Columnists’ corner: “It seems that, although some misgivings may remain, the open source community is coming to terms with the realities of the software business.” So explains Neil McAllister in Does open source matter? But on that foundation an essential question arises: “If a business model that says ‘develop for free but pay to deploy’ is acceptable, then what does enterprise IT need open source for, anyway?” McAllister asks. Hot review: Two midrange storage area networking offerings are boasting enterprise-class features that only 6 months ago were reserved for costlier systems. Compellent’s Storage Center 3.3 and Xiotech’s Magnitude 3D 3000e both house such previously high-end features as multiple storage tiers, data migration functions, and the ability to expand existing volumes without reformatting. One of the two “is more mature and shows it. It offers automatic data migration, a cleaner, easier-to-use interface, and higher performance, all for about the same price per gigabyte,” writes Logan Harbaugh. Best of the blogs: It’s hardly a secret that online retailers are not making customers happy with their return policies, and it seems that more and more the same can be said for classic brick-and-mortars. But there is one company increasingly being seen by Gripe Line readers as having better return policies than the rest. It’s not CompUSA or BestBuy, explains Ed Foster in Jeers and Cheers for Retail Stores. This one just might surprise you. Quoteworthy: Unfortunately, the current spate of hackers is nothing like the hackers of the 1980’s, or even those of a few years ago. The current lot has resources at their disposal that would make an 80’s hacker give his right ear for. This goes twice for the current group of script kiddies who have tools to conduct automated Denial of Service (among other) attacks that, back then, would have made even a seasoned security professional blush. — Victor Garza, in a Zero Day blog post titled Learning about security.The news beat: After word leaked out about the forthcoming Windows Vista OS, Microsoft confirms that it will offer 6 core editions — four aimed at consumers, two at the enterprise. Hewlett-Packard integrates Peregrine into OpenView to enable the monitoring of software, PCs and mainframes. And Actional enhances its SOA management platform with business process visibility, governance and security. Technology Industry