According to an interesting article in Computer Business Review Online, for-profit companies spend 75% of their investments on Linux, leaving 25% for other open source projects such as Firefox, OpenOffice, MySql, and others.

The primer was mentioned in a list of useful resources for the nonprofit sector (sorry, they now have moved this link into subscriber only pages), that was published in the Wall Street Journal yesterday.

Here are some tidbits from the open source world that might be of interest...

I think I'm getting the hang of this blogging thing. There are some folks, down at the end of the long tail, that will be very happy to read about the meeting I had this morning at my kids' elementary school! So, here ya' go!I attended a great meeting at my kids' elementary school this morning.

There have been a lot of TCO studies, even one in the nonprofit sector that NOSI did several years ago. (It's in the primer, under case studies.)Here is yet another perspective about TCO - a very straightforward one. Linux has matured since the time that we did our TCO study, and the equation is becoming even more lopsided.What do you think? Is it time for another nonprofit TCO study?

Anybody who deals with sending outgoing mail knows that there are a variety of approaches the big guys use to stop spam. Verizon does call back to sending mail server to verify from address, AOL throttles based on history for connecting IP, Yahoo! turns on GreyListing, etc.

Join me at the Aspiration offices in the San Francisco Nonprofit Technology Center for the first of what we hope will be many NOSI Salons. The Nonprofit Open Source Initiative (NOSI) is gearing up for a new phase of activity, and we want to hear what you are thinking about open source software and it's role in the nonprofit sector. In what ways is the connection working? How is it not? What kinds of new ideas and resources are needed? We're also looking to start conversations on how to get nonprofits involved in the open source community.

I was wondering how people in the NOSI community could tag their bookmarks on del.icio.us or ma.gnolia (or other bookmarking systems) and their blogs and such, in a way that we could easily find it. Should we have a 'nosi' tag? Or use a tag combination, such as 'nptech' and 'floss' or 'oss'? Suggestions?

__I'm starting off my NOSI blog with a post (one that has already been discussed at length, no less) from Jamie at May First/People Link, because it asks a question that I have been struggling with lately myself:__'*What's a political techie?*':http://mayfirst.org/?q=node/257Submitted by jamie on Wed, 09/27/2006 - 8:24am.I've been thinking recently about what it means to be a political techie, particularly around the conflicts between having a consulting relationship and a political relationship with the same 'client' or 'organization.'

'CiviCRM':http://civicrm.org/, which is, as they say, 'a powerful contact, fundraising and eCRM system that allows you to record and manage information about your various constituents including volunteers, activists, donors, employees, clients, vendors, etc.