Open Source Business

Catholic Healthcare West (CHW), the largest not-for-profit healthcare provider in California, needed to consolidate its IT systems and bring greater efficiency and consistency to the infrastructure. CHW decided the best way to do that was to move away from proprietary solutions and toward open source.

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Joe Brooks is your average 23-year-old capitalist and sick freak (a.k.a., fan of conservative radio talk show host Glenn Beck). He’s not a geek, but he believes free software is a “great way to create software that the average Joe can use.” Brooks proved that point recently, after becoming disgruntled with Wikipedia administrators who kept reverting posts made by Brooks and other Beck fans at the popular community encyclopedia Web site. Brooks, an open source neophyte, downloaded Mediawiki software, configured it, and started his own site called Glennpedia. Read more at Newsforge.com.

Evolution-Data Optimized (EVDO) is a wireless broadband service that offers throughput of up to a theoretical maximum of 2.4Mbps. Verizon’s service, which provides the best EVDO coverage in the US, is designed to work only with Windows. However, you can use Verizon’s EVDO service to connect to the Internet with Linux with a little bit of tweaking. Read more at Linux.com.

Dapper Drake, the next Ubuntu release, is going to be different, say the developers working on the release. So different, in fact, that Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has proposed a six-week delay for final polishing on the distribution that has captured the hearts of new and expert Linux users alike. Shuttleworth and the rest of the developer community surrounding Ubuntu call Dapper the first enterprise-level release. Read more at Newsforge.com.

There’s been some discussion lately about whether Ubuntu is suitable for Linux beginners. If you raise this issue, someone is sure to tout a script called Automatix as the solution to any perceived notions of the user-unfriendliness of Ubuntu. Automatix automatically installs a laundry list of applications, plugins, and utilities that are supposed to turn a barebones Ubuntu install into desktop perfection. That sounded like something I should try. I already thought Ubuntu was pretty easy to use. Although it doesn’t come out of the box with everything I need, I quickly found out how to get just about everything I needed by pointing and clicking. The Synaptic Package Manager helped me set up extra repositories, and update-notifier made it easy to get the latest version of whatever it told me I needed. (more…)

Professional Mortgage Partners in Downers Grove, Illinois, runs a technology consulting side business helping realtors set up office portals and inexpensively access the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) database through the use of open source software. Read more at Newsforge.com.

Catholic Healthcare West (CHW), the largest not-for-profit healthcare provider in California, needed to consolidate its IT systems and bring greater efficiency and consistency to the infrastructure. CHW decided the best way to do that was to move away from proprietary solutions and toward open source. Read more at Newsforge.com.

Tradeware Global is a financial services company that allows securities brokers to provide direct market access to their clients. It currently handles 5% of all transactions in the New York and American stock exchanges. Tradeware is about halfway through with an infrastructure migration that is moving the company’s 100+ servers off of Solaris and onto Red Hat Linux. Read more at Newsforge.com.

A Scyld Beowulf cluster from Penguin Computing is helping researchers at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Lab (LPL) boost computing resources and produce research results more quickly.

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Google is offering free Web pages with an easy-to-use home page creator that you don’t have to download, and you can use the utility even from a Linux desktop if you use Firefox. The company released Google Page Creator last week as a Google Labs project. That means you won’t find it on the main directory of services because it’s in an early stage of beta testing. If you’re willing to be a Google guinea pig, you’ll find the service functional, if limited in scope, and easy enough for a beginner to use. (more…)