Just over a month ago, we brought you the news that Red Hat had washed its hands of long-term patent litigation with Firestar Software over object-oriented software and relational databases. We now learn the deal came just a month too early, as last week the Patent and Trademark Office invalidated the patent in question — the result of a "brother-in-arms" effort by Red Hat competitor Sun Microsystems.

If you like to be on the cutting edge, to have the very latest release of everything, then get ready, because Version 2.6.26 of the Linux kernel has just come down the pipe.

If you've ever wondered how Google manages to deal with all the information thrown at it in a given second, much less an hour or day, then listen up because we now know the answer: Protocol Buffers. Even better, Google has branded them with the Apache license and turned them out into the wild.

Selling Linux is nothing new — enterprise outfits have been offering "premium" versions for years, while commercial Linux support is a gainful industry of its own. The lucre-for-Linux lineup added a new outlet yesterday, as Canonical Inc., sponsor of the wildly popular Ubuntu, announced a deal with Best Buy to sell boxed versions of the distribution in its retail stores.

The virtualization market is growing by leaps and bounds, but the market leader will be bounding forward with a new boss on board, as Diane Greene, co-founder and President/CEO of VMware was forcibly removed yesterday by majority-owner EMC.