Summary: With Windows 8 stumbling out of the gate and Google's Linux-powered Chromebooks gaining steam, Microsoft needs to dump Windows 8 for Windows 7 on PCs and the sooner the better.

Here are four good reasons why Microsoft needs to worry about the rise of the Linux-powered, Chrome OS-enabled Chromebooks: Acer, HP, Lenovo, and Samsung.

Some people think Chromebooks are going to "have just enough momentum to be a pain in Microsoft's rear end.". I think they need to look closer.

Getting Linux to boot and install on PCs locked down with Windows 8's UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) Secure Boot continues to be annoying at best and downright impossible in some cases. Still, slowly, ever so slowly, progress is being made.

First, the bad news. Trouble with a kernel driver in some Samsung laptops equipped with UEFI have caused them to "brick" simply by trying to boot Linux on them. This, however, is not a problem with Secure Boot. Instead, it's a problem with how Samsung has implemented UEFI.

UEFI Secure Boot Linux expert Matthew Garrett explained, "The samsung-laptop driver is a slightly weird thing. By 2010 (when it first appeared) most vendors had moved over to using some level of firmware abstraction, either using ACPI [Advanced Configuration and Power Interface] or WMI [Windows Management Instrumentation]. Samsung still seemed to be stuck around a decade earlier - they were providing a region of memory at a known address, and you'd read that address to find a bunch of offsets. Then you'd write magic values based on those offsets to magic system IO ports based on those offsets and something would happen."

For years, MySQL has been fundamental to many server applications, especially those using the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python) software stack. Those days may be ending. Both Fedora, Red Hat's community Linux, and openSUSE, SUSE's community Linux, will be switching out MySQL to MariaDB for their default database management system (DBMS) in their next releases.

For database developers and managers this change shouldn't be a problem. MariaDB, a MySQL fork founded by the original MySQL developers, is designed to be a drop-in replacement for the MySQL Database Server. It includes support for all the major open source storage engines, which are also supported by MySQL, such as MyISAM, Blackhole, CSV, Memory, and Archive.

Michal Hrušecký, an openSUSE developer and the MySQL maintainer for openSUSE and SUSE, explained, With MariaDB you'll still be using the "same API [application programming interface], still same protocol, even same utilities. And mostly the same datafiles. So unless you have some deep optimizations depending on your current version, you should see no difference."

Summary: Google is offering a pi—that's $3.14159 million—in prizes for cracking Chrome OS.

So you think you're a big-time hacker huh? Well Google invites you to show up at the CanSecWest security conference on March 7 in Vancouver, BC to see if you can crack your way into Chrome OS. And, to make it worth your time, Google is offering a pi worth of cash rewards. That's a total prize package of $3.14159 million. I thought that would get your attention.

Along with supporting the Pwn2Own Web browser hacking competition, Google is inviting hackers to try their luck with Chrome OS. According to Chris Evans, the tech lead of the Google Chrome Security Team, Google is putting its Linux-based desktop operating system to the test because "Security is one of the core tenets of Chrome, but no software is perfect, and security bugs slip through even the best development and review processes. That’s why we’ve continued to engage with the security research community to help us find and fix vulnerabilities."

Summary: After only a few months Acer's Chromebook already accounts for 5 to 10 percent of Acer's US shipments and HP will soon be launching its own Chromebook. In the meantime, Windows 8 PC sales remain anemic.

The blame game for Windows 8's initial disappointment has already started. Microsoft blames OEMs. OEMs blame Microsoft. The bottom line is that Windows 8 has sunk below Vista's market share during the same initial period. The surprising winner in all this? Google's Linux-based Chrome OS.

I thought Chrome OS had a shot at the big-time. I didn't expect it a major PC OEM, Acer, to introduce a Chromebook in late 2012 and a few months later have it account for 5 to 10% of its US shipments. At the same time, as Acer CEO Jim Wong said "Windows 8 itself is still not successful."

Summary: Linux founder Linux Torvalds claimed that Carmen Ortiz zealously prosecuted 24-year-old hacktivist Aaron Swartz starting in 2011 and that this led in part to his untimely death by suicide

Linux inventor and big open source backer Linus Torvalds hinted that he blames the prosecutor in part for the death of hacker-activist Aaron Swartz earlier this month.

In a quick blog last week, Torvalds points out that prosecutor Carmen Ortiz denied that she zealously prosecuted the 26 year old  but showed through press clips in 2011 that Ortiz was singing a different tune back then. 

Summary: There's a new major version of open-source LibreOffice office suite on its way, but developers, not end-users, will be the ones who will notice the real changes.

I use LibreOffice as my main office suite every day on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. So, when I saw that there a new major release due in early February LibreOffice 4.0, I was excited. It turns out though that while there will be some improvements for users like myself, the significant changes will be for developers.

As Charles-H. Schulz, one of LibreOffice's founders and a member of its parent group, The Document Foundation, explained, "In a sense, the 4.0 is actually an existential release, as it marks the departure from the past, the inclusion of new technologies and a more coherent and effective story on licensing. … The 4.0 is not just an update, it represents a deep change for LibreOffice and enables us to come closer to fulfilling our mission: to create the tools for knowldedge and the instruments of freedom.

Summary: MariaDB, the MySQL fork, continues to pick up steam as openSUSE is also considering using it as the Linux distribution's default database management system.

MySQL may still be the "most popular open-source database" for now, but its day may be ending. Just like Fedora, which is considering switching out MySQL for the MySQL fork MariaDB, openSUSE is also considering making MariaDB its default database management system (DBMS).

Fedora's change to MariaDB looks to be more certain than openSUSE's, SUSE's community Linux, potential move. In Fedora's case, the shift is being suggested by Jaroslav Reznik, Red Hat's Fedora project manager, and there seems to be no opposition.

Summary: Fedora Linux's developers are considering replacing MySQL with MariaDB. That, in turn, might lead to Red Hat abandoning MySQL for MariaDB.

MariaDB, the open-source database management system (DBMS) and MySQL fork, may soon be replacing MySQL in the Fedora Linux distribution. Since Fedora is also the testbed for Red Hat's market-leading Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), this move may lead to major changes in the Linux DBMS world.

Jaroslav Reznik, who is Red Hat's Fedora project manager, proposed the change. Reznik explained that he was suggesting this move because, "The original company behind MySQL, MySQL AB, were bought out by Sun which was then bought by Oracle. Recent changes made by Oracle indicate they are moving the MySQL project to be more closed. They are no longer publishing any useful information about security issues (CVEs), and they are not providing complete regression tests any more, and a very large fraction of the mysql bug database is now not public."

Summary: Red Hat recently acquired ManageIQ, an enterprise cloud management company, and now the Raleigh, NC-based company is integrating its administrative services with its Linux-based cloud systems.

Today, anyone can set up a cloud. Managing it, though, that's another story. So, it came as no surprise last year when Linux-giant Red Hat announced updates to its open hybrid cloud solutions portfolio following the acquisition of ManageIQ, a leading provider of enterprise cloud management and automation solutions

In a statement, Bryan Che, Red Hat's general manager of its Cloud Business Unit said, “We’ve worked with ManageIQ as a partner to our Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization platform with successful joint customers and saw an opportunity to expand our hybrid cloud management capabilities with an even closer relationship with ManageIQ’s compelling portfolio With the closing of the acquisition, we now begin work to integrate ManageIQ’s enterprise cloud management and automation technologies with our complementary Red Hat CloudForms hybrid Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution and our open Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization management solution. With this combination, we can offer our customers an unparalleled open hybrid cloud management portfolio.”