Notes from the field: Apple will uncage Leopard this fall. Dell agrees to ship Linux on a few, privileged models and to give customers the option of ordering XP rather than Vista, for the time being anyway. This trifecta leads Cringe to ask Is Microsoft's monopoly kaput? "The days where mastery of Windows gets you a job are long gone ... Moving from a cheap Linux box to Windows isn't like moving from a Model T to an F16."

Best of the blogs: Using great software to bludgeon competitors manacled by lock-in makes business fun, Matt Asay asserts. He's referring to Red Hat's second big migration, as in data. "First it was Unix to Linux," he writes. "Now, with the announced acquisition of MediaMatrix, Red Hat is moving to the migration of data from legacy applications to an open source architecture."

The news beat: Siemens CEO Klaus Kleinfeld steps down by requesting that his contract not be renewed upon expiration. Microsoft announces two new labs that will focus on malware, in Dublin and Tokyo. A group of computer dealers accuse Sun of interfering with trade in used Sun products in the European Union. And evil twin Wi-Fi access points are on the rise; such attacks are much easier to pull off than those requiring logins or passwords.

Posted by Tom Sullivan on April 25, 2007 11:14 AM