Government CIO reports that Oracle has announced seven new customers in India have adopted Linux as their choice of platform for corporate business. The open source OS is now the second most popular operating system among the Oracle developers in India according to company spokespersons. Quoted in the article is Oracle Linux customer Amitabh Pandey, group general manager for IT services at Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation, a public sector company in Delhi owned by India's ministry of railways. "It also had to be cost effective. Oracle E-Business Suite and Red Hat Linux was a perfect fit. We evaluated Linux as an enterprise-wide platform and were very satisfied with the performance."

Lack of software means that Linux is still not seeing a groundswell of deployments on the desktop, but this barrier is beginning to fall exaplains Stephen H. Wildstrom at BusinessWeek. He calls the latest wave of Desktop Linux offerings to be contenders. The article examines Sun's Linux, the Java Desktop and notes the distro addresses the lack of applications by bundling Sun's StarOffice 7 with word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation program that is compatible with Microsoft Word office.

Technology trends that will affect your business and how you do business.
Warning: very little of the following is speculation. Most of it has already been announced and is being implemented.

A federal jury awarded a software company and the University of California more than $520 million in damages Monday after finding that Microsoft Corp.'s popular Internet Explorer browser infringed on a patent.

Alan Nugent, CTO of Novell, thinks he knows how to drive wide adoption of the Linux desktop. Everywhere. Today.