Its an interesting question for two reasons, the first is the most obvious: the White House is considering a more commited move to open source products, and sees value in them. The second is interesting because the answer really applies to everyone.

The most commonly thought answer is because its free, but lately we’ve all been seeing that its not. Depending on the implementation and supplier it can lead to increased support/maintainance costs; training costs and more to migrate from one O/S to another. I understand of course open source doesn’t have to mean linux but thats definately where this conversation is headed.

Then their are other questions – does an open code base mean better quality code (given that many people see it, but there is often less strict quality control) ? Does it mean that there will be less vulnerabilities, or more given that they are easier to find in the source…

Sun’s Chairman McNealy had this to say,

It’s intuitively obvious open source is more cost effective and productive than proprietary software….The government ought to mandate open-source products based on open-source reference implementations to improve security, get higher-quality software, lower costs, higher reliability–all the benefits that come with open software.

What are you opinions?

PolishLinux has an english screenshot review of KDE4 (currently still in beta) –

“PolishLinux.org has an extensive screenshot review and commentary on the development version of the Free and Open Source KDE desktop. Highlights include the ability to run any desktop applet prepared for Mac OS X inside Plasma, on-the-fly annotation and rating of files from within the Dolphin file manager.

Discuss and more at Slashdot.

Source: Flickr

“CrunchGear has an interesting interview of the Director of Inflight Entertainment for the airline Virgin America discusses their adoption of Linux for the passenger’s seat back computers. ‘The ability to compose a music-video playlist is pretty cool and on the horizon. The READ section is also awesome in that it takes what is typically a bunch of wasted trees (excess newspapers, periodicals) and allows us to be more environmentally friendly and timely with things like news/event info/sports/entertainment etc.’”

Microsoft has released a preview (Windows only) of their newest Desktop Search product, Windows Search Preview 4.0 [via LH].

“Windows Search 4.0 introduces several improvements I’d like to call out making search even better in Windows Vista:

• With Windows Search 4.0, the Windows Search Team has fixed most of the reported bugs causing a majority of distractions users have seen since Windows Vista RTM – many of those bugs were reported by you.
• Great improvements have been made with regards to performance.Even now as Preview, Windows Search 4.0 has query response time about 33%faster than search queries in Windows Vista RTM.
• The Windows Search Team has extended Remote Index Discovery for PC-to-PC search to work onevery supported version of Windows. This makes finding information on other PCs running Windows Search 4.0 quick and less resource-consuming. Now Windows Search can find information shared on a remote PC by accessing an index on that PC – and you will open files only when relevant to your search. This will also work if the user’s profile is redirected.
• The Windows Search Team has implemented Rollback Recovery where your search index will roll back to the last known good state (this is good in handling disc write errors). If an error occurs, your index isn’t rebuilt from scratch; only the newly changed files are added to the index, making recovery from system errors not as disruptive to the machine or the user”

Nothing sucks worse than getting to the office in the morning and realizing you left the most recent copy of an important file—whether it’s your to-do list or a PowerPoint presentation—on your home computer. No matter where you are and what computer you’re using, you always want the most updated set of documents and files you’ve got without having to carry ‘em around on a thumb drive. Luckily, several free solutions can automatically sync folders between computers

The peer-to-peer protocol allows PCs to download most of the updates from each other—the remaining servers are mostly needed to send out the first few copies and then coordinate the up- and downloading. One of the advantages of the BitTorrent protocol is that it uses bandwidth where it can find it: faster links are automatically used more.

Using this technology, updating all 6,500 PCs can be done in less than four hours. Previously, this took four days. Four days down to four hours for the same needs!

Its always nice to see some legitimate uses for a clever protocol.

I recently read elsewhere that best-guess figures for Vista are that about 2% of computers on the internet are running it. This leaves a LOT of XP users out there, who are most likely only going to upgrade when they get a new computer…

LH has compiled another “best list” of Vista SideBar Gadgets. I have to admit, I disabled my sidebar, but I’m sure there are some of you who’d appreciate this…

LifeHacker’s Best Gadgets