When Mozilla releases its Firefox 3 browser update June 17, it hopes to set the first-ever Guinness world record for number of Internet software downloads in 24 hours. The target: 5 million. That would be quite a feat, since the last Firefox update netted just 1.6 million downloads.

By Kevin J. O'Brien Last January, Host Europe, a company that runs the Web sites for 120,000 businesses in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, secured an unlikely supplier for the open-source software it uses to run almost all of its computer servers.

For all the success of open-source software -- developers the world over flock to the code available freely over the Internet -- its purveyors able to thrive as public companies are few.

Now that the computer industry has its first accounting of how many patents Microsoft says are violated by open-source software, the question for many tech vendors is how aggressively the software giant will begin enforcement.

By Thomas Crampton The Minitel, a French government-sponsored minicomputer that was wired into 14 million French homes at its peak in the mid-1990s, had a limited service offering, a black-and-white screen and slow connection speeds that doomed it to near-extinction in the face of the Internet.