It has become something of a cliché that Linux has reached a critical point in its development and adoption. However, this is especially true now when we look at what events are lined up to occur in the near future, and particularly in the desktop area.

Let me preface this discussion with the disclaimer that I am not the typical desktop user. I am technical; I am mobile and travel frequently; I support and use software that runs on multiple operating systems; and I am an incessant tinkerer. Now that we got that out of the way, let me share the benefits of the day-to-day travels from Linux to Windows and sometimes Mac OS. For years I lived in a world dominated by a single operating system, only occasionally challenged by Apple. Now a new chapter is being written.

Did you feel that? That really was the ground moving beneath your feet. Microsoft has gone and done the unthinkable and teamed up with Novell. It will help sell SUSE Linux along with Windows, recommending SUSE to customers with an irrepressible itch for a mixed environment and distributing coupons good for one-year's worth of SUSE maintenance and support.

Microsoft has taken up with Zend Technologies, the open source PHP commercialer that wants PHP to be a de facto standard in web development. PHP, remember, is an integral part of the open source LAMP stack, the Windows alternative. Microsoft is interested in stemming defections. And anyway a lot of Windows users also user PHP.

Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik says he is not going to cut prices despite Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's move to undercut him. At least that was Red Hat's first response when Matthew went on CNBC last Friday after his stock took a nasty hit. Whether he can maintain that position in the clinches when negotiating with accounts remains to be seen.

Microsoft has made the kernel of the newly available real-time Windows Embedded CE 6.0 shared source, a hex sign against Linux inroads into the market.

MySQL and Greatlinux Inc, an open source solutions and services provider in China, have jointly announced a strategic partnership to deliver commercial MySQL-based solutions to the burgeoning Chinese market. Greatlinux is MySQL's first Chinese partner, a significant milestone which shows strong confidence in China

X-Tend announced an extension to the partnership with XenSource, by joining the XenSource Partner Program and becoming a XenSource Solution Provider (XSP). This partnership will allow X-Tend customers access to XenSource's XenEnterprise virtualization platform, the enterprise version of Xen.

Solution providers can now offer small and medium businesses a choice - bringing the security, power, flexibility and cost-savings of Linux - with the U.K. launch of Collax server solutions. Interactive Ideas will handle Collax product aggregation and distribution while working together with Collax to generate leads and create new sales opportunities for channel partners.

Red Hat , provider of open source solutions to the enterprise, announced compatibility certification with Open Vulnerability and Assessment Language definitions for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and 4 security advisories. Red Hat will now produce and support OVAL patch definitions to provide a structured and machine-readable version of advisories, allowing OVAL-compatible tools to accurately test for the presence of vulnerabilities.

Wyse Technology, a provider of thin computing, has announced the availability of Wyse Linux 6.3, the latest release of the Wyse Linux V6 products. The product will be offered as a free software upgrade for current Wyse customers of the S50, V50 and 5150 SE thin clients.

IDG is claiming that LinuxWorld show in New York last week pulled in 19,000 people. There were supposed to be something like 150 exhibitors.

Former Massachusetts CIO Peter Quinn, ousted over a controversial effort to deploy open source systems widely on state systems, said that the 'sandals and ponytails' associated with Open Source are having a negative impact in getting a conservative IT management community to change.

Novell has launched the Platform for the Open Enterprise, architecture of software and services from Novell and its partners built to help customers benefit from open source and open-standards based computing at BrainShare 2006 conference. As a key component of its new platform strategy, Novell unveiled SUSE Linux Enterprise 10, the core of the platform for the open enterprise as well as enhancements to its security, identity and collaboration offerings.

This year it looks certain that a new participation record will be set, more than 16,000 votes have already been recorded, as more than 20,000 SYS-CON Media readers are estimated to cast their votes in this year's Readers' Choice Awards.

After many months' work improving upon the first public beta announced in March 2005, the OpenOffice.org project has announced that the second public beta release of OpenOffice.org 2.0, 'a fully featured open-source productivity suite available as a free download for major computing platforms in over 45 languages,' is now available for download.

'As the leading enterprise software vendor driving adoption of the Linux platform, Oracle continues to test and deploy software on the latest architectures to give our customers all of the cost and performance advantages it delivers,' said Juergen Rottler, executive vice president, Oracle On Demand and Support Services, as Oracle today announced that its Oracle On Demand services and Oracle Data Center are now powered by the x86 64-bit architecture.

PalmSource has joined MontaVista's Mobilinux Open Framework partner program and MontaVista has joined PalmSource's Palm Powered Mobile World (PPMW) program. Between them, PalmSource and MontaVista plan to help further accelerate the development of next generation Linux-based mobile phones.

Look how long it took for the Firefox browser to get where it is. This thing was released into the community, into the open source community kind of in a quasi-open source way from the Mozilla Foundation 5-6 years ago. It was a long time coming, and then finally when it arrived, Microsoft did nothing.

We've recently seen OSDL create a sort of patent pool that's used by companies that wish to donate patents for the use of open source. I want to make two points about that. OSDL means well, but the patent pool is from the wrong people. They're from IBM, Hewlett-Packard, companies that already have a business interest in open source, rather than from Microsoft and whatever companies Microsoft would be using as proxies against us, as they used SCO.

Linus Torvalds and Tux were just two of the stars at this year's LinuxWorld Conference & Expo, held last week in San Francisco. Here is a brief round up of stories from SYS-CON Media's coverage of the event.

Sun's Solaris engineering team was honored for their exceptional work on Solaris 10, which included innovative features such as Predictive Self-Healing and Solaris Dynamic Tracing empowers users to solve complex problems previously unseen.

As a result of new agreements, Sun will resell VMware ESX Server, VMware GSX Server and VMware Workstation products, providing customers purchasing Sun Fire x64 servers or workstations from Sun, such as the single- and dual-core Sun Fire V20z and Sun Fire V40z, with the option of adding the virtualization software to their systems.

Ryman's blog can be read at ryman.eclipsedeveloper sjournal.com. He is the latest i-technology celebrity whose blog is syndicated on SYS-CON's branded blog-n-play community pages next to James Gosling, Marc Fleury, Ben Forta, John C. Dvorak, Alan Williamson and others.

SYS-CON West Coast Bureau Chief and International division head Roger Strukhoff recently wrote an opinion piece decrying the lack of movement with the Nasdaq index in recent years. SYS-CON Publishing Director Jeremy Geelan responded during LinuxWorld Expo with a sharp (and public) retort, leading to a response by Strukhoff a few days later. It appears that the battle lines have been drawn...

Linux 2.6 kernel maintainer Andrew Morton said he expected OCFS 2 will be distributed with version 2.6.14 of the public kernel. It will be the first clustering component to be added to the public kernel.

VMware says it expects the Community Source program to yield a richer and broader set of partner solutions that are well integrated with VMware virtual infrastructure products. Its partners can contribute shared code or create binary modules that extend interoperability and integrated virtualization solutions.

IBM said its new Linux approach would address critical business issues faced by both IT and line-of-business decision makers and claimed it make its customers more competitive in an on-demand world. Its formula equates on-demand real-time transformational efficiency with open systems, which of course can mean open standards as well as open source.

The new GPL draft is reportedly going to be positioned as a discussion document. Eben is expecting that 150,000 people and 8,000 organizations will want to put their two cents in and intends to set up advisory committees representing all the different constituencies starting in a few weeks.

SlickEdit v10 was awarded the 2005 LinuxWorld Conference & Expo Product Excellence Award for 'Best Application Development Tool' this week in San Francisco. The award, managed by the editors of LinuxWorld Magazine in conjunction with the show's organisers IDG World Expo, was announced at the show by SYS-CON Media West Coast bureau chief Roger Strukhoff (pictured).

Appro International today announced that LinuxWorld Magazine in conjunction with the show's organizers IDG World Expo has named the company's Appro's XtremeBlade Cluster Solution as the winner of the 'Best Clustering Solution' category for the Product Excellence Awards at the LinuxWorld Expo.

'Scalix stands out with its clear market focus and an SMB focus, too,' said LinuxWorld Product Excellence Awards judge John H. Terpstra, as Scalix won the LinuxWorld Product Excellence Award for 'Best Messaging Solution' here in San Francisco at LinuxWorld Conference & Expo 2005. SYS-CON.TV interviewed Scalix founder Julie Hanna Farris about the Award and about the company's e-mail solution.

'I expect that Release 2 of the Oracle Cluster File System will be distributed with version 2.6.14 of the public kernel,' said Andrew Morton yesterday as Oracle announced at LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco the general availability of OCFS 2 as a free alternative to proprietary systems. It will also be included as a standard component in Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server distributions, Oracle said.

'I'm pleased to see Novell give early access for developers to their popular SUSE Linux distribution as soon as the first beta release,' said Andrew Morton, maintainer of the Linux 2.6 kernel, as Novell announced today at LinuxWorld 2005 in San Francisco the creation of the OpenSUSE project, a new initiative aimed at promoting the adoption of Linux worldwide.

Open source middleware proponents ObjectWeb assembled a set of vendors to join the project and agreed to co-lead the Project Management Committee (PMC). WTP was formally launched in June 2004 based on initial contributions from eteration, Lomboz, and IBM Rational Application Developer.

Alacos, enabler of organizations to transfer settings and application data from Windows desktops to Linux, will announce two new products: Linux Migration Agent Network Server Edition and Thin Client Migration Agent.

At LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco this week, Arkeia is showcasing its data protection solutions supporting Novell SLES9, MySQL v4 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. Arkeia's Network Backup Solution will be demonstrated in the MySQL and Novell partner booths as the first professional network backup solution fully capable of protecting Linux environments.

PathScale has certified a new four-socket systemboard from Supermicro Computer Inc. for use with its PathScaleInfiniPath HTX InfiniBand Adapter. The Supermicro H8QC8/Eand the PathScale InfiniPath interconnect are being displayed in thePathScale booth at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco.

Six months ago when Coverity analyzed Linux kernel 2.6.9, the same version used in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0, six potentially critical defects were found in the core filesystem and networking code; last week's findings on the newest Linux kernel 2.6.12 showed that all critical defects have been fixed.

Univa Corporation has closed an $8 million Series-A round of investment led by ARCH Venture Partners and New World Ventures. Univa is at the intersection of two exploding markets: open source and Grid infrastructure software.