Oracle on Oct. 25 announced that it will provide the same enterprise-class support for Linux as it provides for its database, middleware and applications products. Essentially, this means that Oracle, after removing Red Hat trademarks, will be distributing Oracle Unbreakable Linux, derived from Red Hat's open-source Linux technology.

Microsoft and Novell have announced a set of broad business, legal, and technical collaboration agreements to build, market, and support a series of new solutions that will make Novell's Linux and Microsoft's Windows products work better together.

In a move that some may have sensed was coming, Eric S. Raymond -- one of the co-founders of the open-source movement -- will become the newest member of the Freespire Leadership Board on Sept. 27.

Raymond, perhaps best known as one of the co-founders of the Open Source Initiative and author of such seminal open-source works as The Cathedral and the Bazaar, has recently declared that if the Linux desktop is ever to grab a large share of the desktop market it must do it soon or it will never happen.

[...] Raymond said at the 2006 San Francisco LinuxWorld that no matter how painful it may be to some free software purists, Linux must support popular proprietary software such as Windows media files, as well as proprietary hardware like Apple's iPod.