor's Office put annual IT spending at $1.4 billion. But, those costs did not escape Senator Carona..."

Just days after The SCO Group escalated its legal battle with IBM over alleged violations of the two companies' Unix source code contract, open source advocate Eric Raymond has responded, saying that he possesses evidence that could undermine some of SCO's legal arguments in the case.

Linux, the open source operating system that is rapidly becoming a major force in the enterprise computing space, is the focus of three major events.

NZheretic writes "Eric Raymond and Rob Landley have excelled themselves in the lastest release of the OSI Position Paper on the SCO-vs.-IBM Complaint. Revision 2.0 has been updated to address the newly amended SCO complaint. See this note. I would advise anyone replying to SCO Anti-Linux FUD to include a link to the OSI paper."

by Michael C. Barnes
One of the challenges for the Open Source and Linux advocates has been the dominance of core business systems that now run on Microsoft Windows platforms. Many Unix and Linux advocates promote the idea of replacing these systems with Linux. This is the same strategy that the Unix vendors proposed to mainframe customers many years ago. Today, there are still data centers that run on mainframes.