Careers: It’s a theme ripe for exploration during our month-long look at startup companies. Despite taking great strides to avoid it, as you grow in your career failure is an inevitability. That’s not to say failure is necessarily bad, though. “Here’s the truth: if you aren’t failing at least occasionally, you aren’t doing anything of long-term value for yourself or others,” espouses John West in this Leading from the trenches post. Another way to think about it is that even though it might be painful and embarrassing, failing means learning something new and, as such, should be recognized “as the currency of success, not as an occasion for recrimination and remorse.”Startups: Open source has shaken up several aspects of the software fray. Operating systems, databases, even BI. If three-year old Hyperic has its way, the next up will be systems management. The goal, as is nearly always the case with open source projects, was to build a community around the product. “Here you have this large-scale community of sysops who are sharing the results of managing large environments and discussing what works and what doesn’t,” says CEO and co-founder Javier Soltero. And to think, Soltero bought the technology for $1. View the Month of Enterprise Startups slideshow. Compliance: What with a major revision planned for Sarbanes-Oxley, the aim remains the same, though the approach changes. “That difference will have an appreciable effect on IT, in a good way,” writes Ephraim Schwartz. For starters, the latest iteration, otherwise known as Audit Standard No. 5, reduces some of the bureaucracy of compliance, and exchanges minutiae for a focus on the bigger picture. “The SEC will relax some nitpicky procedures in favor of a top-down approach. Which is probably a good idea, given that the real risk lies at the top.” The news beat: In a public wiki, some Linux users actually invite Microsoft to sue them, with one such IT pro writing “as a Linux user for nine years I believe I deserve to be sued.” Dell, meanwhile, says that laptops pre-loaded with Linux will be available on Thursday. And to obtain its software for analyzing unstructured data Business Objects gobbles up Inxight . Careers