THE REBEL ALLIANCE
An unlikely army of hacker hippies, geek visionaries, idealistic teachers and corporate giants is making Portland ground zero of a digital revolution.http://www.wweek.com/story.php?story=4764"Tux the Penguin is a fat little thing. He's google-eyed and sports a grin that suggests a recent lobotomy.
Weird symbol for a revolution. Yet Tux is the mascot of a movement that's rocking the computer world.
One of the strongholds of that rebellion is in a ho-hum Beaverton office park, home of the Open Source Development Lab. The Lab is the self-proclaimed "center of gravity" for the global phenomenon Tux symbolizes. The mission is evangelical. The cause is Linux.
Linux is a computer operating system invented in Finland in 1991 by a college kid named Linus Torvalds. Torvalds, now a 34-year-old tech superstar whom some see as the love child of Thomas Edison and Che Guevara, works for the Beaverton Lab, backed by a roll-call of tech titans: Intel, IBM, Hitachi, Dell, Cisco. Last month, Torvalds unveiled the latest version of Linux. Nicknamed "the Beaver," it's viewed as a huge improvement to a system already beloved by geeks. "
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Brazil Falls In Love with Linux
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3445805.stm"At the same time, there is a lively debate in computing circles over whether Linux is genuinely more secure.
"Fans of Linux and the open source movement will say that by being publicly available, there are far more people who can work on it, more people who can detect problems, and provide fixes for them more quickly," says Bryan Glick, of London-based trade newspaper Computing.
"On the other side, Microsoft will say there's no way you can manage something like that using software programmers all around the world, you need to have it within a company that has all its expertise within its own doors."
Whatever the underlying reason, Linux is spreading fast in Brazil, although it is impossible to estimate how many organisations have adopted it so far. "This is happening from the bottom up, and not from the top down, as you might find in big companies," says Mr Zappi."
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The news is good: Linux ain't going away. It's just getting better.