Quoteworthy: In my experience, it is true that open source has lower sales and marketing costs. But not forever. At some point, as Red Hat continues to hire direct field salespeople, it will be as bloated as IBM, Novell, or Microsoft in its sales force. But it was much cheaper to start, when cheap matters most. — Matt Asay. The open source sales cycle. Telecom: Not one to post every gripe from readers unhappy with a cell phone vendor’s treatment, Ed Foster “had to make an exception for the grueling but well-told tale one reader has been relaying to me about her struggles with Sprint in acquiring a Samsung A900, aka the ‘Blade’ (as opposed to the Motorola ‘Razr’) cell phone.” Best of the blogs: Looking back on his career as an amateur social networks explorer, Jon Udell examines rolling our own OPML mashups. “For years I’ve been writing scripts that scurry around, follow links, scrape pages, and abuse servers in order to discover these kinds of things. It would be nice to be able to get hold of the data and do this work more efficiently,” Udell explains. The news beat: Oracle says it will submit its AJAX render kit to open source as a follow-up to previous donations of JavaServer Faces components. IBM unwrapped the first offerings of its Project Harmony: Notes and Workplace editions with tighter integration to SAP applications. And Google shareholders address China controversy. Technology Industry