The OLPC is a noble idea, but I think Negroponte has underestimed the the will of its competitors to ensure OLPC doesn't take hold to give them a clear advantage.

When Intel "stole" the contract for the government of Venezuela, Negroponte was outraged, but what his missing is, its just business.

I congratulate Negroponte for his incredible effort to have a vision to give the poor the tools needed to escape dispair and to build a device, but in the end, if Intel can do it, and do it better - than it really doesn't matter.

I'd like to see the poor using free software, but in the end i'd prefer them to have food in their bellies and using commercial software than having free software and going hungry with a bankrupt OLPC.

Its a shame, because I personally love the look of the OLPC, the Classmate looks terrible purely from an aesthetic perspective.

In the event that Notes is open sourced, I doubt this will greatly impact the reach of the product further into the enterprise.

Notes is such a horrid development platform who only seen the Web as a medium a few ages ago. The last major release closed some of the gap but it has a far, far way to go.

There's a difference between open sourcing OpenSolaris, and open sourcing Notes which the article fails to mention. Sun has something to gain by open sourcing OpenSolaris: to sell more Sun hardware. Notes can run on a multitude of platforms and doesn't require specialised hardware (like z/OS) to take advantage of the system.

Anyway if I was running a serious Notes environment, I'd be running it on IBM hardware anyway. For small deployments it won't matter that much.

Protection of data is hard. There are many variables to consider.

The first step to understanding what data that requires protection is to perform a risk assessment. This will help identify information which may result in financial loss, corporate brand confidence in the event that the data is compromised.

It's important that this task has senior management sponsorship. Getting a sysadmin to "get on with it" is not good enough. It needs input from the business to understand the information that needs protection and also the funds to purchase the relevent software, hardware to provide the enforcement controls. Policies and procedures should be written to make it clear what should be done with the data, and also to illustrate to staff, guests, business partners what is acceptable.

Controls typically are installed on the desktop, servers and network in-line controls to capture information as it flows throughout the network.

In your direct question, there are a few options to protect the Word documents. But this is only a small set of the things you need to consider. Word does have some DRM controls and I'll leave it up to you to look into it. What is important to note is that Word format may not have all the necessary controls that you need, and you may need to compensate these with others.

If your company is serious about this, they really should get a security consultant involved to help you identify the risk areas, document the controls, and help with an architecture to protect the information across your enterprise environment.

A couple of security vendors do have some products on the market, but this area is still pretty young, but it is a growth area.

Google Data Loss Protection products from RSA and McAfee for a start.

was the reason why I tossed out Virtual Box.

It was prone to problems, and became so annoying I ended up buying a license of VMWare.

There is also one area which is very unstable - OpenBSD support. It crashes the latest versions of OpenBSD, reports out-of-disk errors etc. OpenBSD is definitely more picky on the hardware it runs due to its strong security features, which Virtual Box doesn't appear to implement properly to make it look "real enough"

Sun has recognised problems with OpenBSD but has said its so far down the important-list it won't bother for some time.