Columnist’s corner: Neil McAllister addresses the issues around Nat Torkington’s question, “Is open source completely meaningless?” The answer, of course, is no. Then again, “it’s getting hard to tell what is legitimate open source and what isn’t,” McAllister explains in Free software is nothing to fear. Perhaps the aforementioned is not the best question to ask, though, and we as an industry should be wondering why we’re still talking about it. “There’s a truly revolutionary way of producing software out there. Maybe it’s time more of us started calling it what it is.” Best of the blogs: As the clock keeps ticking, Microsoft ships a DST patch for its Dynamics CRM 3.0. It’s a requisite fix, indeed, but CRM systems are not the main focus for Matt Hines. “The greatest concerns with the DST mandate deal primarily with critical infrastructure, a la Y2K, with worries about transportation, communications and transactional systems running smoothly,” Hines writes in Zero Day. The news beat: Red Hat pens an agreement with Exadel to offer Eclipse-based developer tools for building applications on Red Hat’s platform. Palm, according to reports, is discussing strategic options with Morgan Stanley, including the possibility of selling itself, collecting VC investments or buying another company. And Avaya touts Voice-as-a-Service, a blending of SOA and voice capabilities dubbed Communications Enabled Business Processes or, you guessed it I’m certain, CEBP for short. Technology Industry